Lighting an Exterior Daylight Scene - Photographic Rendering with V-Ray for SketchUp - page 134

A render at this point would produce an image identical to that shown in our previous
rendered screenshot, which to my eye looks as though it could still do with just a little
bit of a tweak in order to brighten things up.
As the illumination and materials in the scene are both behaving in a physically cor-
rect manner, we clearly need to revisit and tweak our exposure settings a little. In
fact, the best way to do this would be to switch to one of our ground-level camera
views and use the brightness of the sky in our renders as a gauge to help us get the
exposure settings just right.
To do that, let's perform the following steps:
1. Click on the POV Shot - Looking at the Sky scene tab.
2. In the Camera rollout of the options editor, break away from our use of the
sunny 16 rule and set our ISO (Film speed) value to 500 .
This should give a nice, bright sky with the gradient producing a little bit of a halo
effect just above the walls of the building. At the same time, the exterior dining area
is now lit in a manner that makes it feel as though we are looking at mid-afternoon
summer sunshine. Have a look at the following screenshot:
Of course we are getting a very stark contrast between the light and shadow areas
in the image due to the fact that we don't currently have any sky or ambient light
contributing to the illumination. Before we get to that though, as we now have our
exposure looking about right, let's focus for a few moments on working with some of
our sunlight controls, taking a look at how we can use them to alter the feel of the
sunlight just a little.