Night time shots - help pleeese

[markjohn.perry]

I've never been able to create a convincing night time shot of one of my models - I am experiementing at the moment when I've got some time spare -

In a test model I have created a a 2 storey building.

I have added 3 lights on the ground and first floors, and 3 outside along the front of the building.

The best "success" I get is with the Sky and Sun switched off.

If they (sky and sun) are on then they seem to completely nullify the effect of the point source lights I have placed. Even if I set the suntime to the middle of the night. The result here is complete blackness.

I have attached my best effort - please could someone take a look and see where I'm going wrong.

Many thanks.

[rdaynard]

Start by coping your model into a new drawing. Any time I do a night rendering, if I've messed with the sun settings at all, I can not get it to work, so just start fresh. If you're only using point or spotlights then don't change anything. If you're using web lights, use the "lightingunits" command and make sure you're set to 1 or 2. Then think about how the building would actually be illuminated. When I want light from a window, I put a point light just below ceiling height about 3 ft away from the window. As for the lights outside of the building, I usually create a block with the fixture I want to use and the light that I want to use positioned within that block. (I do this for 2 reasons. 1) It seems to work a lot better, don't know why, just does. 2) If I want to make a change, I only have to do it once.) The last thing I would do is change the background. I like to use a gradient background because it makes the building stand out better. I posted a couple of night renderings in this forum a little while back, check them out to get a visual idea of what I'm talking about. Hope this helps.

[david_peterson]

Also (As I'm sure you already know) make sure your model is close to 0,0. The closer the better. ACA will do some screwy things with lighting. If that's still no good, you can try to increase the intensity of the sun. Just some other thoughts.

[Steve_Bennett]

If you haven't, try enabling Global Illumination (GI).