Making Night

I am doing a night, alley scene for a project, and i can't seem to get a realistic looking night. I was trying to do it with Maya's physical sun and sky, but can't seem to make it work? does anyone have particular settings to do this or have another way of accomplishing it?

Thanks.

Most physical sky models used in current renderers are designed towards daylight. When you try to use them for night lighting they break down and give incorrect results (as you noticed).

Solution: Do it manually (its not 'that' hard) or use an HDRI.

I've seen some updated models being presented at siggraph (that do night time and even simultation of the stars if i remember correctly), but i havent seen these implemented in software yet...

thanks. I'll give that a shot and see how it goes.

Chritters is right. IBL is better for pretty much everything, but probably not going to solve the problem.

Assuming your alley is narrow with tall buildings, you probably aren't getting a proper representation of "environment lighting" due to the lack of direct illumination.

Under both circumstances (Ps&s and IBL) you may find that a portal light will be needed to get the right amount of ambient light into the depths of your alleyway.

Don't forget the power of postproduction/grading when doing night scenes, or any scene for that matter! Check out the difference between the last two pictures (Fig. 16 & Fig. 17) of this tutorial. When you work in a linear workflow, you can do a lot in postproduction to get the look the way you want:

tutorial:
http://www.floze.org/2008/07/six-tu...e-part-iii.html

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