Maintaining sharp shadows with VRay Sun + VRay Sky?

[joadhughes]

I'm trying to render a living room scene with large windows. I want there to be squares of light on the ground, with sharp shadows where the window frames are. I am happy with my lighting using VRay Sun and VRay Sky, but the lighting is too soft and creates really soft shadows. If I disable the VRay Sky, I get the sunlight on the ground like I am looking for, but the whole scene looks bad. I tried using a VRay Dome but I don't have much experience with them and I just ended up with a dull render and solid blue outside the windows.

[Corey Beaulieu]

Generally speaking, a small sun size will sharpen shadows and if you are going to use your sky map in a dome light then you are allowing yourself to control the contribution. You can turn that down and get m,ore direct light.

 

I might suggest that you get a balance between what you want and a fairly rough render and then focus on the post process. We forget that a photographer will use multiple exposures to get what they want and as render artists, we need to something similar. Saving as an EXR will give you the data of a multiple exposure and your post work will be far greater than a 8 or 16 bit Tiff. A photographer might also fill in the missing sky contribution with a very soft splash light behind the camera— assuming the same conditions anyway.

[Msamir]

As Corey said it depends on the sun size take a look here on how the sun size affects the shadows.

http://www.vray.com/vray_for_3ds_max/manual/vraysun_and_vraysky_examples.shtml