Diving Straight into Photographic Rendering - Photographic Rendering with V-Ray for SketchUp - page 16

Better still is the fact that V-Ray also sets up a basic indirect (or global) illumination
system for us automatically. This means we can even render interior Arch Viz shots
right out of the box without having to do any extra set up work beyond, of course,
getting our geometry created and then positioned in the scene.
Note
Global illumination is a general name for a group of algorithms used in 3D com-
puter graphics that are meant to add more realistic lighting to 3D scenes. Such
algorithms take into account not only the light which comes directly from a light
source (direct illumination), but also subsequent cases in which light rays from
the same source are reflected by other surfaces in the scene, reflective as well
as non-reflective (indirect illumination). The source of this content is Wikipedia.
To look at the kind of renders we can get from V-Ray without doing any real
lighting setup at all, either continue to work with your current scene or open up the
Ch01_03_Lighting.skp file from your Exercise_Files folder, if you prefer to
work with the same scene as I will be using.