VRAY INTERIOR LIGHTING TUTORIAL – Rendering with Daylight in SketchUp!

VRAY INTERIOR LIGHTING TUTORIAL – Rendering with Daylight in SketchUp!

In this video, learn to light an interior rendering in Vray using lighting from the exterior environment settings like the Sun, Rectangle Lights, and exposure! This will help you get your lighting set up initially so that you can add materials and create your final rendering!

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We’re going to start off by turning on SketchUp shadows – these will give you a preview of what the actual shadows will look like within your model. You can adjust your time of year and also time of day settings to get your sunlight where you want.

Material Override

For this video, we’re going to render our scene without any materials to just get our lighting right. This is a good way to start off because your render will work much faster without Vray having to calculate all the lighting and how it would work with the materials. If you’ve already applied materials to your model, you can turn on a material override in the settings section. In this case, I haven’t applied materials yet, but if you have, you can go into “Settings,” “Material Override.” This will override your materials to whatever color you’ve set. In this case, for simplicity’s sake, I have not placed glass in the windows. To exclude a glass material from your material override, you can adjust that using the material settings in your Vray Asset Editor window.

Adjust Exposure Settings

The first thing you’ll notice is that your render is a bit dark. We’re going to adjust this by going in and adjusting our camera settings. You can find these within your Vray Asset Editor window, under the settings tab. One thing to note – whenever you have an interior render that isn’t bright enough, it’s a good idea to start by adjusting your exposure rather than making your lights brighter. This becomes especially important when dealing with artificial interior lights, otherwise your lighting calculations start becoming unrealistic.
In Vray, the camera acts a lot like a camera would in real life – the shutter speed or exposure value is going to affect how bright your image is. The lower the value, the brighter the image will be. You can either just adjust the exposure value, or there are more advanced settings if you click on the advanced settings button. In this case, we’re going to set our exposure value to 11. Note that this makes your image noticeably brighter.

Adjust Brightness to Reduce Color Blowout, Add Realistic Shadows

However, you need to make sure that you don’t increase exposure or brightness so much that you image becomes blown out. You can check this by clicking the button for “force color clamping.” This will indicate on your image where the super bright areas are. In this case, you can see how we’ve brightened our image up so much that we can’t see our sky or our ground plane anymore. Let’s reduce the brightness of our sun to .5. See how this reduces the blown out areas in our image?
Our shadows are also looking a bit too straight – very unrealistic. To create more soft, rounded shadows, go into your sunlight settings and adjust your sun size – in this case, we’ll set it to 3.

Add Artificial Rectangle Lights

Now, however, our image is dimmer again. What we want to do is create an artificial light that will push more light through our window. To do this, we’re going to use a rectangle light outside our windows. A rectangle light is a light in Vray that casts light. You can add a rectangle light using the lights toolbar within Vray. Simply place it outside your window – in this case, we can scale it so that it covers both windows. You’ll notice however, that when we place this, we can no longer see our sky, which is not what we want, so we’re going to go into our light settings and under options, select the option for invisible. This means that the light will be cast without the actual geometry being rendered.

Note that you may have to make some adjustments once you turn your materials back on, but by adjusting the settings that we’ve already changed in this video, it should be fairly easy for you to achieve the results that you’re looking for!

About Justin Geis

Hi, I'm Justin Geis, and I'm the founder of The SketchUp Essentials. I started using SketchUp as part of my work as a general contractor in 2008. I quickly realized the power of the software and started using it for personal projects. I started The SketchUp Essentials as a place to share easy to follow SketchUp tutorials and tips to help everyone harness the power of 3D Modeling in their lives. When not working with SketchUp, I enjoy playing soccer and spending time with my wife and our two dogs.