Well this is a exterior lighting tutorial showing how to set up the vray sun with the vray physical camera, and you will see some material setup for future reference.

Exterior lighting is pretty easy, but what makes an exterior looks good is the environment that you put in the scene, i normally do not create exterior scenes because it is not easy make great looking trees that you can share, but i tried with this one.

The modeling was pretty straight forward, box modeling, extrude and things like that, i will do a tutorial just for modeling structures, for lighting i used Vray Sun and Vray Sky, because this is a physical solutionand will gives you a nice lighting, let me show you the setting and position of the sun:

This position of the sun will gives you a nice yellowish color and a more softer lighting.

I used the vray physical camera, because it gives you more control about the lighting affects the scene, it is pretty important to find the perfect exposure for you lighting, make some test and look for reference about what kind of lighting you want your for scene, let me show you the vray physical camera settings:

I added some boxes with pictures of real buildings in the front and back of my main building set to have a more natural feeling of a complete environment, let me show you an image of what i did:

Also of my tree i did some vray proxies and put it around, some are in the front of the scene because i was not looking for a plain lighting in the front of the buildings. Also for giving a extra detail i added some wires in the street.

About materials, the scene have some nice materials with simple but effective setup to work good with the lighting, let me show you some of them:

The Render Setup, was simple but fast, with this render setup you will have exteriors in minutes (Depends of the resolution, lighting and material setup) in this case let me show you:

And with the final render i did some post production like a Lens Flare, Color Balance, Sharpen, Brightness and Contrast, Chromatic Aberration.