Alternative to Sun Light?

[wickedfool]

I was hoping that instead of directing the sun, it would be nice to just artificially fill the scene with light and use ambient occlusion to create subtle shadows. With floorplans without a ceiling, I find that the sun light is extreme in the upper position but the shadows are decent. In lower settings the lighting is better but the shadows are extremely long. Having a scene light that can be color toned and adjusted globally would offer a different kind of light while still using generic ambient occlusion to produce some shadowing in the areas that connect like the walls and floors.

Is anyone aware of any plugins that remove the need to move the Sun and place manual lights in each room to produce a quickly/easily adjustable lighting across whole floorplan? Thanks in advance.

[Daniels118]

When rendering at the 2 highest quality levels you can set the time of the day, just set it at midnight to hide the sun. There is a checkbox to automatically add a ceiling light to each room, so you don't need to add them manually unless you want them positioned at specific points. Also, when rendering at these quality levels, the rendering is implemented with raytracing, so ambient occlusion is not applicable, it just works out of the box.

[Kaka88]

I've just been thinking about it recently and setting everything up manually. Thanks for the tip!