Attached Link: Youtube Night light Tutorial

This tutorial can be applied to just about any 3d application, but here I am using Carrara.

The basic idea is to use moonlight with 4 distant lights each with their own colour shading and (low) intensity, in order to simulate the slow to render indirect lighting that is available under global illumination.

In addition to this set up I go into how contrasting addtional (brighter) lights with this lighting can help the whole scene look like night time.

The video is geared towards surviving youtubes encoding for darker lights. Of course using some kind of gamma correction is useful, but how about fixing the scene at source? Gamma correction can light up everything, here you can select what is to stand out.

Finally I mix a three point lighting idea with this set up to show how you can cheat and help individual objects stand out in the darkness.

Thanks again.. I haven't gotten started yet today but this is now in my que to watch.  Your videos are appreciated.

Quote - Thanks again.. I haven't gotten started yet today but this is now in my que to watch.  Your videos are appreciated.

 

Pleasure. Hope it helps.

Thank you! Very interesting video and good advice.

I think your method is good. Visually it's not blue enough for me though. (More blue may not be more realistic, but is more cinematic, I believe) What's your ambient setting in the scene there? I would change the ambient to 60% dark midnight-sky-blue blue. I usually use it for daytime scenes, but it can work with nightitme too, and your lighting setup looks good for that, I think.

From memory I think I'm on 20%, but as I say in the vids - its not a one size fits all solution, I would be changing settings depending on the shot.

Blue sounds good, but I over did it on one attempt, so I'm just going to experiment per shot and see what I like.

Good luck!

Thanks for the video and letting us know!

-Kix