First render scene, sky and performance questions

TheMageWilliam

I effectively have 3 questions here, but they are all related to a scene I am about to build, I have rendered a few test items, and followed along with some tutorials, but this will be my first real render.

First is the sky. My scene is in a living room, but it does have a window, and will I need to do anything to render the sky, or will I need to install a sky scene? Not sure how to do that, though I found a sky and cloud addon I am interested in, but not sure if I need it for this.

Next, while I only need a living room, I purchased a whole house. Would it be better to remove parts of the house that won't be in the scene, or will it really not have much of an impact?

If it matters I'll throw in my computer stats. 1080 GTX card, running the studio driver, i-7 6700k CPU @ 4 GHz, also from 2.5 years ago with 32 GB memory, all from about 2.5 years ago. Running Windows 64-bit. (Dual monitor mentioned for no reason.)

And the third question, I see the load all on the house, not sure if it's possible to just load one or two floors instead of the whole house? 

Item here: https://www.daz3d.com/modern-house-2-bundle

fred9803

You can delete the outside stuff with that set but not individual rooms. You can load just the furniture for the room you want.

You can put a background on a plane to see through the window/s instead of using a sky or sun. Maybe use a Ghost Light to get light coming through the window/s and also light the room.

I'd move the whole house down so that the Living Room is at ground level so your characters come in at the right height. Create a primative sphere at 0,0,0 in front of your default camera where your character/s will load and move the whole house (and not your camera) to get the view you want. Otherwise the things load will have to be moved from 0, 0 ,0 to where your camera is which is a total pain. I hope this helps a bit. Cheers.