ADD LIGHTING BASED On DATE, TIME AND LOCATION
01 CREATING CREATE CAM AND ITS SETTINGS
a cam is always the first thing I do when it comes to architectural visualisation work, or really for any other render. It’s the basic stuff where you can see the composition, check if there is something missing and also discover if there is anything we can delete.
As an example, in this image we have several trees on the left-hand side, and in this case they all are 3D models. I decided to do it this way because the polygon amount was no problem for my graphics card, but if this was an issue we could easily erase it and add it later in Photoshop once we have set our composition. In this scene I set the white balance to neutral and also the shutter speed to a value of 200.
02 ADD DAYLIGHT
Now that we have our cam ready it’s time to add the lights. In the Create tab go to Systems and then select the Daylight tool. The first click will set the base for the daylight, and click yes when you’re asked to create mr Physical Sky. Here Daylight will be creating a sky as we would usually do in V-ray by pressing 8 and adding a Vraysky (we will delete it later anyway).
Now press Render and we will see how the daylight is ‘working’ in our scene, but currently it doesn’t look quite right because we can’t see the correct shadows and the usual lighting that we’d get when using V-ray. This is troublesome, seeing as how it’s the interaction between light and shadow that gives V-ray its realism.
03 VRAYSUN IN SUNLIGHT
The reason our lighting looks this way is because we are not using our V-ray components such as Vraysun or Vraysky. It’s time to tweak a little Daylight so we can have our light working the right way in our scene. Select the Daylight and then in the parameters in the Sunlight menu select Vraysun. Once selected it will ask about creating a Vraysky as we usually do, press OK and then OK again so that we can place it instead of the mr Physical Sky we created in the previous step. Press Render and see how this time our daylight is working just fine. Now we have a Vraysun calculation activated.
04 SET UP DATE, TIME AND LOCATION
Okay, we now have a daylight working but what we need is to set the correct parameter so that it can give us the precise lighting according to date, time and location. Let’s click in our Daylight and then in Daylight parameters click Setup, as here is where the last setting happens. As we can see we have a menu called Time, and here we set the time and the date, time zone and even the daylight saving time.
Next we need to add the location. Adding location will give us latitude, longitude and time zone, which you can also add manually if you know those values. Click Get Location and a mini map menu will show up, so select the location you need and hit OK. Now that we have our location configured it’s up to you to set the date and time. Press Render and it’s done!