First I would like to use the Linear Exposure control here instead of what we have been using so far in the overcast night shot, which was Reinhard. With this we will be able to reduce the overall light in the room without having to sacrifice the burning brightness effect near the light sources.

Now let's have a closer look at our light sources: they are V-Ray light spheres. We can see that number 4, the Tiffany lamp, causes some nice sharp shadows on the walls and it was a nice feature in the earlier scene but now I don't think we need it. I find it a bit distracting and I would like to see much smoother shadows. So just replace this small radius sphere with a normal V-Ray light sphere by copying one from lamp number 6. No Instance this time because later we might want to handle them separately.

Let's reduce the light drastically by bringing the Multiplier down to 300. Let's see what we get now (Fig.05). It is really dark but I like it because these lamps have only one purpose and that's to light the areas very close to them. But just for some more fine tuning: let's make light number 6 a bit less bright (200) and number 4 a bit brighter (500). Because by now it is, I guess, clear to everyone that we will introduce a completely new light source in the scene to serve as our main light source: the fireplace.


How could you leave that out of a romantic scene?

So we will do this by putting three V-Ray light spheres in the fireplace, scattered in there randomly (Fig.06). And render a final test (Fig.07).



Now it's time for the final settings and then it's ready to be rendered properly (Fig.08 – 09).



And after some Photoshopping, the end result looks like this (Fig.10). I think it's satisfying enough. Who could resist this atmosphere?