Viewport Lighting Differences

supernoob

I'm just getting into to trying out the different lighting options and I'm confused about the differences I'm seeing when using the iray option in the viewport.

I added a camera and turned off it's spot-light, added a figure and a 'distant light'. I understand that the viewport isn't going to be perfectly accurate compared to the render but the difference I'm seeing is huge!

With default lumens my viewport is massively over-exposed so I lowered the lumens until is looked ok and did a test render. I got a silhouette.

Lumens had to be bumped way way way up from default to get the 'right' amount of light for the figure to be exposed correctly in the render. So the default lumens are way too low, no problem and easily fixed, but why is the viewport hugely over-exposed at a even very low lumen values?

Is there another setting, that affects the exposure in the viewport, that I can change to at least get a somewhat accurate view of what my lighting is doing?
'Preview Lights' shortcut doesn't seem to make any difference, on or off and the exposure is blinding.

Thanks for any input.

 

edit. SOLVED.
'Interactive' or 'Photoreal'. Needs to be the same in both 'Draw' and in 'Render'. I had mix-and-match, supernoobing at it's finest. Obvious once you've found it. I'd delete this post but I don't think I can.

While I'm here... Why do the lumens have to be so much higher (about 100x) for photoreal compared to interactive?

Richard Haseltine

How bright the light looks will depend on the Tone Mapping settings (in Render Settings) - the defaults are set for a bright day outdoors.