Relight an architectural
render to dusk.
AI relighting is a class of generative image-to-image transformation that takes a daytime architectural render and produces the same view at dusk, golden hour, or blue hour — warmer interior pendants, deep gradient sky, longer shadows — without going back to the 3D model. In Renovato this lives as preset L.01 (Day → Dusk), routed automatically across GPT Image, Nano Banana, and Seedream depending on the scene.
What relighting actually changes
A daylight render carries hard edges, neutral white balance, and shallow contrast — fine for a daylight visualisation, weak for cinematic appeal. Relighting to dusk replaces the sun with warm low-angle accent, lifts the sky to a deep blue gradient, and turns interior fixtures on so they read as glowing rectangles. The geometry doesn't change — only the lighting, the white balance, and the small bits of the render that should be self-illuminating after dark.
A traditional Vray relight requires re-rendering the model with new lights and an updated environment dome. AI relighting skips that step: the model is the existing image, the "render" is a generative inference that preserves the architectural composition while restating the lighting.
How to do it in Renovato
- Drop your daylight render into the atlas as a source node.
- Drag the L.01 Day → Dusk preset onto the canvas and connect the source.
- In the inspector, dial the strength slider (defaults to 0.85 — try 0.7 for a softer transition, 1.0 for a full blue-hour mood).
- Click Generate. Cost: 2 credits. Wall-clock: 6-12 seconds. The output appears as a downstream node, ready for any further preset.
For a more aggressive twilight, chain L.02 Golden hour first, then L.01 — the warm pendants from the first preset survive the dusk pass, giving a more lived-in feel.
When to use each preset
- L.01 Day → Dusk — calm, blue-shifted, no direct sun visible. Best for residential exteriors, competition boards, hero-frame exterior twilight shots.
- L.02 Golden hour — warm, low-angle direct sun, long shadows. Best for marketing renders, approach views, anything that needs warmth on the facade.
- L.03 Overcast — diffuse, neutral, no shadows. Best for technical / planning renders where you want the materials to read clearly without lighting drama.
Stacking on top of relight
Relight outputs are first-class nodes in the atlas, so downstream presets read from them automatically. Common follow-ups:
- + E.01 Add people— figures on the terrace at dusk read as "life in the building".
- + F.01 Volumetric fog — a soft layer of ground-level mist for cinematic mood.
- + V.01 Walkthrough — animate the dusk exterior into a 5-second slow zoom for client meetings.
What relighting can't do
Relighting is a generative inference, not a physics simulation. It will get the gross lighting state right (warm pendants on, blue sky, shadow direction) but it won't produce the precise photometric output that a physically-correct Vray relight would. For a competition board where the physics has to be defensible — daylight study compliance, glare analysis, lux measurements — go back to your renderer.
For everything else (marketing, client review, portfolio, social), AI relight is fast enough to enable variants you wouldn't otherwise produce.
