From the course: SketchUp: Rendering with V-Ray Next

V-Ray light types: Sunlight

From the course: SketchUp: Rendering with V-Ray Next

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V-Ray light types: Sunlight

- There are, by default three main lighting elements in V-Ray that are set up and ready to use each and every time we create a new scene in SketchUp. These being indirect or bounce light courtesy of V-Ray's global illumination engines, the defaults being Brute force and Light Cache and natural looking daylight simulation provided by the built in V-Ray sun and sky environment and, we also view the scene using physical camera model at render time. This instantly giving us the ability to render our scenes in a very photographic way. That having being said though, if I go ahead and take a render of the scene that we have here, you can see after a little while, that what we get back is a completely black return, which is because I have, in this instance, set up the scene so as to force us to have to manually build the lighting system that we would normally get by default. Hopefully helping us familiarize ourselves with the components that make up V-Ray's day lighting system in the process. Do keep in mind though that both the global illumination and physical camera systems, are still enabled and working here and so will both, ultimately effect the renders that we are taking. To start building our daylight environment then, the first thing that we will need to do is open up the Asset Editor and jump into the lights tab where we find a single sunlight entry in the list. This is essence being the system that produces the default and physically accurate daylight simulation that we get with each new SketchUp and V-Ray scene. Now you will perhaps have already noticed that the sun icon is grayed out, which is telling us that the system is currently turned off. If we click directly on that icon though, it brightens and if we make sure that the sun light option is selected and that the right hand panel is extended, we see the on off slider over on the right, move to the on position. Meaning we can use either of these controls to turn the sun light both off and on again. Enabling that though, hasn't currently made any difference to the end result that we are getting, because if I go ahead and render again, you can see that we still have a completely black return in the V-Ray frame buffer window. And just to prove that we are genuinely taking a render here, let's switch the frame buffer window over to viewing just the Alpha channel and note that V-Ray is definitely finding geometry in the scene, we just have no lighting present at the moment that can make it show up in the color channels. Turning the Alpha view off then, let's in the Asset Editor set the intensity multiplier for our sun light to a value of one, after which we can render again. With what we see now, being the lighting that V-Ray in SketchUp would usually give us by default. If we turn the sun light switch back to the off position though, rather than going back to a completely black render, what we get now, because the sun multiplier is still set at a value of one, is light that is coming only from V-Ray's physical sky map, in other words, the actual sun light contribution has been switched off. Which can of course come in very handy for use on certain types of shots. We can if we want, alter the sky model being used here from the drop down with each option producing different colors in both the sky backdrop and final lighting results that are being generated. And we can, of course, alter any of the other options in order to tweak the results that our daylight simulation is giving us, should we want or need to. As noted, we do get all of this set up by default whenever we create a new scene using V-Ray Next in SketchUp. Hopefully though, seeing how the system is constructed and controlled can help us take full advantage of this very powerful set of V-Ray lighting options.

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