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Description
Stayed up until 4 AM messing with this. These results aren't meant to be completely photorealistic, but I'm pretty sure movies kinda lie to us when they show a nicely lit medieval or fantasy tavern interior at night. Unless they spent half the town's gold on candles, it's going to be dark as heck in there. A lot of smoke will add to the general brightness, but that wouldn't make for a very enjoyable mead night either.

These settings seem to give a nice warm, dark, but not *too* pitch black look that should be suitable for fantasy renders while avoiding using an HDRI or any other light sources that would not be present in real life. If you want to make any improvements, I just ask that you please post your results and settings so we can all benefit from them. There's already too many 'secrets' when it comes to Iray rendering...come on, 9 months in and we still don't have a set of generally agreed-upon skin settings?

Couple of extra things:

* If you lower the Bloom radius, you can get a nice oval candle glow. I use 0.30 here (which is large) to get that hazy glow over the table and around the kettle.

* The Candle Wax settings are just applied to the default textures of the candles used here. It's mainly just to allow some of the light from the candle to penetrate into the wax. You may have to adjust it for different candles, but the principle should be the same.

Hope it can be useful or at least a starting point towards better interior fantasy lighting! Thanks for taking a look!

Description
Stayed up until 4 AM messing with this. These results aren't meant to be completely photorealistic, but I'm pretty sure movies kinda lie to us when they show a nicely lit medieval or fantasy tavern interior at night. Unless they spent half the town's gold on candles, it's going to be dark as heck in there. A lot of smoke will add to the general brightness, but that wouldn't make for a very enjoyable mead night either.

These settings seem to give a nice warm, dark, but not *too* pitch black look that should be suitable for fantasy renders while avoiding using an HDRI or any other light sources that would not be present in real life. If you want to make any improvements, I just ask that you please post your results and settings so we can all benefit from them. There's already too many 'secrets' when it comes to Iray rendering...come on, 9 months in and we still don't have a set of generally agreed-upon skin settings?

Couple of extra things:

* If you lower the Bloom radius, you can get a nice oval candle glow. I use 0.30 here (which is large) to get that hazy glow over the table and around the kettle.

* The Candle Wax settings are just applied to the default textures of the candles used here. It's mainly just to allow some of the light from the candle to penetrate into the wax. You may have to adjust it for different candles, but the principle should be the same.

Hope it can be useful or at least a starting point towards better interior fantasy lighting! Thanks for taking a look!