When lighting a space remember that the goal is not to see everything, but to make it look attractive and inviting.   In this tutorial you’ll learn some of the basic steps using V-Ray lighting and ambient occlusion passes in Mental Ray to achieve realistic and appealing lighting effects for interior architectural visualization.

You’ll see how to create lights for interior lights, as well as how to address lighting from outside the scene.  You’ll also see how to progressively enhance the lighting in a scene, as well as how to use ambient occlusion and also assemble all the passes in Photoshop.

Let’s get started.

Tools Used:

• 3D Studio Max
• V-Ray
• Mental Ray
• Photoshop

Final Image Preview:

Before we get into lighting I want to go over the render setting I normally use when rendering in 3DS Max 2009 with V-ray 1.5
Environment Settings:
Press 8 on your keyboard to bring up the “environment and effects” window. Go to the exposure control tab and choose “Logarithmic Exposure Control” Then go to the “Logarithmic Exposure Control Parameters” and change the brightness to 67.0 and contrast to 100.0 all other parameters can be left as they are. This is a way to get brighter more saturated colors when rendering while also using less intensity on your lights.

Test render settings:
Press the F10 key to bring up the “render setup” window. Click on the “common” tab then go down to Assign Renderer and assign V-Ray for the Production renderer. Refer to the image for the test render settings I use.

Let there be light:
Once you have a space built and all the textures applied, begin to light the scene in stages, almost as if you walk into the space and begin turning lights on in related groups.

Stage 1: Lighting fixtures

Any Lamps, Chandeliers, cove lights, down lights or Vray Light materials should be rendered first to see the result. In this scene the general lighting for the space was light panels on the ceiling. I used a warm colored Vray light material set to 0.3 for this. I also have a background image of a city at night that you can see outside of the windows, I used a vray light materials for this as well also set to .3


As you can see room is already filled with a dim light and the chairs directly below the lights are brighter than the rest of the space. This good start so let’s move in to the next stage.

Stage 2: Outside light

If your scene has windows it’s very important to cast some outside light into the space. Most of the renderings I do have a moody night time feel. Generally I use vray light and cast a blue light inside. Create vray lights for each window with these parameters.


The result is decent but I forgot to do something, any time you have windows and you want light to pass through them you must change the object properties. Select the windows, right click then go to object properties. Uncheck both cast and receive shadows, click “ok” and try another render.

Stage 3: Light from view point into the space

This is something I do to make the foreground of the render bright as well as brighten the space a little more. Create a vray light positioned behind your camera view to cast light into the space. The same vray light settings should be used as the outside lights except for the color. Change it to a light yellow then do a render to see the result.

Stage 4: Accent lights

Accent lights are used to accentuate certain aspects of the space. For this its good to use “photometric web” lights. Create a “Photometric – Free Light” then set these parameters.

I’m satisfied with how it looks, but the panels on the back and side wall look dim and unattractive. So let’s create a vray light to use as wall washers to cast light from the top to the bottom of the wall panels. Create a vray light and rotate them at a 45% angle at the wall, choose a light color then set the multiplier to .15

I’m happy with the result now let’s move on to the final stage of lighting.

Stage 5: Light the furniture

This is a strait forward step, for this just position down lights over the furniture until you are happy with the result. The position & parameters of the furniture lights are displayed in the image below along with the last test render.

When you’re happy with the result do a final render. There are only 4 settings you need to change in the render setup.
Output size:

• Whatever you like

Adaptive DMC image sampler:

• Min Subdivs -2

Irradiance map:

• Built in presents- Med to High

Light Cache

• Subdivs – 1000 or more

Now that we are finished with the lighting we can do some post work in Photoshop, but first we need to use mental ray for an Ambient Occlusion render pass.
Ambient Occlusion:
Wiki Explanation – Ambient occlusion is a shading method used which helps add realism to local reflection models by taking into account attenuation of light due to occlusion. Ambient occlusion attempts to approximate the way light radiates in real life, especially off what are normally considered non-reflective surfaces.
Ambient occlusion is a global method, meaning the illumination at each point is a function of other geometry in the scene. The soft appearance achieved by ambient occlusion alone is similar to the way an object appears on an overcast day.
Basically, this can be used to ad greater detail and shadows to your final renders in Photoshop. Please use the 5 Step images below to make your own AO render pass.





Now do a render, you should come up with something close to this.

Now let’s do some post work in Photoshop.

FINAL STEPS: Photoshop

These are fast and easy steps to alter the details, brightness and contrast of your final renders in Photoshop.
Open up your final render in Photoshop. Press “F7” and make sure that the “Layers” Window is visible. Duplicate your final render layer two times, and now you should have 3 layers of your final render. Change the Layer mode of the top render layer from Normal to Soft Light. Next select the middle layer and change the layer mode from Normal to Screen. Now you should have a bright and vibrant looking render. The Final thing to do is drag in your AO pass render to the top level of layers, change the layer mode from Normal to Soft Light, then drop the opacity of the AO layer to around 80%. That’s it, now you’re done.

This tutorial is just to give a general idea of how I light a space in vray and how to use AO passes to enhance the final image in Photoshop. I hope you find it useful!
-Garland Steele