The first part of the article here

03.05 Adjusting the night scene

Activate now the render in real time and establish a resolution of 900 × 506 .

Activate the Material Override option and start the interactive render.

In the Asset Editor, inside the lighting window, it deactivates the Sunlight .

In the window Settings ( Settings ) in the dropdown Environment ( Environment ) option disables Fund ( Background ).

Put the color now a little darker and the intensity value put it in 2 then stable a color of what for you would be a sky with light at nightfall.

You will see in the Frame Buffer window the changes you have been making.

Then, stop the render. We are going to add some artificial lights below.

03.06 Adding directional lights (Spot Lights)

By adding a light to a single component, that light will be added to all the components of the scene. We will use this to add specific V-Ray lights to the lamps that hang from the ceiling of the scene. Select a hanging light and edit it.

Click on the type of directional light ( Spot Light ) inside the VRay lighting bar.

Place it in the center of the lamp and you will see how it is copied in all the other components of the scene.

To finish editing the component, right-click once and select Close component and repeat to select Close group.

03.07 Adding IES and Sphere Lights (Sphere Lights)

Let's now add some IES lights, click on the IES light icon in the VRay lighting bar.

Navigate with the file explorer until you find the 10.IES file that is inside the tutorial file pack.

Click now to place the object that represents the IES light in the scene next to the bookshelf.

Make one or two copies of this light with which you will obtain a very good result of aesthetically speaking lighting.

The kitchen area could use general lighting. Navigate to a better view of the kitchen.

click on the type of light Sphere (Sphere Light) in the lighting bar.

Place it near the ceiling to illuminate this part of the house.

03.08 Adjusting the lighting settings

Now go back to the original scene by clicking on the top RenderView_00 tab and start the render in real time.

We will focus first on the IES lights. To isolate the IES lights, the other lights in the scene can be temporarily disabled. In the Lighting section of the Asset Editor , select the Directional Light ( Spot Light ) and expand the configuration. Disable the Sport Light and the Spherical Light .

Now let's render a part of the rendering window, select the Render Region icon and draw a rectangle in the area where the IES lights are displayed.

Now select the type of IES light, this type of light has the lighting information within its configuration but to get a greater effect of this light we need to modify it so we click on " Override Intensity " and we will set a value of 4000 for that these lights have a little more presence.

Now define a region of render of the image to viaulizar the light of the kitchen.

Give the spherical light a warmer tone.

And give it an intensity of 100 .

If necessary, enlarge the render region a bit and then select the Spot Light and activate it.

Select the Light Spot Light again and activate it, open the light point configuration and where we can see the parameters Decayand Penumbra Falloff , change the value from Decay to Inverse to square ( Inverse Square ) so that the light decreases as it is moves away from the starting point, also changes the Penumbra Falloff to Smooth Cubic .

The scene becomes a little dimmer as a result. We have to change our intensity a little to account for the natural decomposition of light. First we set the Units and change them to  Radiant Power (W) and that gives us too much brightness with a value of 30.

Lower the intensity to 8 .

Now displays the option cone angle ( Cone Angle ) and increase it to 1.8 for a wider cone in this type of lights. The penumbra angle ( Penumbra Angle ) softens the light at the edges of the cone so it is better to set a value of 0.8 to achieve a more natural light effect.

Try some regions to see the contributions of light to the scene. In the chair, notice that the shadows are quite sharp.

Change the Radius of the Shadow ( Shadow Radius ) to 1 to add softness.

When you like it, disable the render region in the Frame Buffer to update the entire image. Put an amber tone on the directional lights ( Spot Light ) in its Color parameter .

You will see that a little color is good for a lot.

We are going to do the same with the Spherical Light of the kitchen.

This is a general light in a corner that we do not see directly, use a dim light and no accessories as this may make sense.

03.09 Night rendering configuration

For the render and put a resolution of 1280 × 720

Disable the Interactive and Progressive render and set the Quality to High ( High )

Now disable the " Material Override " and after about 35 minutes (depends on the team) you will have something similar to this.

03.10 Color Correction and Lens Effects in the Night Render

To give the final touches you can do it with your image or you can load the one in the tutorial file pack, you just have to load the file called IL_Night_01.vrimg .

Click Show correction controls in the Frame Buffer window.

Start by adjusting the Exposure.

Balance of Targets

Then adjust the richness of the colors with Saturation.

Then, add a little life with the Color Balance.

And to get some impact we modified the Curve.

When you are satisfied with your own corrections, right click on the background of the Frame Buffer window and select Blackfor the background. Click now on the Globals bar ... and you can save the color corrections. Let's now load the sample color samples that are in the tutorial file pack.

Load the file night_CC_01.vccglb and then the night_CC_02.vccglb to see a warmer version of this scene.

Close the color corrections and open the lens effects.

Activate the effect of glow, shape, size and weight as seen in the image.

Activate the glare ( Glare effect ) and mark in Type a Glare type from camera params.

Mark the Weight ( Weight ) around 11.3

Notice how lighting improves with this effect.

The lights in the upper image are not typical light points but emissive materials but that will be the object of another tutorial.

Do tests with different effects to get different results.