Sunny Day/High Noon rendering. Advice.

[DanSHP]

The architectural visualizations you see online are predominantly moody, low sun atmospheric pieces of art. You rarely come across (decent) well balanced high noon imagery. The issue with that in the real world, client's do not always want the moody bombastic visual. From time to time they want a professional, high noon sunny day image.

In my experience, producing a balanced convincing and realistic visual for this time of day is very challenging. You generally have less contrast and a reduced colour range to play with (especially in city environments).

Something that has stuck in the back of my head since starting out, was an online interview I came across with one of the guys at MIR and this topic came up. I'm paraphrasing here but when touching on the subject it went along the lines of this....

"Anyone can produce a golden hour image. The real skill lies in producing a high noon sunny day plaza visual..."

Pretty accurate in my opinion.

Anyone have an opinion on this? Similar experiences?

Cheers

[glorybound]

99% of my exteriors are mid-day shots.

http://bobby-parker.com/exterior-rendering

[MANUEL_MOUSIOL]

Wouldn't sunny high noon mean more contrast and brighter colours?
what do you see as the difficult part?
I haven't done a rendering of that kind myself...
Obviously there is a dynamic range issue, but good tonemapping will surely take care of it, no?

[squintnic]

just use a sunny HDRI or vray sun sky and learnt to do post...

those super atmospheric childlike renders with kites and nasty foreground people are quite prevalent online in the 'render bro' world but far less so in the professional world....dont be swayed by the work of non professionals
dbox do a good line in super high end mid day shots that still retain atmosphere

[Neilg]

dbox do a good line in super high end mid day shots that still retain atmosphere

too kind!

Daytime images are no more difficult than ones with low sun, nobody does them for personal work because they arent as sexy.

The only time something is difficult is when you dont have any experience doing it. I'd almost certainly struggle with the MIR style apocalyptic thunderstorm images but I know with good photographic reference and 20+ images of practice and refinement under my belt i'd be able to compete. likewise someone thats done 20 sunset images and no noon work is going to be better at the ones they've done more of.

[DanSHP]

99% of my exteriors are mid-day shots.

http://bobby-parker.com/exterior-rendering

Yes but, the type of schemes you work on are vastly different and in sat in a completely different context. We primarily deal with inner city residential and office schemes. There is little vegetation (maybe a few trees) and at high noon little shadow so not much contrast, in my experience you cannot rely on Vray to produce a good looking render in such circumstances, it requires tons of post!

Your imagery has both vegetation and shadows in abundance which IMO makes for a more convincing image.

[MANUEL_MOUSIOL]

Could you give examples of what you find troublesome and examples of what you would like to achieve?
So the sun always has to be aiming straight down?

[Vizioen]

Yeah, about the pieces of art / moody dusky / nighttime / cloudy visuals. Those are indeed a hell of a lot easier to create than a highly realistic midday sunny shot. Yet 90% of my work is sunny, at clients requests. Not a lot of clients here that want the overly photoshopped moody ones. Those only apply to very architectural buildings (musea, malls, ..) Developers of some low(er) budget apartments or houses don't want to depict their projects in yet another film noir setting or whatnot, that's not going to sell good in any case.

As to how I tackle it: some basic rules of photography (for instance avoid having the sun straight behind you), good shaders, (avoid using materials with diffuse values over 180, EVERYTHING is reflective,..). Use good HDRI's (Peter Guthries are good ones as everyone knows) but even the VraySun can take you a long way already and always use realistic camera settings (preferably EV values so you know with one number you're in the right ballpark).

I also remember the MIR interview and the comment about creating a good sunny, I tend to point my fellow artists, that want to create those moody images, to that particular interview to convince them to try and create a good sunny image too.

[^Lele^]

I was checking properties of late (as a game of sorts), and the southern in Italy i moved, the more those pictures at high noon looked like *ugly* renders.
Flat, seemingly uninteresting.
Also, the colors turned definitely towards deeper reds and blues, all the more so as one approached the coast.
I found detectable differences also in areas which had radically different daytime exposures (say, sitting east of big mountains, versus sitting west of them.), not to mention based on the amounts of vegetation.
Last but not least, the atmospheric medium adds to hues and saturation: a leafy valley in a wet area will carry definite blue shades suspended mid-air, and contribute to scattering of direct sunlight, thereby reducing contrast.
On a coast, by the sea, under windy conditions, there's hardly an atmosphere to talk about, and the pictures all look stark and contrasty.

Principling lighting is still one of the hardest tasks at hand, regardless of the tools used (well, provided they allow for variation, ofc.).
I'm very glad it's what i do for a living!

[MANUEL_MOUSIOL]

Could you please give me a link to this legendary interview? Thanks!

[Vizioen]

Could you please give me a link to this legendary interview? Thanks!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPaafinZvyY

[^Lele^]

wait, what? ^^

[Vizioen]

Haha race aside he could pull that off.

[^Lele^]

Yeah, anything not exactly as wished, they'll fix in post.
Like sunny renders! ^^

[DanSHP]

Could you give examples of what you find troublesome and examples of what you would like to achieve?
So the sun always has to be aiming straight down?

I'll try get something together some point this weeks.