I'm about to launch into to renders for my job this next week and I'll have day and night (gulp) shots of buildings to do. It'll be a short deadline for the amount of work it is...that's why I'm asking ahead of time...to prep myself. Are there certain lights that look more realistic than others for night shots? Are there lights I should stay away from for whatever reason? I imagine the only lighting that would exist would be lamp posts and car headlights. What I'm mostly concerned with is lighting the interior rooms so that it shines correctly through the glass. Anyone know where to get some general Vue night scene tips? I didn't see anything in the backroom. I'm kind of intimidated by this project.

I can't remember if you have Vue Infinite or not. If you do, you will have a much better time controling your light precisely with the inclusion / exclusion lists. First tip - disable Lens Flares. Second tip - especially for a night scene, set Ambient light in your atmosphere to 0 (or to a very low value) and then use a couple of directional lights or very large spotlights (with low intensity) to simulate the moonlight.

If you do, you will have a much better time controling your light precisely with the inclusion / exclusion lists. Not sure I understand, but yes, have Infinite. You could just change the sun color to white or whatever color moonlight is... goes to check Thx btw.

What I mean is that, if you are not satisfied with the way the light flows from inside the rooms to the outside of the building, you can always add point lights outside the windows and set them to illuminate everything except the building (exclusion list). It is a great way to add soft touches of light around the areas you really want to illuminate without affecting the rest of your scene.

Artistic night scenes are surely much different from night scenes made for work. In the first kind you usually want to hide most things to focus attention only on a few important details. In night scenes made for work you don't have this "luxury" and you are forced to still show most of the object you are presenting, although with subdued lights. This is something to take into account. In general, night scenes are perfect exercises for global illumination. Most of what we see in the night, in fact, is visible because of bounced/reflected lights. But being on a tight deadline you might not have the luxury to rely heavily on GI. Therefore a good use of ambient light will become crucial. I would say, do not overdo it. try to "invent" some plausible human light sources instead, and use point lights and spotlights with low power, large range and very high falloff. Apart from these general tips, it is difficult to say more without evaluating a single specific scene.

Hey, maybe I've missed it but everybody has missed THE trick to good night pictures, or at least fooling the eye into seeing it is night; All the tips above can help + use a blue coloured light as your key light. Cheers

I will be using GI for sure. I should have about 2 weeks to render 3 day and 3 night images. I may bring in my home PC and make a rendercow at work to help with the rendering. Thx for the tips guys. If ya got em, keep em comin. BTW, all this stuff will go on my Vue Realism page I'm making. It'll be a guide for how to create the most realistic renders possible with Vue. Tips for night scenes would be a good addition. I should probably start building my atmosphere and lighting at home with an example building...

Here's a very fast and simple HDR render I did with Vue 5 over a year ago. I used the stock Vim-HDR that comes with Vue- with a bluish tint as Cheers suggested. A spotlight on the statue (a bit too bright- but sort of realistic) suggests nighttime lighting. The IBL effect is best on the fountain water. I PERSONALLY would consider a mix of IBL and ray-traced lighting...

What I notice about nighttime lighting effects are the "vignette effect" on buildings, trees, etc. Basically they become somewhat "Cartoon-like".

Wikipedia:
In the visual arts, vignetting is a loss in clarity towards the corners and sides of an image (for example brightening, darkening, or blurring). The effect is sometimes used intentionally, for instance in photographic portraits. In photography (other than for these special effects) vignetting is usually unintentional, and is often caused by optical limitations of the lens. Clarity to the corners of a photograph is one of the features of high-end optics.

One more tiny little tip to add to the rest of these good ideas. If you have a light that is a lamp post, or something like it, place at least two point lights inside the light fixture, and offset the point lights a little bit. This will cause your shadows on the nearby buildings or the ground to be significantly softer. (In theory, the softness setting for the lights does this, but mostly, in Vue, it just creates a scatter effect of tiny littlg dark and light grains on the buildings or nearest objects. I didn't like this, so I just thought about what I'd learned of light behavior in high school physics.)

Some night light tips:
Moonlight is the same color as sunlight (since it reflects off the Moon, which is quite neutral in color). Hollywood has people thinking it's bluer at night. You can go with that or not.

Actually, what happens is that in the dim moonlight, your retina's cones (color sensitive) don't have enough light energy to do much for you, so your rods (monochrome) take over - except for the light sources themselves and any well illuminated surfaces, of course.

Street lamps cast interesting shadows from their internal parts. Here is an example from my training e-book for digital artists - i used a point light in each lamp and located it as high inside the lamp as possible to get max shadows.

Vue 5i has a curve for light sources which lets you control how far from the source the light starts to be visible. With this you can but a light source inside an opaque object and still have light coming from it outside the object. It's great for how wide a searchlight or car headlight beam will be as it emerges and such.

This control is in the Lighting & Shadows control above the object hierarchy list when you select a light source.

Dim light can be pretty contrasty (low signal-to-noise-ratio or dynamic range, since you are near the threshold of sensitivity of the eye) so you may want to use a pretty high contrast.

You can get extra drama by using Volumetric Illumination at night.

Like any other art challenge, it really helps to go and observe keenly. So, if i were you, i'd take some night time walks and get a very good look at the real thing.

Cheers!

_jc
Art-Head-Start.com
Training e-book for digital art students

Small lens flares on point lights can give the illusion of volumetrics. I often use them on candle flames. A group of point lights to soften the shadows is a good idea. You can also use mapped shadows instead of raytraced shadows, and a softness of about 5' on the light. Mapped shadows consume resources, however. Quicker to render, but they use more memory, can be a problem when rendering complicated scenes. Without global illumination, objects in shadow tend to look very "flat". With GI, they look much, much better. Global Radiosity tends to be a tad better than GI, but usually not worth the extra render time.