When I turn on viewport lighting and shading, the viewport is always much darker then the render. It gives a general idea of where lighting highlights and shadows will be, but it is really useless in terms of getting an overall feeling of the lit scene.
Would it help to adjust the camera settings so the viewport and rendering match as closely as possible and then adjust the lighting to suit? That just alot more work than simply being able to adjust camera settings to brighten up the scene.
Exactly - the viewport lighting is very simple and won’t take into account things like GI, colour mapping, area lights, inverse square falloff and so on. Low res test renders or Vray RT are your only options - vray RT is going to be a serious productivity boost in that sense.
Ok, I will use RT in the viewport. My understanding is that RT doesn’t use GI caching, but computes brute force for primary and secondary bounces. Won’t this generate results that make it hard to compare to what an actual render would look like?
The results will end up being the same (or similar to a large extent), since the same quantity (GI) is being calculated. Just the methods for calculation are different.
As for the viewport, perhaps it needs some exposure control assigned to look good.