A simple Heliodon setup

Let's assume you have a building site and now you want to do some outside rendering. To give it an optimistic, comfortable mood we want a lot of sunlight in our scene. To do so we set the time to July or August. The time of the day will adjust the angle of our light coming into the scene. If you want longer shadows set something in the morning or evening, for shorter shadows we need something at noon. Artlantis will now calculate the sun direction automatically, but you can change it manually in 2D view (as in the screenshot). I suggest setting the direction of the Heliodon to go with the camera view and then to slide a little.

The first input box with the sun/cloud icon adjusts the direct light. The ( ) radiocity box underneath sets the diffuse or indirect light. Theoretically there is no need to check the radiocity box, but I recommend using it in order to soften you image and to give it a warmer appeal. To achieve a mid-summer coloring set the radiocity color to a very bright yellow, for example RGB (255, 255, 240).

Using Freznel Water for glass

What is glass? It has almost no color, it reflects it's environment and it reflects light. That's why I use a very bright blue as the basic glass color (RGB 245, 255, 255) and a tone similar to the sky color for the reflection. The normal shader is fine with most *exterior* rendering setups.

The problem is that often glass is not equally thick resulting in a wavy reflection. Because of that I recommend using the Freznel Water shader. It takes a little longer to render of course, but unless you have consecutive layers of glass you won't notice on faster machines. Find my settings on the left. The result will look as shown in the screenshot.