How to create realistic lighting at night in Blender Cycles

Question

I'm modeling a simple night scene (with buildings, traffic lights, etc) to simulate you actually driving down the road. The rendered image looks like this.

The lighting in this image doesn't seem to be realistic and the building is too dark. I would want the buildings look like the one in the following image(with light coming from the building):

I tried to add light sources in the building, and make the material of the building glass as glass, the light is not visible. How do I create realistic lighting for the buildings? Thanks in advance for your reply.

. I changed the road material to be a solid color so I didn't have to worry about uploading texture images with the .blend file.

Answer 1

First of all, I noticed that your image has a pretty light-blank sky. (by which I mean that there really isn't light coming from it.) Light always comes from the sky, even at night. You can see the difference in the image you provided as a target.

You need a HDRI (high dynamic range image). these can be found quite simply by Googling HDRI maps. You can also render your own from blender, but that's a different story. If you want to use your existing sky, it'll work, but it may look weird. Change the color setting of your sky to environment.

I would also add an emission node to some of the windows. if you increase the amount of your fog glow node this'll give nice results.

Now obviously you don't want a model that took four minutes to make, but you get the gist of it. What really makes the example picture you have nice is that there are reflections off of the interior walls. This can be accomplished with a glass shader and some lights inside the building. Note that it will look better close up, worse far away, and better overall if you use a texture on the building. I used brick.