Lighting an Exterior Daylight Scene - Photographic Rendering with V-Ray for SketchUp - page 147

What we get back in the render shows that things are shaping up nicely. We should
even be able to just about pick out the fact that the directional sunlight from the HDRI
is now travelling from left to right in the render, which of course means that it now
corresponds to the shadow settings at work inside the SketchUp viewport.
Adding direct sunlight to an HDRI setup
Of course, one big problem with what we see here is the fact that the lighting inform-
ation coming from the HDRI doesn't really give us an appropriately strong sense of
directional sunlight in the scene, nor are we getting any of the nice, clear directional
shadows produced earlier while making use of the V-Ray Sun.
Ideally then, we need to turn our V-Ray Sun back on in the scene, which is something
that we can in fact happily do although there are two possible ways that we could
go about it. One would be to simply open up the Environment rollout in the V-Ray
option editor, and once again turn the GI (skylight) on. The other would be to make
use of the fact that in SketchUp the V-Ray Sun is considered to be the default light.
This is very handy as it just so happens that V-Ray also provides a Global Switch
that can be used to force the system to render with this light enabled irrespective of
whether or not the GI (skylight) option is turned on.
The final result when using either of these approaches will be identical. However,
some artists seem a little wary of using the GI (skylight) option, wondering whether
or not they may in fact end up doubling their skylight illumination. To allay such fears,
we will in this instance make use of the Global Switch that V-Ray provides. To do so,
perform the following steps:
1. Open up the Global switches rollout in the option editor, and in the Lighting
section, put a check in the box for the Default lights control.