Lighting an Exterior Daylight Scene - Photographic Rendering with V-Ray for SketchUp - page 122

in mind that when we talk about observing sky color, we are not just talking about
the colors that can be seen up above our heads. As lighting artists, we should also
be very much interested in what is happening at the ground level. How much are the
colors we see up in the sky affecting the look of objects on the ground all around us?
For instance, what is happening with the colors being picked up on the buildings and
roadways found in a city? What hues are being created in the shaded and dappled
areas of a woodland beauty spot?
These are the questions that we do well to think about and then introduce into our
renders, simply because they can make the difference between our creating a de-
cent looking final render and a genuinely photographic one.
In fact, this brings us to another important aspect of our reference gathering and ob-
servational work: the question of location. The environment in which we make our
observations and/or capture our reference images will obviously have a big impact
on the type of lighting conditions and colors that are being both viewed and captured
by us.
What we observe and capture in the center of a large city will obviously differ greatly
in terms of the lighting and color information present compared to images taken out
in the remote countryside somewhere.
Just as with our indoor research, we can gain valuable insights by doing our referen-
ce gathering in locations that are at least similar in a general sense to those that we
will be trying to recreate in our V-Ray renders. The extra realism that can come from