Photographic Rendering with V-Ray for SketchUp: Turn your 3D modeling into photographic realism with this superb guide for SketchUp users. Through concrete examples, screenshots, and images, you'll learn the practical side to photographic rendering using V-Ray.

To take a look at the first of the scene files that we will be working with throughout the duration of this book, you may want to load the Daylight_Interior_01.skp file from the Exercise_Files folder that has been provided as a downloadable resource.

This scene contains a small gallery type building that has been designed and created to give us both interior and exterior spaces in which we can work at creating lighting, materials, camera composition, and so on, as well as providing a number of challenges that we will need to overcome as we move forward with our project.

We have also, by design, only populated one of the interior rooms in this building, leaving you free to add your own set dressing to other areas, using them to do your own exploration and experimentation with the concepts and tools that we will discuss throughout this project.

Now, although we have already demonstrated in our first chapter that we can pretty much jump straight in and start creating renders using the default lighting setup when using V-Ray in SketchUp, I feel the need to state quite emphatically that such an approach is in reality a long way short of ideal when it comes down to the work of creating photographic renders. Our first order of business when getting started on a project should always be to thoroughly develop the goals and aims of the project itself.

Time spent in breaking down the goals and then working out how to match our stated goals with the tools that we have available will not only save us a lot of unnecessary trial and error throughout the course of the project, but can actually lead us toward artistic choices, technical options, and even final results that may otherwise have been completely bypassed in pursuit of a quick turnaround.

Now that we have the goal for the lighting in our scene clearly defined, the next step is to outline the approach we are going to take and the tools we are going to use in order to create that lighting solution for ourselves. Again, we could quite easily jump in and probably use the default Sun and sky system in V-Ray, which has been designed with the goal of creating natural-looking daylight in mind.

The problem with diving in isn't necessarily the lack in quality that such an approach will produce, but rather the lack of artistic development that it can foster. Remember, a good photographer is, generally speaking, an artist first and a technician second. He/she is someone who has learned how to utilize the technology at their disposal as a means to an end in the pursuit of their artistic vision. Ultimately, it is their understanding of what makes a photograph good along with their artistic sensibility that will allow them to create the kind of high quality images that...

The place to start when working on any kind of lighting design is to decide exactly what will constitute the key light in the environment. This is the light that provides the main source of illumination for the render and is also, generally speaking, the main shadow casting light.

In a daylight setting, it doesn't take a lot of figuring to realize that our key light would most likely be the Sun. The question is, which of the available V-Ray light types should we be using as our Sun? This, I suppose, could seem like a silly question given that we have already highlighted the availability of the V-Ray Sun light type.

Well, V-Ray does offer other light types that could almost as easily be used as a sunlight in the scene. In V-Ray Version 2.0, we have the Omni, Rectangle, Spot, Dome, Sphere, and IES light types, which are all readily available at the click of a button in the VfS:Lights toolbar.

The beauty of these particular light objects is that they are free of the inherent...

Just as it is obvious that in most daylight scenarios the Sun will be the dominant and therefore key light, it is also very clear that without the secondary or Fill light that comes from the Sky, what we call "natural daylight" would probably not look so natural at all.

Essentially the Sky acts as a giant diffuse reflector that is able to cast at least some level of illumination even into areas of an environment that direct Sunlight could never hope to reach. In this respect, the Sun & Sky system form a perfect lighting partnership—one that we often fail to fully appreciate for both its technical complexity as well as its aesthetic beauty.

Besides adding almost perfect illumination coverage for an environment, we also need to take into account the fact that Skylight can and often does add quite a strong color cast. Again this is not something that we generally appreciate or possibly even notice due to the automatic color balancing that our eyes and brain typically...

Let's quickly summarize the elements of creating a daylight solution for photographic rendering that we have covered in this chapter.

The first thing we need to keep in mind is that unless we approach every aspect of creating a photographic render with a clear, well thought out plan, there is a very good chance that we will fail to hit the required mark, whether that is one we set personally or by our client. We also need to make certain that our plan is put down as a permanent record somehow, be that written, painted, photographed, or compiled.

We also need to work smart. Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel each and every time we work on a new project, we should already have learned to work with a few tried and tested workflows that will get us most of the way towards a finished solution in a very short space of time. We also need to note that when working on lighting, every new light added to a scene should be test rendered in isolation, giving us a clear view of the illumination...