Lighting an Interior Nighttime Scene Using IES Lights - Photographic Rendering with V-Ray for SketchUp - page 93

Adding some much-needed ambience
Now, before we proceed with our first lighting step, I do need to add a disclaimer here.
The choice regarding whether or not to add this step is purely a matter of personal
preference. Not all visualization artists include it in their personal workflow, and so I
would recommend that you try lighting the scene both with and without it. In the end,
simply weigh the time it takes to include it against the extra (if any) quality that you
feel it adds.
Having gotten that out of the way, one thing I always like to try and do when starting
an interior lighting setup such as this one is get at least a hint of the outdoor lighting
conditions to show up on the interior render. In this instance, this would mean bringing
some of the ambient light from the exterior moonlit sky to the inside. This generally
speaking amounts to a subtle effect that should add just a small measure of purple
and blue tones to the dark or shadowed areas of an interior image.
It is, to be honest, a difficult effect to achieve to a satisfactory degree in any render
engine, which is why (as we noted) lots of render artists tend to skip it altogether and
instead let a background color or even an image added in post production suggest
ambient lighting conditions rather than trying to include them in the V-Ray render it-
self.
As this is meant to be a learning experience, however, we are going to see how such
a lighting effect could potentially be approached using the tools and options that V-
Ray presents to us.
Using the V-Ray Sky
Perhaps the first option that we might think of trying would be V-Ray's Sun and Sky
elements along with SketchUp's Shadow settings controls. We noted in Chapter 2 ,
Lighting an Interior Daytime Scene , that this system gives us a physically accurate
method for recreating lighting and sky coloration according to the time of day and the
month of the year that we specify.
Well, as we already have the Sun and Sky elements enabled in the scene, let's:
1. Click on the Window menu at the top of the SketchUp UI and open up the
Shadows control dialogue.