Lighting an Interior Nighttime Scene Using IES Lights - Photographic Rendering with V-Ray for SketchUp - page 91

Starting with a blank canvas
Armed with a fairly good idea of the direction we want to take as well as having some
thoughts in mind regarding the lighting tools that we will use, it's time to move on to
the creation of our lighting solution in the scene.
We would typically want to start our lighting scheme using what I refer to as a blank
canvas, by which I mean a totally dark scene. In this instance though, as we will be
making use of the V-Ray Sun and Sky system in a little while, we will skip this so as
to avoid performing unnecessary steps.
Setting an initial exposure level
The very first thing that we will need to do then is set up at least an initial exposure
setting that we can start to work with. Without a fixed point of reference in the form
of some typical exposure values, we will probably find ourselves struggling to make
any sense out of what we are seeing as we add lights to the scene and make our test
renders.
For instance, if our initial exposure settings were to cut out too much light from the en-
vironment, we could find ourselves adding more and more light objects to the scene
or possibly even cranking up the intensity of our lights so as to create enough illumin-
ation to see by.
On the other hand, if our exposure settings were to allow too much light to enter our
virtual camera, then we could easily find ourselves running into all manner of ugly hot-
spot and/or burnout issues as well as probably having to reduce the number of light
objects and/or intensities so as to not over-illuminate the scene.
Note
As the whole point of our using IES lights here is to make use of real-world lighting
data for the intensities, any solution that involves artificially altering the light in-
tensities would probably be extremely counterproductive.