thanks a lot for this fantastic renderer and this easy blender integration as well as the documentation in the wiki!
I'm trying to model the approximate / expected lighting condition for my kitchen, when I'm going to use a certain LED stripe. The results I get appear plausible to my untrained eye, but I would like to have some feedback on the correctness of this simulation and possible culprits / mistakes I have done in setting up my scene. I've attached a .blend file for someone else to use this, in case its somewhere close to being correct.
My questions / the challenges why the results may be off:
- Light intensity mapping: LED strips are marked as "800 Lumen per Meter", did I model that correctly to Lux?
- "Plain" wall material definition: I used a white material, did not twiddle so much with material setup. Is that sane for a "painted white'ish wall"?
- Renderer setup: The results are quire different depending on which engine I use, but this is expected?
- Camera setup: I've used the 'camera settings' as a tone mapper. This looks reasonable in results.
LED Light: What I intend to model: A LED stripe embedded in a case, covered by a semi-translucent diffractor. This looks like so:
Else: Shapes of a 'white' material which model my kitchen.
Materials:
LED Light: A 800 Lumen emmitting matte material, normalized by Light color, which is slightly 'warm', and a 90deg spread angle. As its "Lumen per Meter" I'd like to model, would "Candela normalized by m^2" the better choice, if I would be able to get that value?
Semi-translucent diffractor: Matte translucent material, effectively transmitting 0.46 light (the vendor mentioned the diffractor to block roughly 50% of light).
Walls / everything else: A Matte material with a near white value (0.854306) and a sigma of 0.02. More or less arbitrarily chosen. While writing this post I realized the documentation states that no matte material should be larger than 0.8. So this is probably quite off. But what would be the 'right' material for a drywall?
Renderer:
BiDir renderer engine is used. As the scene is basically full of indirect light, from the documentation it sounds like I'll have to use that one. But the path engine produced quite different results.
Camera:
Using a 'Camera settings' tonemapper and a setting which would produce a reasonably lighted image (F2.8, 1/10, 200ISO). Tested with a point light source with 800 Lumen, seemed ok-ish.
Results:
Both are very dark. If that is what I could get, I probably end up not doing this project in my real kitchen. If this is a correct represenation of what would be the result, LuxCore just saved me a couple of hundreds of Euros. However, I'm not yet at a point that I want this to be true.
800 Lumen / m LED strip
1600 Lumen / m LED strip