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After years it seems, I feel confident I can light a normal scene (portrait etc). However I still dont have a good sense of how to light a dark scene. It's difficult to illuminate the chracters without bringing up the ambient light as well. I usually start with an hdri like orestes night skies and try to add lights to flush it out.
How would you do it?
Dark is essentially a lack of light. While I also tend to use the Orestes' HDRI Skies you can use any of them, as long as you do not plan to show the sky and stars. Any daylight sky will dowhen you drop the scene's exposure value to maybe 15 or 18.
Once you've done that you need some limited lights, either Point Lights or Ghost Lights. They will show the diffence between the dark surroundings and your object, which you prbably will want to show in your render. The contrast between lots of dark and some lighter areas is what it is all about. At least in my opinion.I have been cheating in my scene lighting and using a Ghost light kit, it can be found on the site. I use it to add a little more punch to my scenes without washing it out. I like it because I can place them off scene inconspicuously and not have to worry about it lighting my whole scene.
One helpful thing to keep in mind: "real" dark is not the same as what I like to call "Hollywood dark," haha.
If you closely examine how dark or nighttime scenes are handled in film, you'll often find there's still plenty of light doing the things lighting is supposed to do (clarify important features, separate the subject from the background, etc.)
The result is almost never remotely realistic, but those methods can give you an idea of how to do dark-scene lighting "right" artistically while still seeming plausibly dark.
@Fleshkage “Hollywood dark,” haha.." Ha ha indeed... a lot of the indoor lighting looks stupid. Who lives in a house so dark that you can barely see the other side of the room? I guess they think it looks "artistic" and to hell with realism. TV shows are the biggest offenders.
Another option to create a night scene and not lose in detail, as well as avoid noise, is to render the scene with normal daytime illumination and already at the post-work stage reduce brightness and saturation, adjust the white color (white point) and set the temperature in the cold spectrum.
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