Lighting an Exterior Daylight Scene - Photographic Rendering with V-Ray for SketchUp - page 145

Two big differences with regard to this setup, however, are seen in that firstly, I have
chosen to dial brightness and saturation of the color back a little compared to that
produced by the V-Ray Sky. And secondly (as we will shortly see), the Dome light
creates much stronger occlusion shadows in the scene. Both of which in my opinion
will help give the scene lighting a more natural look and feel. Have a look at the fol-
lowing screenshot:
Of course both the illumination levels and color saturation will probably change quite
drastically once we add our HDRI to the mix, but by setting up these initial options
we can be certain that our base Dome light setup is closely matched to the physically
accurate V-Ray Sky.
Adding the HDRI
Our next task is to pick out a HDRI for ourselves; one that will provide a good match
regarding the kind of lighting conditions that we want in our scene. Once more, I am
going to make good use of the sIBL archive found at http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/
archive.html . In fact, in this particular instance, I will be making use of the Grand
Canyon C zip archive.
Again, if you want to follow the steps we will be taking here, you can go and down-
load this freely available resource for yourself although you can of course follow
along using any spherical HDRI that you may have available.
To add the High Dynamic Range Image to our Dome light, with the V-Ray light editor
still open, let's perform the following steps:
1. First of all, put a check in the Use Dome Texture option found in the Dome
Settings section of the controls.