The task was to produce 3 renderings for this Theater we are designing in 3 days. We had brought the basic file from revit into sketchup. In sketchup we could make the all the small design choices to later present to the client.  After we had our designs pretty much down, I began work on the renderings.

Usually our (you and I) renderings consist of exteriors of our buildings, or light filled interiors. Architects always want to show that lots of light is entering the space, and most times we don’t even need to add artificial lighting to our scenes. In these series of renders, the task was to be different. For the first time, I had a scene with absolutely no illumination from the sun.

At first I wanted to bring the model from sketchup to Rhino. But after trying an import, Rhino was running extremely sluggish with the 1250 seats. It was really painful. Since my end goal was a rendering, and all the modeling was complete, I decided to just use the maxwell plugin for sketchup.  We had already assigned materials in sketchup and I would have had to recreate all of them in rhino.

In times past, to achieve lighting from emitters, I would take the watts of the lights and set them to about 1000+. Everywhere I read, people say this is a very bad practice in maxwell, and will produce very grainy images. Theaters are also all about the lighting,  thats what makes a theater look like a theater. The first and most important thing I found was adjusting the EV levels in maxwell. These levels can not be adjusted while the image is rendering, like the ISO / Shutter. The EV informs the fStop, along with the shutter and ISO, which of course can be altered during the render. I found the default EV was set at 14. This setting is great for any exterior or interior with a lot of light, but for an interior, it needs to be cut in half to at least 7. I think I rendered mine at an EV of 6. By dropping this number it allows all your 100w emitters to actually give illumination to the scene.

Secondly, I discovered IES lights. In maxwell’s material editor when you go to create an emitter, you can set it as an IES light. This gives the emitter actual lighting effects. For example, if I apply an emitter to a sphere, it will illuminate an equal amount to a 360 degree radius.   An IES light can specify the difference between a spot light, a flood light, a down light, and so forth. In my scene I used several different types of IES lights, as necessary in the theater. Here is the 10 hour render of the above scene with no post process.

As you can see there are lots of different lighting effects in this scene. And since its maxwell I can constantly change the intensity of these lights. Before changing the EV levels I would have to crank my lights up to the highest they would go to even see them. With the EV set at 6, most of these lights range at 10-25% full power. The lights under the balcony were at their lowest settings actually, and were still reading pretty hot.  I used the incorrect IES lights for those, I think I just put the spotlights under there, but didn’t have an extra 10 hours to re-render, oh well.

To really make this image look dramatic, I brought it into photoshop and did a lot of post processing. I wanted this image to feel like you were presenting on a stage in front of a rather packed house. I added a lot of outer glows to the lights and lots of people. Below is the final image.

As you can see those lighting effects really take the image to the next level and make it feel like you are standing there. Side note: photoshopping all those people were a pain… The end image is a little bit grainier than I would like, I think SL 15.6 or something, but that’s kind of what you get with an all artificially illuminated scene, and 10 hours render time. By no means is maxwell the quickest render engine.

Here are the other 2 images.

I would have liked to add more people to this one, but ran out of time. Also Alicia Keys (at request of the project manager) could have been worked in a little better.