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Need tips or tutorial on making a night exterior scene


padre.ayuso
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Hi there all,

I'm sure there are some tutorials and tips for night scenes of buildings but I can't seem to find any right now... Anyhow, I'm doing this shot of a building at dusk and while I'm trying different things, a good tut would come in handy.

Thanks in advance!

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yep easiest way at the minute is change time to something suitable for night.

 

lower multipliers of sun and sky. (we're talkin 0.001 here)

 

adjust exposure to suit night time exposure.

 

now to avoid the yellow skies and see if the image is looking how you want. now is the time to utilise the review viewport technology in max

 

enable viewport background, shadows, hardware shading etc etc.

 

oh and use lots of photometric lights as i can assure you that unless you are in the desert or somewhere not built up, then there will be other light sources somewhere all contributing to the light of an nighttime exterior.

 

what sort of scale are we talking? photometric lights may not be the answer if the scene is huge, hence travis tutorial suggestion and many others floating around the web (could use self illuminated materials inside office blocks etc

 

i've seen some great tutorial recently or at least an article on how some people did the big offices at night using clever techniques. it wasn't the vyonyx one. i think it was in either 3d world recently or 3d artist

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Hi there, i also have the same problem,

i cant get the night scenes to look right, i usually use fully reflective glass with no transparency,and v-ray sun at low angel using IR and Light cash,some times i override the global environment just to get the colors right.BUT!

i have seen this amazing lightwave plugin on the front page, take a look at it on this site front page its called vRoom.

 

im wondering is there something like this for Max? or are they any good tutorials on setting up a night scene with materials?

please guide us to some if you know any.

 

Many Thanks.

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Thanks guys. We were able to follow your steps and our previous knowledge to come up with a smoking scene. The main thing was to also make it so you could see inside this building. Being a lot of glass windows, at night you would end up seeing the insides of the building. Another thing, we did bring down the exposure control to 8.0. We turned off the sun and had the skylight at 0.03 with MR Physical Sky as the environment map. The IES lights inside the building we wanted to display and we included stuff inside to make it look real. The rest of the buildings, even we even handled whatever else in Post Production with Photoshop. The streetlights were also IES lights and from there an AO and some Photoshop work and it looked great. As a note, the rest of the settings are as follows:

Hightlights: 0.25

Midtones: 1.0

Shadows: 0.2

Color Saturation: 1.0

Whitepoint: 6500.0 Kelvin

Vignetting: 0.0

 

I have Gamma Settings on to 1.8. OK, I hope that helps anyone else that tries to do exteriors.

--

By the way, this is all in Mental Ray, we have not yet moved to VRay, but the scene looks just as great.

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For night scenes, sometime you dont need a mrsun at all, just the sky.

 

A handy way to light the interior is by using large planes with a self -illuminating A&D shader that has been set to emit Final Gather samples.

 

Post a render to show us your results

 

jhv

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Thanks Justin, I would love to put the rendering on the net, and would if it was not for confidentiality agreement. However, I'll see to make my own building and rendering and show it to give a good idea of how it came out. Thanks to all for your help, it worked out at the end and used the info from everyone.

Best

Alex

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City scape buildings at night...

http://vyonyx.com/?p=1652

 

Other than that, if you are using MR sun and Sky, I would lower their multiplier values you you might start getting weird yellow skies.

 

 

I can never get these vyonyx links to work, they always take me to the main page. And then there's no way I can find the actual article within the site. Does the link work for everyone else :confused:

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  • 8 months later...

sorry my explanation was a bit vague - a picture paints a thousand words

 

see attached, this is where you'll find light settings etc.

 

still need Alt+B for viewport background, if your using physical sky then you may just see white when you enable it so you'll need to turn on exposure in viewport also

 

my screenshot shows 2011, but it's the same in 2010

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