Hold on… Lighting is represented in Diffuse and Specular. Specular lighting is critical
I’m certainly no expert, but I don’t believe there is really such thing as “specular” lighting. Specular lighting effects are really just reflections.
By the way, people keep asking about when the HDRI mapping will become part of the featureset. Well, I don’t have an inside line on what Vlado’s up to -- but his renders’ framestamp says 1.47.06.
When I say specular I mean reflection. It is all about reflection. Even diffuse lighting is about reflection. But reflecting an HDRI vs a LDRI is the key, as you will not get the specular effect from the reflection without it, especially when dealing with fresnel.
Here is the exact Debevec’s Sky probe: (62Mb)
http://graphicslab.ict.usc.edu/skyprobes/skyprobes.zip
and the explanation page:
http://graphicslab.ict.usc.edu/skyprobes/
Have fun with noise…
Gaël
wonderful…i waited a long time for that feature. i often use domelights for exterior. but working with solid colours for the light limited the effect.
thank you so much for this.
i use domelights in all animation projects and this is the best new feature ever.
MmMm Damn nice! Dreaming I can use this a lot earleir, than other ppl around 
But… I’m still dreaming 
Here is a small animation with the sky probes from the site of Paul Debevec. I had to blend the different skies to make the animation a bit longer, I suppose it would have looked much better if the skies were in 1-minute intervals
Chaos: Industry-leading design and visualization software (5 MB)
Best regards,
Vlado
Congratulations Vlado !
It’s absolutly good !
Gaël
Vlado, this looks great. I cant wait to test this out.
Now all we need is an hdri camera that is cheap!
brilliant Vlado!
would it be possible for you to post the scene so we could see how it was set up?
Very nice! Will we have any control over the area shadows? Right now they look a little too sharp.
Blur the hdri map would probably do it.
/Thomas
Hi vlado,
Are you also adding this feature to regular vraylights? I would like to map an avi to a vraylight, to simulate a tv screen.
That would be nice!
Another hack to make the regular vraylights look like it emit maps is to put a mapped plane (self illuminated) or a VrayLightMtl behind the vray lights and set it to skylight portal…
Wouldn’t that be the same as just using only the mapped plane, with output of the bitmap to for example 5? That’s what I’m doing now, but then all tha light is GI light, no raytraced area shadows.
Ok I just tried it, works very well! :!:
It looks great - can’t wait to try it either.
@Vlado: Interesting rendering. Also nice to see how rendertimes differ between high-contrast and low-contrast images. That’s as expected and nothing new, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen this so explicitely.
Thanks for that preview.
To get back to the discussion about the resolution of HDRI’s: Isn’t the prurpose of very large HDRI’s that you can use them for both lighting and as a background that doesn’t blur too much? So far most HDRI’s I have seen were too small and just looked unnaturally blured when used as a background in the render (some people want to use the images as both background ‘environment’ and light source)
In this respect they make sense I think. For pure lighting it’s probably faster to use a low-res version. If the shader would do an automatic (user adjustable) downsampling before starting the render it would be actually very convenient and a nice time saver, as it would eliminate the need to handle two separate texture files (the high-res and the low-res version) and do the downsampling manually (in HDRShop or Photoshop or whatever).
Stefan
For the purposes of importance sampling, the dome light presamples the HDRI to a specified resolution… so that would eliminate the need for a separate blurred version of the map.
Best regards,
Vlado