Help me with this night exterior

I urgently need to know what is the best preset, or in fact best process in detail, to have a good quality big scale project's night shot..
After completing the model in sketchup, I did put some spot lights, some diffused lights, and some emitter surfaces for all the lighting you can see in the attached render.

Now the issue is, the landscape mainly, and the total image overall is not looking realistically lighted for an actual night scene.

I simply deleted the sun, made the sky as pure black. Just 2 low omni lights placed at distance above, to light up the total project dimly.
The brackground you see is not anything applied in kerky. Its simply a jpeg, pasted in a plane and placed over there in sketchup itself.

And finally I used preset 10. PM+caustic+AA

AND I KNOW ITS A BAD RESULT.

Please guide me on this.

[Fletch]

emitter materials when rendered with pmfg render settings like you chose will slow it down a lot.
avoid them if using pmfg

use Thin Glass instead of dielectric glass on the balcony railings.

don't kill the sun and sky, instead choose an evening setting (turn off all geom. except your walls for quicker test renders, and try different sky settings to get a nice evening shot.) turn sun power to .1 instead of default 5 or whatever it is. turn power for sky down as well.

assume power of 1 for spot light = 100w bulb and set all lights to appropriate powers. if need brighter render use exposure adjustment / tone mapping adjustment in the render dialog or in post pro.

I'd render with MLT. It handles many lights and light emitting sufaces best and with most realistic results with most materials.

night vegetation... very difficult. good 3D models will be most important. good materials next most important.

color of lights is very important, should not be white. most lights are not pure white. look it up - light color - on your fav. search engine.

render alpha mask image and post-pro your background image in. trying to render it directly in the background like you are doing looks bad, and will likely never look right. post-pro is much faster.

Thanks for your reply Fletch.
You are of course right about a better result using MLT. But you know, specially for night scenes with lots of lights, I have seen it takes really at least 150 passes to overcome the grains and have an acceptable clear render. Thats minimum I mean. The more clear the better. So I suppose actually 250 to 300 passes will be actually called Good.

SO the render time is a factor in MLT.

Can you help on a point though?

In the material library, all the grass materials are available as MODELS, which should be imported and spread with instance brush.
Is there any way/ trick to use them as simple material? I mean applying it over a texture as whole? Just like other materials, e.g, metal and glasses?

[Fletch]

killing all sky light by making it black will make MLT night exteriors render very slowly. It renders direct light much faster than indirect, and the sun/sky provide the direct light. Better to just decrease their strength as I mentioned before instead of killing them off completely.

speed also depends on machine being used to render.

You should use a seamless grass texture applied to all terrain where you want grass, then scatter the grass model using the scatter brush on top of that texture, this gives best results. So, if you downloaded grasses from KT's site in the past, look in those mat folders to see if they contain a good seamless texture image.

Hey Fletch, that sounds really interesting, if anything like that scatter brush exists. I simply dont know where to find it or how to use it.

I hope you are saying something different than the instancing brush? I use it myself..
But in instance brushing for grass models (which themselves are small blocks only), I have to set up lots of parameters like distance, population, etc to spread the grass throughout a vast area of land.
Even then, always the spreading does not come smooth and even.

Thats why I wanted to know a way, which will spread the grass models (those downloaded from KT site) over a large area having a single texture, evenly.

[Fletch]

instancing brush, scatter brush... same thing. sorry for technical error with terminologies.
playing with the settings is the only way to achieve best results, or to drive distribution with black/white/grey texture.