Joel Guerra is a rendering architect and 3D designer who works independently in Ecuador. He graduated in architecture in 2020 and is currently studying for a master’s degree in architectural visualization. If you follow us on social media, you probably recognize his name, as Joel is a regular winner of our ‘Rendering of the Week’ community forum contest. You can see a collection of Joel's stunning renders on his Instagram page.
Joel discovered Enscape after looking for a rendering engine that his computer could support. He was fascinated with the program and the versatility he had to show a project in real time, in a short time. He started to investigate more about architectural visualization and focused on improving his rendering skills and learning the concepts surrounding lighting, composition, cameras, materials, and post-production.
Today, Joel shares his tips on rendering lighting to help illuminate an interior scene.
Tips for rendering lighting in Enscape
![Final Realistic Lighting Rendering Image Joel Guerra step1]()
Step 1.
Start by placing a rectangle light on the ceiling and directing the light towards the ground. This lighting will make the overall light of the environment more harmonious and balanced.
The size of the rectangle light should be proportional to the size of the space to be rendered. This is an auxiliary, which will allow us to define the shadows of certain objects and adjust the general lighting of the render.
To access the rendering lighting options in Enscape, click on the plus icon in the Enscape toolbar, which will open the ‘Enscape Objects’ window:
Note: The lights do not have to compete with each other. They must be complementary and help improve the lighting of the scene. You always have to define which will be the main light and from this, start to configure the rest of the lights.
- White light: RGB: 255, 255, 255
Step 2.
Place light bulbs on the outside of the scene. This will act as sunlight that will enter the scene and will be our enhancement lighting. Place several rows and columns of light bulbs and angle the light beams to 90 degrees. With the help of Enscape, check how much luminous intensity must be added to the scene so that it is correctly illuminated.
Note: The number of light bulbs depends on the size of the window we have in the model. Try to move the lights away or zoom in to get other results.
- White light: RGB: 255, 255, 255
Step 3.
To simulate an LED strip on the panel, use different lighting options such as a rectangular light, linear light, or disk light. In this case, the disk light was used to obtain a much more uniform result and simulate the LED strip. I highly recommend working with the rectangular light or the disk light to create LED strips since they are more stable than linear light that can sometimes present a flicker.
Note: Place the disk lights from their center and create several copies of them until filling the space where the LED strip will be located. Finally, define the luminous intensity and assign a color to the disk light.
- Orange light: RGB: 255, 228, 167
Step 4.
The next thing is to add spheres of light to each of the lamps that appear in the scene, this is to simulate that they are on. It is not necessary that the light generated by the lamps is very noticeable. Remember that the lights should not compete with each other. Set the light source radius to 0 and start increasing the luminous intensity without increasing it too much.
- Orange light: RGB: 255, 228, 167
Configuring Visual Settings
Keep in mind that when configuring the light objects, if you modify the settings a lot, you can interfere with the lighting that we adjust for each object in addition to their respective intensities.
In Enscape, under Visual Settings, you can find the Atmosphere tab. In the Illumination section, we can modify the intensity of each of the artificial lights that have been added to the scene, but we must be careful not to move this parameter too much.
After making the respective settings, I create the scenes and render them, and then do post-production in Adobe Lightroom, where I try to improve not only the render in general, but the lighting of each object.
Final rendered result
More rendering tips
For more ways to improve the quality of your rendering lighting and internal scenes, take a look at these related articles:
