Lighting

There is only one direct light in the scene, but there is an additional light source; skylight with HDRI map of daytime sky with some little clouds. Direct light has light beige colour, shadows are set to VrayShadow with area shadow turned on.

Rendering

I used VRay for rendering, because it is the engine that I know best. You can see all the settings below. I used indirect illumination with Irradiance map for Primary bounces and Light cache for Secondary bounces. It was my private project, I did not care so much about render times so the Irradiance map and Light cache settings are quite high. A good idea is to save GI maps to files, so that you can stop rendering after GI is calculated and render the picture later using these files. Image sampling was set to Adaptive subdivision with Mitchell-Netravali filter which produces a nice effect. There is the same hdri map in GI Environment (skylight) and Reflection/refraction etc. environment.

Post - Production

When you have rendered the final image you can finish work, but there are still many things you can do to make it better. There are two ways to improve the image after rendering; first is colour, brightness, levels, hue, contrast, correction, etc. and another is painting on the image to add some things. I used both of these methods. Working on layers during post-production is a very good idea because you can modify all effects anytime you want. Here you can see all layers that I added in this process.



I painted a few details on the walls and other objects like cloak and doors and grass.