I’m getting close. The office model is nearly finished. Just a few more lamps to add. There is already a lot of stuff in this room it really doesn’t need anything else. But to get an accurate understanding of how bad it is and to make it better, I really need to put them in.
So off we go. Let’s add the two lights that are on the desk. They aren’t very big lights. They actually have a cone shaped lampshade on them and I considered creating the lamp in two or three parts to be more realisitic. That’s not really the point of this so I decided to go with s cylinder shape. I dropped in a cylinder with the right height and right diameter to represent them. Not a very difficult model.
Once the one lamp was in I decided it should have reasonable appropriate materials in relation to what it really looks like. The lampshade is a nice purple-ish color and the rest is a black metal. This is another reason that I thought about modeling the lamp in more than one piece. However, I learned a great trick with the Holiday Card project and this seemed a great opportunity to use it. It did take me a little bit to figure out how to use it again. The material id settings, though proved to be the best solution.
A bit better an explanation of what it took to use the material id and the selection id feature. First I selected my materials got them all setup the way I wanted. Then I assigned the materials to separate material id chanels. Then I went back to the cylinder and selected the faces that I wanted to have the lampshade material And under the Polygon: Material IDs I Set the ID. I did the same for the faces that I wanted to have the black metal material. I thought this would automatically assign the material. It didn’t show up. So using the Polygon: Material IDs section and chose the id I set the lamp 
shade to and then used the select id button. Then I went back to the material editor, selected the material I wanted and chose the assign to selection option. I had to do this for the other selection set as well. As you can see, it did let me get what I wanted.
I copied it so that I had the second lamp. As you can see though, it doesn’t really look like either lamp is emitting light. I turned off the other lights to verify. I was disappointed, I was really hoping that making that material a self illuminating material would take care of that. It didn’t so for each light I added an omni light in the middle at the height the bulb would be. Then I grouped each light with it’s lamp so that I can move them around easier.
This looks better. I know it’s a bit dark. It’s actually what the room looks like with just those two lights on.
Wow. That one scene too almost 30 minutes to render. Holy cow. Of course with those lights and all the relective surfaces, there are a lot of Final Gather points to calculate.
Here’s another view of the room with all the lights on. This one took 48 minutes to render. With render times like that, I am so glad I am not animating a view of this room.
And still two more lamps to go before moving things around. At least I know to go get coffee while I render those scenes.