dome light and background image

[metroberlin]

i render a scene without gi but with the really great domelight. is it possible to let the dome light produce the ambient of a background image (f.e. a hdri map) instead of a solid colour ? anyone experiences with ? thanks...

[vlado]

Not yet; it only works with a single color.

Best regards,
Vlado

[tammo]

i have also used dome light with great success in animations with moving objects.
i had a scene with a car racing through a very large city.
i could not light the scene with my standard method (lots of shadow map spots) because of the huge size of the city.
the domelight worked perfectly: 20 subdivs with adaptive QMC AA
rendertime about 12 mins per frame PAL, no GI flicker.
it would be great if you could load bitmaps or hdrs to control the lighting.

[metroberlin]

yes, i also have a big city animation and dome light is perfect for it. most of the exterior shots don´t need gi at all when you lighten them by hand. and to create depth i used the dirt shader in a seperated pass or now the dome light !!! fast, clean and very useful

[archcanvas]

Never try it with VRAY, but, doesn't the normal way (extracting 6 images at different exposure settings, and putting them on different bitmap slots) work with VRAY? I experienced it with scanline and other renderers before, it works even though using a HDR image.

[paulison]

im trying out the dome light now..ery exciting stuff


when i render with GI and untick max ovveride for reflection and background etc i get a reflection of the background image used in Max's environment settings (kind of weird)

When i set the multiplier of the dome light to 1 and use max overide for GI environment this looks good but very bright but is this the correct setting? I take it the HDRI image isnt being considered in the lighting?

I find 32 subs on the light with mult 1 looks good. What are some good settings other people have found for using Dome light only for lighting?

[TRGraphics]

Paul, I think the whole point of using the domelight is so that you don't have to use GI for exterior scenes. It is also very slow if you use GI with the domelight.

Tony

[RErender]

actually Vlado said before that he created it to use with lightcache (first and second maybe?) for an animation.

[TRGraphics]

I did not know that. I will have to give it a try. I always assumed it was for non GI use. Most people I've seen that use it, don't use GI with it.

[paulison]

yep same here i thought it was a way of faking GI (which you can use it for) but for a current project im working on I found that when using material overide and domelight with GI it was actually very fast in .14 and looks quite nice aside from the fact of the HDRI not influencing the lighting (correct me if im wrong here)

the lightcache for primary and secondary + dome light sounds very interesting though. I'm going to try this now and see if its faster/ looks better than IR+QMC + domelight...

so if you can do the lightcache for the whole animation in 1 hit and save the file, then render the whole animation out then i can see this being a good quick method. When I use Lightcache on its own though it looks very blotchy...trying now with more samples