realistic lighting

Hi Keith, You're image doesn't seems to have indirect lighting and the shadows are looking very hard. Do you use Select series 1? If yes, try to use a hdri as lightprobe in combination with sun. Further should I make that shadows softer and use Exterior good as render setting. Regards

Since you have very sharp shadows and are talking about Raytracing with antialias, I presume you are using a version prior to V8i. Since I do not have V8 anymore, I must do this from memory, so bear with me.
Also some suggestions to improve image quality.

#1 Lightring
Search the Bentley Select area to find a lightring created by Jerry Flynn. This is a ring with distant lights placed in a circle. One of these lights is a very bright one, replacing the solar light. The lightring works as a Light Probe as described by Louis-Paul, except that a light probe is way cooler.
Reference the lightring into your design and turn on the 'Use Lights' option in the reference dialog.
Turn off all other lights (solar, ambient, anything) in your design.
Test render to see if you like the results.
Rotate the Light Ring reference to your needs.
Alter the lights in the light ring to your needs.

#2 Particle Trace
There's a render mode called Particle Trace which you should definitly have a look at. The results and handling are different from Raytracing, so it needs some getting used to. This takes some time.

#3 Image quality
Up the amount of antialiase samples, and us Depth of field for close ups.
Also a you could turn on fog/distant cueing, to simulate the effect of details becoming vague when far away from camera. Use very moderatly though.
See if you can reduce the Moiré effect on the roofs. There's a toggle for this somewhere.

#4 Material
Make the cars stand out less. They draw attention away from a beautyful design.
In the material editor, increase the light diffusion for your building. It can improve the white, without messing with lights.

Kind regards

Ivo Blaauw

Thanks for all of the comments and suggestions. We do use V8i but we are going to download Select Series 1 (took us a while to work out what it was!) and see how that goes. The difficulty we always have is that every major release of Microstation completely changes the lighting and material modules, we just get used to working with the current system , then it all changes.....

Well, it wil not come as a surprise then... It has all changed big time.

Read this to get to know the new things.
http://communities.bentley.com/forums/thread/105703.aspx
Regards

Ivo Blaauw

I've been using SelectSeries1 this week and the results "straight from the box" are mind blowing compared to what i was capable of before! Thing is, I am only using default lighting and this tends to have an orangey tint to it. If I switch off default lighting, it goes mad and everything is way too bright. I would have hoped that default lighting would be a starting point and I could subtlely change the odd setting.

Would attach an image but I can't see how I can in this reply!!