Question How to light up an outside scene realistically?

[trashmaneatsgarbage]

Best way to orientate lights to make an out side scene look like its realistically lit? When I try to light up a scene with either a subscene or my own lights the models look overexposed or shadows don't looks realistic, I am trying to use a directional light but having trouble making it took realistic. I try to use LUTs to make it look better but need help with the lighting orientations.

Thanks in advance.

 

[MacGruber]

There is only so much you can do about shadow quality, but at least you can get the rest right:

1. Import your own sky, e.g. some HDRI from https://polyhaven.com/ (see SkyMagic tutorial on what to do)
2. Place a Directional light in the scene so that it matches the position of the sun in your sky. Potentially a few Point lights as helpers.
3. Save a version of your scene with only the major objects, like just the floor and major static objects. Remove all characters and small objects, anything that moves in your scene. Keep the things you can to see in GI reflections
4. Use SkyMagic Exporter to create a cubemap screenshot of your scene, 256 resolution is fine here.
5. Reimport that cubemap as custom sky. Use it for GI only, turn off "Show Skybox", because you still have your custom sky imported in step 1.

This way you get light that actually (somewhat) matches the rest of the scene. The brighter a scene or if you have shiny objects (glass, latex, leather, polished metal/plastic) the more important this becomes.

More details here:

Customized global illumination with SkyMagic - Guides -

SkyMagic is a plugin included in the MacGruber Essentials package. It allows you to bake and import custom global illumination into VaM. It can be used in a number of different ways: Bake custom reflections within VaM to have global illumination...

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