Outdoor standard lighting tips

This is about setting up a fast, natural looking, outdoor lighting setup without using Mental Ray.

Sunlight

Use a target spotlight for the sun -- this will help to create soft shadows (as opposed to a direct light.)

Turn on shadows, using shadow map shadow.

Increase shadow map size to 1024

Increase shadow sample size to 10

Observe shadow edges and adjust as needed.

Make the sun a very light yellow.

Light array

Now that we have the sun, we need to create a general ambient light for the scene.

Make a direct light aimed at the center of the scene.

Rotate instances (using transform coordinate center of the light target) so all lights aim at the same center.

Set the multiplier very low, for example, 0.5.

The color of the light can be a very light blue, as in the sky.

Turn on and off shadows and observe the effect.