VrayLight (Dome) affecting entire scene

[Neilg]

Can you go into the vray properties of the dome light (right click menu) and exclude it from GI?

[dlparisi]

You can't exclude lights from GI, only geometry. You can set the geometry to not receive GI but then the objects don't get any GI, even from reflected surfaces.

[Morbid Angel]

I think this is only prone to vray Dome light. I could be wrong though. I think vlado purposely made this work this way to speed things up when rendering with dome light and gi.
And due to nature of ray tracing and they way things work in current renderers like vray or mental ray for that matter, you cannot specifically exclude objects in such way unfortunately.

[dlparisi]

Another odd thing about the dome light is if you check it as a skylight portal (I realize that doesn't really make sense to do though) it will behave very oddly. Even if the scene has no other lights in it, the dome light will still provide illumination. Adding to the weirdness - that brightness is linked to the domelight color and brightness even though those are disabled when "portal" is selected.

[vlado]

The dome light is not designed to work as a light portal, so it will look odd. The portal options should be disabled in that case and I'll make a note to fix it.

About the original issue in the thread, I don't immediately see a solution for it, other than not using GI, or splitting the rendering in two passes for direct lighting and for GI.

Best regards,
Vlado