Thanks for your reply numerobis...

The advantage (for me) of the two pass technique was that I couldn't duplicate the results I was looking for even by bumping up the interior lighting to an unreasonably high wattage (as you said), it didn't work. So really this was my shortcut to do it. The EV14 was to get the building exterior bright enough that I could tweak it in photoshop, and using the HDR image for illumination it isn't very bright anyway. If you set it low, you end up with an extremely dark building.

The multi-light you refer to doesn't exist in the plug-in for SU as far as I know. I love SU for it's quick ability to produce massing models, but for rendering I was looking for more. Given that the Maxwell plug-in was free it was easy to experiment and the upgrade to the production renderer was only $99, which was a lot less than the other solutions I was finding. Are there other biased solutions that would achieve an interior glow look?

It would be great to see how you or others have achieved an interior glow look for architectural renderings with a minimal cost outlay.

cheers...

I'm fairly new to the Maxwell plug-in for SketchUp and I've been trying to create evening renderings of the homes I design. I put together a short video on the basic technique I've been using.

It's a three step process:

First step: render the scene without any environmental illumination at an EV 4. I assign an emitter to the entire floor surface with the wattage around 650 Watts +/- just to make it quick. You can spend more time realistically lighting the scene if you'd like, I was just looking for a glow from the interior.

Second step: render the scene with an HDR image as the environmental illumination and an EV 14 +/-

Third step: I usually camera match a photo in SketchUp to be sure I have the perspective correct when I render out the model. But you can select any image to use as your background and overlay the first rendering with the second and place that in the background image. I add fog (using a gradient adjustment layer and a transformed rendered layer of clouds) along with silhouettes (people, trees, birds, etc.) for detail in the final images.

Does anyone have any other techniques they've used? I found no matter how intense I made the interior lights with an active environment the rendering engine weighted the global illumination so high I wasn't able to get a decent interior glow.