If you have a dusk shot, then you can tweak the sun color or use an HDRI image to generate the light.

I have been using V-Ray for over a year now and I am in no way paid by V-Ray or affiliated with the company.

I simply tried out a lot of different programs and found V-Ray was the best at meeting a lot of my needs.

You will notice that I dont vear too far from the default settings, but instead use settings that will provide the best ratio of fast rendering times and good outputs.

Another very important point that I want to make is that I am not trying to produce the perfect V-Ray rendering each time.

I am simply trying to get close to what I want and then refine the lighting and colors in Photoshop.

This way of thinking maintains my sanity and minimizes the amount of test renderings and setting adjustments that need to be made.

To keep things manageable, this first post will be an overview of the basic concepts that I use for setting up a daytime rendering scene.

This means the V-Ray interface is running inside of Sketchup.

Things like the sun, cameras, and materials all speak to each other between the two programs.

Changing the sun angle in Sketchup will change the sun angle in V-Ray.

I typically adjust the sun angle in Sketchup to get the shadows exactly where I want them before moving to V-Ray.

I also save the Sketchup scene that I plan to render in V-Ray by going to ViewAnimationAdd Scene.

This is especially important if I am going to overlay Sketchup image exports on top of the V-Ray renderings or if I need to render the same view later on down the road.

This will take everything to the default V-Ray settings when the program was first installed.

If I have been experimenting with settings and things are getting weird with the outputs, I will often hit this button to start from scratch.

Next to that is the Load button which allows you to load past settings which have become a big time saver in our studio.

This will override all materials in the model and replace them with a single material color.

This is the box I check when I create clay model renderings.

I usually leave the default settings the same except for the F-number which I change from 8 to 10.

This slightly darkens the final output so that the white materials dont get washed out.

For interior shots or dusk scenes where there is low light, these settings will need to be adjusted accordingly.

Again, the default V-Ray settings are tied to the Sketchup sun.

Therefore, changing the sun angle in Sketchup changes the sun angle here in V-Ray.

Option Load Image Vray