Outdoor Lighting
 

This year we are doing a considerable portion of our animation in an outdoors setting; whats the best lighting set-up for this kind of thing? Our animation is realistic, and will vary from dawn to dusk (though all in different scenes, so it doesn't have to be dynamic). We haven't decided between MR and Scanline, but it will probably be largely influenced by this factor.

Last year (iirc) we used MentalRay's GI and a self-illuminated semi-sphere along with some other minor lights, which worked okay but seemed to be washed out and take longer to render than it was worth.

By the way, we have the resources to have a reasonably lengthy render time, though obviously I would like to keep it low.

Re: Outdoor Lighting
 

The very best way to do this is to render in layers. First you have your diffuse pass, specular pass, ambient occlusion, and every individual light rendered separately. So you have all these different files and you take them into combustion and work on them in there so you can tweak them in real time without havening to wait 5-10 mins to see a result. That is the absolute best way to do that, then you can achieve the best result and have motion blur and distance blur without the cost of lengthy render time.

but I'm going to assume that you dont want to do it that way so my other suggestion's is just use the sky light with final gather. Then set up some lights to cast light up from the ground to mimic the light bouncing off the ground like it does in real life.

Re: Outdoor Lighting
 

I'm interested in the layer rendering. What is the process?

Re: Outdoor Lighting
 

for a lighting system, just use the daylight in the systems tab, from there go to the modify tab and change the it to mr skylight (say yes to adding mr physical sky) and a mr sun. Go into environment and set logarithmic exposure control with the "exterior daylight" box checked. In the hierarchy tab, you can set the time of the day and the daylight system will do all the calculations. Very simple and very good results. It does have a slightly high render time, but nothing too extreme, and btw make sure you enable final gather.

Re: Outdoor Lighting
 

The daylight system doesn't include a skybox right? Last year I found a free panoramic which I mapped to an inverted semi-sphere. Is there a better way to do it?

Re: Outdoor Lighting
 

the mr physical sky is a sky that adjusts itself to fit the correct colors (sunset sunrise) and sun position. If you would rather use a sky box (your sphere with inverted normals is a fine way to do it) you can still use the daylight system, just don't use the mr physical sky, and make sure that you turn off case shadows in the object properties of your sphere.

Re: Outdoor Lighting
 

Yes there is, two words.

Layer rendering.

Re: Outdoor Lighting
 

If you don't want to render in layers (which may or may not be overkill, depending on what you're trying to accomplish), you could try a Skylight, which would limit you to the scanline renderer.

Now, that dawn to dusk transition does sound like a job for layered rendering. Sounds fun.