lighting

When it came to the lighting the outside of my scene wit the grass, water and windmill. I was looking for a way to make it look realistic. I remembered when i was back in college and i had to do an environment and had to find way to render an outside scene. To do this i used mental rays physical sun and sky system what gives you a really good outside lighting effect and if very easy to use as well. The only downside to this was the render time. We had Maya fur to create the grass and using the mental ray renderer and its physical sun and sky it put some of our render times up to like 2o minutes a frame and some were only 5 or minutes. I think that using mental ray and its lighting system it has giving us a really nice piece of work and i am happy that i used it to render out our project even though the time was quite insane.