Working out lighting settings

[Ian Foster Griffith]

Roy

Trying to sort out my lighting settings to get the look a got in AR4.

A long story short a want to understand the best way to control sun intensity to give different times of the day, but allow my lights to show?

See image attached.....................................

Light seetings 1 - is standard preset EXTERIOR (It looks good but have control issues)

What is the best way to control the level of the sun, showing midday, afternoon, night.

How do I get my internal/external lighting to show up and shine.

In this render  "Lighting - Advanced - Lights - On" but the lights like in "Light seetings 2" do not show up unless I change it from 150w to 150000w, and this mades the lights go funny.

Light seetings 2  - is standard preset Studio (Lights look good but have sun shandow issues) Same model and the lighting shows up perfect when in studio with lights in the right range. 40-200watts.

What I,m asking is to what are the main settings I should be playing with to get that cool look when the sun fades in the afternoon and the house lights start to come though with  there own affect on the front of the house?

[Ian Foster Griffith]

Also now you seen the model and know what I,m looking for...........

Should use - standard or path tracer???

[George Ioannidis]

I think that if you use path tracer exterior renderings should look better, but if you have lights inside the house I am afraid you'll wait forever the tracer to solve the scene. In other words, the inside of the house will be full of fireflies (at least that is my experience). If you turn internal light channel off, fireflies should disappear.

[Wayne Williamson]

I think the quickest way to get what you want is to use channels. Put the sun on channel 0, the sky on channel 1 & the interior lighting on channel 2. Thus you will have 3 channels in the advanced tab. Once your rendering has cooked for a little while you can adjust each of the slides for the 3 channels and get the look you are trying to achieve.

[Ian Foster Griffith]

Will try this channel method and see if that gives me the control.

Thanks   - will be back soon with results............

[Ian Foster Griffith]

How do you turn the sun level up and down, how do you create night or afternoon or morning.???

[George Ioannidis]

In lighting tab change the number of available light channels to 3 or 4 (we have max. 8 channels available). In sun tab set sun channel to 1 and skylight to channel 0. Group artificial lights to other channels, according to some eventual grouping logic (spots in separate channel, floor lamps in other etc.) You can then change the value of each light channel raising or lowering the light channel power in channel panel during the rendering or later, after the rendering is stopped, you save result to native nxt image file and open it in nxt image editor. There you can play with light channels as well as with other effects like haze, glow and vignette. If you want night shot, simply set sun and sky value to 0 or almost zero (like 0.001). If you want daytime rendering, turn off artificial light channels off setting them to 0.

[Ian Foster Griffith]

Thank you, done some quick tests and this is working for me.

Will do tests on my full model tonight and see if it's what I need.

thanks for the post.........