Nighttime Scene

The image above was rendered with a twilight effect.

There are two post-processing changes you can make dynamically (without re-rendering) to switch from a daytime scene to a nighttime scene. The Brightness Control and Lighting Channels

The "Twilight" scene already has some lighting channels applied - as you will see below.

This is the same model rendered with default settings.

In normal daylight, the sun and sky are really too bright to see the interior light and street lights.

There is a Brightness Control at the top of the rendering window which should be your first tool to adjust brightness.

Here we lowered it from 50 (default) to 40. It made the sky and scene much darker, but also made the lights themselves darker.

We will see the lights much better if there is no sky at all.

I could turn off the sky, and re-render. Our we could use a Post Processing feature, Lighting Channels to turn off the sky.

The Lighting Channels Wizard is loaded from an icon above the rendering area.

Here I turned off the sky, using Lighting Channels, so I could see the effect immediately (without having to re-render the model)

Turning off the Sky was probably too drastic, so instead we can turn it back on, but not as bright.

The twilight model above was created with the Sky turned on, but set very low (0.01). To make the Sky even darker, and create more of a nighttime scene, you can use Lighting Channels to lower the sky even more, or raise the lights. (Either one has the same effect).

For the image at the left, I left the sky at 0.01, but raised the street lights and ceiling lights from 1 to 40.

I felt that the image above had both the sky and the lights too bright, so I decided to use the Brightness Control as well. I lowered the lights from 40 to 20, (for better bakance between sky and lighting), and then lowered the brightness from 50 to 45.

This is all done immediately, without having to re-render, so it is very easy to use these controls to get just the effect you want.

Blurry Reflection

This model has defined blurry reflection for the concrete areas. This effect - done by lowering the Sharpness of the reflection material provides a realistic, wet concrete effect to the rendering. However, the way this is achieved - by changing the angle of the reflection for each rendering pass will require more rendering passes than renderings with sharper reflections.

Here is the rendering of the concrete are after just one pass.

The reflections are very sharp - because just one sample has been taken from the reflection of the lights.

After 3 passes, you can see how it works - each light has 3 reflections - but it creates a very unrealistic effect until you allow for many more samples.

It will need more passes to converge properly.

This image was allowed to render for 150 passes. It is almost acceptable now, especially if the reflections were in more subtle parts of the drawing.

This would be a good model to let render overnight to really let things converge.