If you don’t have specific instructions for these, you could place lights somewhere behind the camera, so that you give the impression that the space is receiving illumination from neighboring sources (street lights, car lights, or even other buildings). Depending on your scene, you may have exterior lighting fixtures (like the lighting posts that I have in this scene), or even exterior spotlights that illuminate the building. What doesn’t look right at the moment is the fact that the courtyard is too dark. Hit another test rendering and you should have something similar to the render bellow:Ĥ) Adding artificial lights in the courtyard Therefore we will place vray planar lights just in front of the windows, pointing towards the exterior, like in the following image. Now we have light inside the house, but the light doesn’t seem to “come out” enough. If you hit another render you will end up with something very similar to the following.ģ) Simulating artificial light “spreading” from inside Be creative and play with parameters like intensity multipliers, filter colors, etc.įor this scene I have used spherical vray lights with intensity multipliers varying from 1 to 2, filter colors with orange, yellow and blue tints and different a radius for each one. The important thing to keep in mind at this point is that artificial light can look different from one case to another depending on many factors (intensity, color temperature, size of the space that is actually lit, etc.) so you shouldn’t put a light source and instance it all over the place. We will begin by adding vray lights inside the house, to simulate artificial lighting. If you hit render, you will end up with something like this:Īs you notice, it is starting too look like a night rendering, but at the moment it lacks artificial lighting so the spaces look deserted. In the slot right beside put a gradient (dark blue in the upper slot, a lighter blue in the middle and a pale orange or purple in the lower position) Last but not least go to the vray environment slot and check “GI environment (skylight) override. In the global switches tab, make sure that “default lights” is unchecked. In the vray settings, check global illumination, select lightcache for secondary bounces, irradiance map for primary (you could also use brute force, but it will take longer to render). Now put the desired image into the environment slot ( 3d max’s environment slot, not in vray’s). The first step is to choose a background image of a sky.įor this tutorial I have used the image bellow:

In order to follow it you need to know the basics of 3ds max and vray. In this tutorial I will go through all the steps that we usually do when I’m asked to do an “exterior night-rendering”.

Vray light