I’m currently working on an interior and it’s pretty hard to get enough light in the scene it seems. Actually it works quite well to bump the EV under Image to a number like 5 which gives me a better result than actually bumping the value of the environment.
Currently I’m at 20 Ray Bounces and 50 Global Illumination bounces. Quite high numbers but I though especially bumping the GI bounces should get more light into bit darker areas.
If I put 150 in there it doesn’t make a real difference, not for render times and for the result so I was wondering if the number is in some way limited or samples ‘escape’ the scene so they will get removed. Not sure how to explain it but hope it’s clear.
My scene is a closed off room but it has some windows so all sample bounces escape through there. I tried quite a lot but if there’s a trick to get more bounces I would love to know.
I’ve resorted to using the EV adjustment as well when I just can’t get the scene bright enough, or any environmental changes screws up the look. I don’t like it, seems like a bandaid fix, but it works. I would think that after a time, the GI bounces would have less and less effect since physically the photons would eventually fade out and be absorbed in real life anyway.
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I also was actually surprised the EV adjustment works quite well since like you say it doesn’t actually bring more light in the scene but it’s basically a post render thing.
I’ve now placed area lights at the windows to basically force more light inside. I see the same done in interior scenes you can get for V-Ray. I might try to add some point lights inside to see if that helps would prefer a large area light but they cast shadows even if they are not visible for the cam.
[edit]
Those area lights at the windows I bumped from 5000 to 60000 lumen with the EV at 1. Which gives about the same light but feels more natural this way. Less areas which are overly bright. Interesting. Try to tweak a bit more. I’m actually quite happy how it looks in the viewport after just 30sec of render.
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adding area lights all over the place was the default way of lighting the C4D Physical renderer way back when I was using that. it was routine that the window glass was changed to an area light and the outside was then added in post, even if it was an animation. HDRI lighting in Cinema wasn’t really a workable solution until about 4 years ago when they really rewrote the code and implemented a lot of new changes. THen Redshift, and it all changed again lol.