Lighting is one of the most important factors when generating convincing, photo-real renderings. The interaction of lighting setups along with the atmosphere will strongly dictate the visual render quality and believability.

To create a new lighting and atmospheric setup, the following are useful guidelines:

• Limit the number of lights used – the fewer the better.  Start with a single directional light (e.g. the sun) and add lights as needed

• Turn off all fog and haze in the atmosphere tab at the beginning

• Turn off or eliminate any clouds in the atmosphere.  This slows render time.  You can always add the clouds in at a later time.

• For outdoor lighting, use either the Standard or Global Illumination (GI) lighting modes

• For indoor lighting, use either the GI or Global Radiosity (GR) lighting modes

The most important factor in outdoor renders is to get the primary sun location and angle dialed in correctly.  Look at the two examples shown here.  The top render uses a high, overhead sun angle.  This tends to decrease the contrast of the scene and washes out import details on the ground terrain.  The bottom render uses a low sun angle and dramatically increases contrast, bringing out much more vivid details. Notice the increase in realism by simply changing the light angle.

For all lighting setups, indoor and outdoor, it's best to use a white colored or grayscale light for the main light.  You can adjust the intensity of the main light by increasing or decreasing the grayscale color value of the main light.  Grayscale lighting produces a more exact color match for the materials and textures used in the scene. For outdoor lighting, a softness value of 0 to 2 is generally sufficient.  Also, you may want to reduce the shadow density if the shadows are blocking out important details.

The Vue Fog and Haze settings are a bit difficult to master.  There are actually three settings used to adjust Fog and Haze.  The first setting is on the Sky Tab which adjusts the amount of fog in the sky.  Use this setting to create a blend line between the horizon and the sky.

Atmospheric Fog and Haze, found on the Fog and Haze Tab, is used to add altitude dependent fog and overall atmospheric haze to the scene.  I find the Fog settings hard to control so I use cloud objects to simulate fog instead.  The haze setting is useful to decrease the contrast of the scene when using a darker, more overcast sky.

Global Illumination Lighting is useful for close-up to medium range outdoor scenes that demand more realistic looking shadows.  To realize the effect of Global Illumination, you must set the Light Balance towards more ambient light.  Do not set the Light Balance to fully ambient or zero, since this will drastically reduce the amount of specular highlights in the scene. A setting of 25% to 50% will usually work quite well for outdoor scenes.  The most important value to use for adjusting the brightness of the scene is the Sky Dome Lighting Gain.  This influences the amount of light coming from the sky to illuminate the scene.  You can also adjust the Overall Skylight Color to a higher grayscale value to increase the amount of light.  When tuning the GI atmosphere, I generally decrease the Quality Boost to -1 to increase preview rendering speed.  When I'm happy with overall GI settings, I then revert the Quality Boost back to zero.