As mentioned in this post. To create night I made a 'night time sky' jpg to use as a sky texture, otherwise it never really gets dark enough.
I use the cloudy sky background and it does okay for me...lol.. I have made other night pictures, and I noticed awhile back that some of my day and night times were reversed in the renders, but I thought it was just my settings. The picture background is dark enough for my preference, but I am not getting much of a "glow".
What index of refraction setting are you using for your glass? if it is near 1.0, then because the light won't bend the object will appear invisible.
This is the mtl file...
# Blender3D MTL File:
# Material Count: 1
newmtl Untitled_1
Ns 96.078431
Ka 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000
Kd 0.737778 0.339378 0.073778
Ks 0.422222 0.247078 0.046914
Ni 2.296000
d 0.222222
illum 2
I haven't worked much with editing mtl files, so I forget which is which, I have a cheat sheet saved as a notebook file, but I haven't used it much.
I have been lazy, and letting the 3DS or sketch up do all the mtl file making. Do you design everything in SketchUp? I only ask after importing your 3DS sconce model straight into Sweet Home, have you tried it, have a look and see what happens? 
Maybe SketchUp isn't good at exporting 3DS?
Maybe SketchUp isn't good at exporting 3DS? I don't make all of my designs in Sketch up,
but it is the easiest to use for textures. I use Blender (on a very BIG learning curve....!)and for some reason my computer or graphics card does not like AOI, it freezes sometimes when I try to render or export files. I do not like Misfit, the interface to me is odd. I make most of my files 3ds because of friends (we share alot of files) and they don' use as much hard drive space. Sketch up does have some known issues with 3ds formatting, but there are work arounds, and most of my files are imported into SH3D as DAE files. The wall scone was just one of the many files that I used as a dae file that hasn't given me trouble once I fixed the mesh problem. Have you tried the wall scone in your SH3D? Is it giving you any trouble? The glass in it is not truely transparent, so I'm not sure how other computers will compute the glass.When you ticked "Use light angle as power knob" had you rotated the light bulbs you added to the scene? I ask because they start switched off, at zero degrees, so require some rotation to produce light, around 30-40 seems about right for candle light, adjust to taste
Do you mean to rotate the light bulbs themselves in the 2d plane? I was rotating the light angle knob on the advance interface... the one for the sunlight... you notice on my picture the knob is rotated to 310 degrees, I was trying to get the render to work. But even if I rotate my bulbs in the 2d plane, the render window will act like it is about to render, but then gives me the blank gray box like above, and is waiting for me to rerender or save...
Your current project is looking interesting!
Thanks! I'm debating on the choice of siding versus brick and all that fun stuff.
Well don't I feel a little sheepish.....
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