While testing out a lighting setup for archiviz in Blender Render I encountered a strange problem. The ceiling is too dark no matter what I try.
Here are some things I tried:
- Checked that normals are facing the right directions
- Removed all modifiers from ceiling plane object
- Joined ceiling and room as a seamless mesh
- Tweaked all lighting settings I could think of
- Tweaked all material settings I could think of
- Extruded the ceiling plane to give it a volume
Things to note: The only light sources are a duplivert array of Point Lamps and the ambient light from outside the room. I tried other types of lamps such as Spot and Area, but settled on Point because I found that the shadows looked best with Point. The other lamp types still didn't brighten the ceiling enough, except when I created a dedicated secondary Area Lamp pointed upward at the ceiling - which caused lighting problems in other parts of the room because the undersides of furniture would glow.
I made a special material for the ceiling that is like the rest of the room, except with some emission to brighten it. It looks better with that on than the regular room material, but doesn't look good because it kills the shadows in the corners. And besides, it's a hack and doesn't solve the real problem.
What could possibly make a ceiling appear darker than the walls it touches?