realistic lighting setup problem - need your help

[ariza]

Hello

I have a problem with setting correct ligting to my scene. I would appreciate any help and c&c to my rendering. The scene is quite simple and I would like to achieve realistic look of it. In my opinion it's far from it now. The rendering and screenshot attached. There are two lights: free area & mr area omni. gi&fg enabled, fg preset: high, noise filtering high + log.exp.contrl. on. Please share your thoughts and suggestions. Thanks in advance.

[Glacierise]

I think you biggest problem is the lack of directionality. Now, if you work for architects - they just don't get it and want everything to be flat lit (and don't like it later :D ), but if you do it for yourself, esp for learning, this is important. You need to have a clear key to define direction of the light. Don't just use a light behind your camera - it flattens things out. If you go for a indirect-heavy approach, use a daylight outside, than play with the FG settings, incl multiplier. Bouncing some photons will help too, most noticably creating soft lighting and color bleeds. So - you have a key light through the window, from the daylight, and fill light from GI/FG.

[ariza]

Thanks Glacierise for your reply. Now I do this renderings for myself as I am learnig interior viz. But maybe later if I succeed I might do this commercially. So I want renderings to look realistic and at the same time physically correct and pleasure to the eye. If u look at the attached pictures you'll see that I haven't used one light behind my camera, I've used one area light for the sky and one mr area omni light for the sun. Fg/Gi also used. I was just wondering how can I improve this settings (or maybe use quite different light model) to make the picture look really stunning. Maybe there are specific settings in rederer which I should pay more attention to.
Anyway Glacierise thanks :) Any other c&c are welcome