Lighting an Interior Daytime Scene - Photographic Rendering with V-Ray for SketchUp - page 69

With those steps taken care of we are, believe it or not, ready to render with our GI
(skylight) enabled.
As you can appreciate, this approach is far quicker and easier to set up than the V-
Ray rectangle light solution, which is definitely a big plus. Let's click on the render
button on the V-Ray toolbar then.
In a very short while, you will see another advantage of this particular skylight ap-
proach: it also renders far quicker than our array of V-Ray rectangle lights. This, of
course, doesn't mean that there aren't drawbacks to this particular approach as well.
For one thing, our render shows that the occlusion or contact shadows in the scene
are nowhere near as defined as they were with our V-Ray rectangle lights, and we
also see a much stronger color cast in the environment that is not as simple to con-
trol as it was on the rectangle lights. There we had a simple color swatch, whereas
here, because the V-Ray sky (or TexSky) map has been designed to be physically
accurate with respect to both its light energy and the coloration it adds to an environ-
ment, the V-Ray sky map has no direct color control option as such.
As you can see, this option's physical accuracy can sometimes limit our ability to
exercise artistic license in setting up a lighting solution. One quick and easy way to
make a big change to the color coming from the sky map would be to change the
algorithms being used to compute the sky model itself. To do this, we would need to
perform the following steps:
1. Go back into the V-Ray texture editor by clicking on the GI (skylight) map but-
ton again.
2. In the Default Sky Options area, click on the Sky Model drop down and se-
lect CIE Overcast from the list.
3. Click OK to exit the texture editor.