background not rendering

[paulison]

Hi all,

Ive got a city apartment job where ive had to map the background onto a sphere around the project (I dont usually do it this way, but need to because of the proximity of neighbouring buildings) but have a couple of problems I cant figure out:

1. the background isnt rendering.

Ive tried flipping the normals so the background displays in the viewport but it still doesnt render out. Also checked the clipping planes set on the camera.

2. Interiors are rendering very bright and theres no shadows/ poor GI

The lights are all vray planes/sphere with a multipier of 20-30 and direct lights with shadow map + IES light. This rendered fine in another project. Maybee enclosing the scene in a sphere to map the background on is effecting the skylight? how do i get around this?

Thanks for any suggestions. Ive tried many things but am running out of time (normally i'd eventually figure this out myself or find a solution in this forum somewhere)

The only other thing I can think of is maybee it has something to do with the apartment being on the 20th floor? All of the lights etc are in the correct place but it is a fair distance from 0,0,0.

Will post an image only if REALLY needed. hope the description of my problem is enough though

Thanks,

Paul

[jacksc02]

hey dude,
could you use a plane instead of the sphere?

It would be great to see an image to clarify what is going on. email it to me if you want

[paulison]

hey jack,

I can try a plane next if i cant get the sphere working. I tried adding a shell modifier to the sphere but still no good

if a plane works its obviously something to do with the shere object the background is mapped onto right? will try that shortly

thanks,

Paul

[jacksc02]

i think the sphere might be killing the environment light. You could always try to remove the sphere from being visable to gi

[Da_elf]

yeah. in vray properties there is an option saying "visable to gi" you will want to turn that off. then there is also the mater of the sphere. is your image maped onto it a self illuminated material? also whats the size of the image being used on the sphere? i used to have problems sometimes with images as backgrounds when they are really high res. sometimes id run out of ram and the 1st thing to stop rendering would be my bitmaps. howeveri havent had that happen in ages. maybe it was just something with the old max