Lighting an Exterior Daylight Scene - Photographic Rendering with V-Ray for SketchUp - page 139

effect on both lighting and shadows, a lighting technician would have to use lights
that have a bigger surface area to them. This essentially is what we need to do in
order to control the softness of shadow edges on our V-Ray Sun. To soften our shad-
ow edges then, let's perform the following steps:
1. In the Option editor, click on the map button for the GI (skylight) control in
the Environment rollout.
2. In the Sun section of the controls, set the Size value to 8 , which, although
a little exaggerated, will certainly help us see the difference in shadow edge
softness.
3. And then finally click on OK to exit the texture editor.
To get a render that lets us see our shadow edges to best advantage, let's switch
back to our Side on Overhead scene view, and then click on the render button up
on the V-Ray toolbar.
The very obvious soft edges we now get on our shadows clearly demonstrate the
effect of the V-ray Sun size multiplier.
At this moment in time of course, the fact that our shadows are still completely black
inside the render isn't really helping them look too realistic at all. This is something
that can easily be remedied with the introduction of some fill or sky lighting to the
scene.