Scene Lighting

When doing test renders to see what the animation will actually look like, i have had issues trying to get the lighting to be just right and not produce too much or too little shadow and the overal brightness of the scenes. To fix this, i tried different combinations of light sources to make the scene just right. However when doing this, a problem i encountered was that the test render image was much brighter than the saved test render image.

The first image below is a the test render that shows up within maya and is incredibly bright due to the lights that are placed in the scene. This made the colours really bright and was misleading when compared to what the actual scene looks like when one frame is rendered.

 The second picture is what the final rendered image of the scene looked like with the same settings as the the image above. This image however is really dark and many colours are too dark to recognise from the shadows.

This image however is almost perfect in my opionion as the colours are still bright but they arent so bright that they are almost washed out like the first image.  This result was achieved by adding an extra ambient light and placing it above the scene. This apporach i feel gives just enough light to make the darker colours different from each other such as the road and pavement.