Lighting and Camera

This is where it gets more fun for me as this is my favorite process in every scene I do. I rendered over 40 tests throughout the scene trying different light situations and positions. I ended up using three lights in addition to the GI Enviroment skylight (Fig.12):

• An orange-beige colored Target Direct to simulate the sun in the morning shot with VRay Area Shadows.
• A bright orange colored Vray Sphere Light in the lamp with the Intensity of 260.0, Yes, 260.0 because it's refracted by two layers.
• A light-blue colored Vray Plane light to fill dark areas
• A GI Enviroment skylight set to a strong blue color (49, 156, 255) with a multiplier of 7.0 to 10.0
  

The intensity of each of these lights was related to the VRay Physical Camera that I used, more specifically related to its shutter speed. The higher the shutter speed the darker the image. VRay Pysical Camera has some really cool features like Vignetting (darkens the render at the corner of the image), Distortion to simulate real-life cameras and, of course, Depth of Field which is be used along with the F-Number and the Focus distance. Applied examples can be found on this valuable full-documentation site: http://www.spot3d.com/ . This site helped me a lot in terms of DOF and camera settings. Here are the camera settings I used in the Depth of Field render (Fig.13).

Rendering

I used Adaptive DMC Image sampler and VrayLanczosFilter with the default settings, and Exponential Color mapping with sub-pixel mapping checked. For GI I used an Irradiance map with the "Medium" preset and Light cache with 1000 Subdivs. The image was rendered at 3K pixels and here are some close-ups (Fig.14).




And here's the final image (Fig.15).


Finally, I would like to thank the 3DTotal team for giving me the chance to contribute and give back to the non-stop giving community of CG artists. I would be more than happy to reply to any questions or provide any further details about this scene.