Lighting an Exterior Daylight Scene - Photographic Rendering with V-Ray for SketchUp - page 119

time to make a serious study of the color properties that come from the sun. First
of all perhaps from sunlight on a clear sunny day, but then also under a variety of
daytime lighting and weather conditions including noting the range of sun colors that
are produced due to the differing times of day, month, and year. An excellent way
to approach this would be to arm ourselves with a reasonably decent digital camera
that is capable of capturing images in at least a 16-bit format such as Camera RAW,
with 32-bit HDR capture being even better.
Keep in mind that we will probably want to set our camera's white balance control
manually when gathering references so that all of our reference shots are using the
same fixed base point regarding color. If we were to leave our camera to use its
auto white balance feature, we would probably find the colors in our images shifting
around all over the place, which would of course seriously hamper our ability to draw
any usable conclusions from the shots we take. A daylight balance of somewhere
between 5,500 to 7,500 degrees Kelvin is generally recommended for this type of
work, with my personal preference being a daylight white balance of 6,500 Kelvin.
Note
Currently, the V-Ray Physical Camera doesn't use "degrees Kelvin" for its white
balance controls but instead uses a standard RGB/HSV color select dialogue.
Even so, we can still get a rough 6500k white balance by using HSV settings of
H 320, S 6, and V 255 (RGB 255, 249, 253).