Creating a Photorealistic Vue Render

Vue Atmospheres and Creating a Photorealistic Render:

I generally use the Vue lighting setting of “GR” or Global Radiosity in my Vue renders as this does lend to more realistic Vue renders, a good realistic Vue Atmosphere is truly the key to the most photorealistic render. This creates the correct light color bounce from various objects in the scene, which can be tweaked and adjusted using the various settings within the Vue Atmosphere Editor. If you are using one of my Vue atmospheres, they come optimally set to give you the utmost realism in your renders, if you change these settings be careful not to save the atmosphere back over the original file.

Global Radiosity vs. Global Illumination in Vue Atmosphere Renders:

In my opinion, and generally in the opinion of most other experienced Vue artists, the ultimate in realism in your renders is gained from using Global Radiosity (GR) in your Vue Atmosphere lighting setup rather than Global Illumination (GI). If you look around you, and carefully analyze how light interacts in the natural world, you will see actual Global Radiosity at work… Since we live in the natural world, and in an atmosphere that creates this ‘scattering effect’ our eyes can tell us what ‘looks real’ and what does not, even if we can’t quite put our finger on it. GI simulates natural lighting to a degree, but it will not duplicate the realistic color bounce and ‘shadow fill’ as seen in the real world as the Global Radiosity setting will for the best and most realistic Vue atmosphere.

Tweaking the Vue Atmosphere for your Render

Since every scene is different, different lighting situations and requirements will come into play. Therefore when using the Vue Atmosphere of your choice there are different things you can do to enhance the realism of your render for your scene. For instance, shadows are truly one of the keys to realism. We live on a world where one could almost describe our atmosphere as “soupy” at times. Light interacts with the particles in our atmosphere, bouncing to and fro, here and there. So depending upon the amount of light, the direction of light, and the atmospheric conditions the depth of shadows will change. Rarely in daytime anywhere on earth will you find a truly pitch black shadow. Light scatters off of the particulate matter in our atmosphere and fills these shadows with reflected/scattered light. Within the Vue Atmosphere Editor, when you have the GR lighting selected, you will find a setting called “Bias”.

The bias setting defaults to 0.00 in most standard Vue Spectral Atmospheres. What the Bias setting does is increases or decreases the amount of “shadow fill” in your global radiosity atmosphere. With a setting of 0.00 there will be no adjustment, leaving your shadows darker and deeper while increasing this setting (dependent upon your scene) to the positive will create more shadow fill, lessening the depth of the shadow. Try tweaking this setting and for those of you who have never tried it, you will be surprised at the results.

As always… Happy Rendering! Stop by my site sometime and I will be happy to share some of my Vue experience with you!