Lighting an Interior Daytime Scene - Photographic Rendering with V-Ray for SketchUp - page 48

The lighting workflow
Now that we have the goal for the lighting in our scene clearly defined, the next step
is to outline the approach we are going to take and the tools we are going to use in
order to create that lighting solution for ourselves. Again, we could quite easily jump in
and probably use the default Sun and sky system in V-Ray, which has been designed
with the goal of creating natural-looking daylight in mind.
The problem with diving in isn't necessarily the lack in quality that such an approach
will produce, but rather the lack of artistic development that it can foster. Remember, a
good photographer is, generally speaking, an artist first and a technician second. He/
she is someone who has learned how to utilize the technology at their disposal as a
means to an end in the pursuit of their artistic vision. Ultimately, it is their understand-
ing of what makes a photograph good along with their artistic sensibility that will allow
them to create the kind of high quality images that people love to look at.
The same should be true for you and I as rendering artists, possibly even more so,
given the fact that we can be called upon to wear many different hats during a project,
filling a variety of roles that each require the application of artistic know-how.
To help develop our lighting skills, we are going to take an approach to developing the
lighting scheme that has been used by skilled lighting artists for many decades. This
is to build our solution one light at a time, gauging and weighing the contribution that
each added light makes to our overall lighting effect.
To do this, we will, of course, need a blank slate or completely dark scene into which
we can add each light, building the solution as we go. This will mean doing a little bit
of tweaking in our start scene as V-Ray in SketchUp automatically makes use of a
V-Ray Sun & Sky system in order to produce a readymade daylight system.
To make the required tweaks, let's perform the following steps:
1. Open the V-Ray option editor from the V-Ray toolbar.
2. In the Environment rollout, uncheck the On box that can be found in the GI
(skylight) options.