night rendering

[scrimski]

Which program/which renderer?

[Sandking]

I use Blender with Kerkythea now but app doesn't matter to me as much as technique.

[scrimski]

It surely does, posting links to Vray or mr tutorials won't help you much.
Read this
http://www.itchy-animation.co.uk/light.htm

[ElecHeadMatt]

Currently working on a night time city scene so if technique is all thats important to you, here's some methods I took.

Determine the color of your night sky first and set up a super dim bounce light to cast that color, either by final gather/GI or with an area light. The catch is going to be getting to proper balance between too bright and too dark, so take some time with that one and don't be afraid to go back and work on it as you add more lights.

Not to say its not equally important during a daylight scene, but you should have a really strong grasp of color theory and composition, because the majority of your lighting in the scene will need to come from traditional point and spot lights and these lights will greatly affect the way your scene is composed. Pay attention to things like color temperature and complimentary lighting colors, harsh fluorescent green/blue street lights to soft orange window light for instance.

Be also sure to have some lights specifically for casting only specular light. If you look at movies like Fight Club, a lot of the scenes lack a lot of fill light and leave it up to specular highlights to outline objects and make them stand out. Look at a ton of reference and maintain a critical eye of things, night scenes are friggin' hard.

You can take a look at my project page/dev blog for some extra notes I've put down on it:

http://mattburdette.com/studio2

Hope that helps!

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