Add More Recent Skylight Models

[Richard7666]

Yes, hdri domes are great when they correspond to the look you're after. But if it's not the case, there is not much you can do. Some color correction, a reasonable change in vertical rotation to bring the sun up or down, maybe brighten the sun in photoshop and that's all.
But hey, these are only photographs after all -with many exposures within, sure- but still just photographs. If you need more flexibility you should explore other methods.

Using a vray sun+sky in conjunction with mapped couds would give much more freedom to position the sun directly within 3ds max.

Another option is to render your own HDR domes. But then you cannot make adjustements directly inside 3ds max. I recently started experimenting this method with terragen and it's giving good preliminary results.
I cannot post current projects, but here is a quick and dirty example of an hdri dome rendered in terragen with standard settings, only changing the sun angle decreasing from 45 to 0 degrees :



BTW : does eon ozone do the same thing directly in 3ds max ? Never had the time to try it.

That looks excellent. V-ray having something like that inside 3ds Max would be great.

[theedge]

That looks excellent. V-ray having something like that inside 3ds Max would be great.

That would imply developing a full fledged procedural sky system generator. If Planetside Software could develop a subset of terragen with only the sky system and make a plugin from that it could be great. That's what ozone already does but it doesn't seem to be much used.

[Richard7666]

Yeah, I should have phrased it as "having something like that inside 3ds Max that V-ray can use".

I will have a look into Ozone.