More lighting experiments in Maya

So i've been experimenting with the lights in Maya and the results have been mixed so far. I'm having difficulty in getting the brightness of the light right as well as forecasting the right sense of shadows in the scene. I guess i just have to keep tinkering with the lights till i get it right. I am using the are lights first since out of all the lights, i liked this one the best because of the direction the light is being projected in. So as can see in this pic below i am adjusting and increasing some settings for the area light because then i will render the shot and see if it has made the lighting any better.

I also realised that in some cases, one light might not be enough. So for the area lights i decided to put in about 9 area lights and spread them around in the office room. Also i need to cover up and fill up the roof of the office so it isn't exposed because otherwise the lights might just go into inifinty without having to be blocked by some kind of boundaries.

So i've put in the roof and also finished up the complete blockout of the environment. I can start placing my lights without having the problem of an incomplete interior environment.

As i was placing the area lights around the scene, i knew that i would have to start thinking about the shadows since that is going to be really important and so i started experimenting with that in this scene. I'm using this feature called Depth Map Shadows since this will allow me to actually to see shadows in my scene coming from the opposing lights. There was this other feature called Ray Trace Shadows which was really good because it gives it more of a cleaner look but what i found out was that the rendering time was too long and so i decided to stick with depth map shadows because it took less time to render the shots and looked decent.

Here are the initial render shots which is not bad but it doesn't look right. The light is not strig enough and it looks a little dim. The shadows look great but maybe too strong

I increased the brightness of the area light and it has just made it worse. The scene looks literally so bright that i need to go back and decrease the intensity of the light.

Its almost getting there in the rendered shots below but its become a little dull and pale, plus theres not the right balance of brightness of the area lights.

I went back to the settings and just increased a tad of the lighting and i also moved the area lights about in the scene to give it more of an even look.

Camera pic references for lighting

When i took the specific pictures below with my camera, i was keeping in mind how the light was being projected and the reflection as well as brightness that its effect had on the surrounding objects.

Since i am going to be lighting up an office room, i took a picture of my hand next to my TV just to see how the light was being projected onto my hand. Obviously the results were that it was very strong and bright. The first pic below is my hand a few centimetres away from the Tv and my hand looks bright but if you look at the 2nd pic that follows you will notice that my hand gets brighter as it leans closer to the TV. So in basic principle this would also apply to a Computer Moniter, where if a person is facing the moniter close up then the light from the mointer will be projected back into his face. This is something i will look out for as i am lighting the office environment.

Saw some interesting lights and colours while i was in my local cinema below in this pic. I like the purple look and the ambience of the lights. Could be something i could use for my scene.

I took this picture below when i was in my room. I just like the fact the light is being illuminated onto the ceiling and how it gradually fades out. That is something i want to achieve in my environments.

I decided to get more references of real lighting and i used my phone camera to take pictures of my university since it had a lot of interesting lights and mood. The general lights in university were not what i expected since they were all different shapes of lights and ray. The more i started exploring the place, the more i realised that this place was perfect as an example of what we should try and aim for in our environments.

From the pictures, you will see a lot of lighting in different places and just the nature of how its projecting the ray of light onto the surfaces.