Lighting an Exterior Daylight Scene - Photographic Rendering with V-Ray for SketchUp - page 129

Sunlight is the key
The key light here is very easy to identify as we would naturally expect it to be the
sun itself. So in order to stick with our iterative lighting approach and have only direct
sunlight present in the scene for now, we will need to perform the following step:
1. In the Indirect illumination rollout of the option editor, remove the check from
the On box.
Note
As GI (skylight) is an indirect source rather than a direct light source in
V-Ray, this leaves us able to render with just direct sunlight in the scene,
which means of course that we can focus on getting this element looking
good before moving onto the fill light.
Of course, before we can go ahead and take any test renders here, we will need to
dial in both the time of day and month of the year settings that we want to work with.
To do this we can perform the following steps:
1. From the Window menu, select the Shadows option.
2. In the dialog, click on the Show/Hide shadows toggle to the left of the time
zone setting so that we can see the directional sunlight in the SketchUp view-
port.
3. Leave the Time Zone dropdown set to UTC-07:00 .
4. But set the Time slider to read 15:15 (03:15 PM).
5. And finally set the Date to August 16, and close the Shadows Settings dia-
log.
Remember that in order to make this setting stick for the particular Scene view we are
working with here, we will need to:
1. Right-click on the Side on Overhead scene tab.
2. Click on the Update option.