Starting with a blank canvas

Armed with a fairly good idea of the direction we want to take as well as having some thoughts in mind regarding the lighting tools that we will use, it's time to move on to the creation of our lighting solution in the scene.

We would typically want to start our lighting scheme using what I refer to as a blank canvas, by which I mean a totally dark scene. In this instance though, as we will be making use of the V-Ray Sun and Sky system in a little while, we will skip this so as to avoid performing unnecessary steps.

Setting an initial exposure level

The very first thing that we will need to do then is set up at least an initial exposure setting that we can start to work with. Without a fixed point of reference in the form of some typical exposure values, we will probably find ourselves struggling to make any sense out of what we are seeing as we add lights to the scene and make our test renders.

For instance, if our initial exposure settings were to cut out too much...