in this QuickStart tutorial video for
v-ray for Sketchup we will discuss how
to setup exterior lighting for a
daylight scenario I'll be working in
Sketchup pro 2019 for this tutorial
series and for this lesson I'm using the
lesson file called 0 to 1 exterior
lighting day start you can download this
tutorial file from the link in the video
description where you'll find it located
in the assets folder to begin you'll see
on the right here that I have the asset
editor already open and I'm looking at
the render settings before I start
changing the lighting I'm first going to
enable the material override toggle
which if I drop down the rollout you'll
see a set to display a default generic
gray color this way I can focus on the
lights contribution to my project
without being distracted by the
materials now let's also toggle on the
interactive render switch and then go
ahead and start a render to see what our
image looks like so far
okay you'll see we have a nice preview
of our lighting here thanks to the
material override now let's take a look
at how we can tweak the lighting and
improve it if we open up the lights tab
you'll see we have a Sun light which is
added by default to any v-ray for
Sketchup file if I select the Sun and
open the right hand flyout menu you will
see the settings for the Sun system
arguably the most important parameters
here are the intensity multiplier for
the Sun and the size multiplier since
they impact the brightness and harshness
of the lighting to speed up our preview
a bit let's first draw a render region
in the VfB to render only that specific
area and then see how we can make the
shadows more blurry using the sun's
parameters an easy way to do this is to
increase the Sun size multiplier a value
of 15 should work here to soften the
shadows a bit note that the size
multiplier also affects the visible size
of the Sun itself as well as its
appearance in reflections okay let's
disable the Sun in the render region and
then explore another option for exterior
lighting this time from the lights
toolbar let's click on the v-ray dome
light option and click anywhere to place
it in the project this will create a
sphere or hemispherical dome around the
project with the option to map an image
to it such as an HDR eye
by default the dome light in v-ray comes
with a ready-to-use 360-degree HDRI
image which you'll see appears in the
background of our render right away now
I'm first going to enable the use
transform option this will lock the
orientation of the HDR I texture to the
v-ray dome widget so that I can simply
rotate the dome light directly from the
viewport and the texture and lighting
will rotate with it also note that the
adaptive mode is checked on by default
which enables us to take advantage of
the adaptive sampling algorithms in
v-ray next these make the dome lights
calculations more efficient and can
significantly speed up your render times
depending on the scenario now let's
rotate the dome light and observe the
result this has on the lighting
you'll see that we're now getting a lot
more light in our render simply by
rotating the HDRI so that the light
shines some more directly onto the house
and our project HDR eyes are great in
this sense because the single HDRI can
be used to achieve a bunch of different
results all based on its rotation
however my render still looks a bit too
dark so I'm going to increase the
intensity of the dome light to two by
clicking in this little square here
there we go now the light is filling in
the scene much more nicely
okay let's try letting in another HDR
image this time to see how that changes
the lighting if we go to the texture
slot here we can then click on the
folder icon to load in a new image I'm
gonna use the sprue at sunrise 4k HDR
image which you can download for free
from HDR I Haven calm or find it in the
assets folder of this lesson now we'll
see the lighting change right away as
the dome light adopts the color tone and
characteristics of the sprue at sunrise
HDR I we just loaded in the sky really
is the limit in terms of the sheer
variety of lighting scenarios you can
achieve with HDR ice and as a bonus many
are available for free online or can be
bought at a reasonable price now the
image is once again a bit too dark so
let's increase the dome lights intensity
to 30
alright that's looking much better but
I'm still not satisfied with this result
as I think there's now too much shade
across the bottom foreground of the
image and not in a variety of shade
coming from the trees in the scene let's
rotate the dome light and HDR again to
find a more interesting light angle for
our final render
okay I'm really enjoying the light from
this angle much more as it also feels
very fitting for a late afternoon hour
the shade of this angle also adds more
variety in the shadows and a sense of
realistic depth to the image in addition
the warmth and yellow tint coming from
the HDRI contrasts very nicely with the
clear blue sky above all right now let's
stop the interactive render and then in
the settings let's go ahead and prepare
for a final production render I'll turn
off the material override increase the
render output to 2000 by 900 and disable
interactive rendering and progressive
mode so that we're rendering with
buckets when you're ready we can go
ahead and start our final production
render note that bucket rendering is a
very effective method for rendering
production images as it generally
renders images at high quality settings
more efficiently than progressive
rendering which is preferable for
getting a quick preview of your scene
and since the release of virion X GPU
bucket rendering has been supported on
GPU so that you can take advantage of
the additional power and speed of GPU
rendering and once more don't forget to
save your final image from the VfB to
your hard drive by clicking on the disk
icon at the top ok now you've seen a
quick walkthrough of how you can set up
and tweak the lighting for an exterior
scene in very next for Sketchup
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