Hi, I have a scene where I have two dome lights - one for lighting and one for background and reflections. So far so good, but on render I have two shadows (see pic).
Its caused by specular, so I tried to fix that by tick Affect Specular on dome light with Affect Diffuse (the one which is used for lighting and its invisible for background) and untick Affect Specular on the other one (which I wanna use for reflections and background).
When I do that, second shadow is gone, but I see wrong dome in reflections even I didnt change affect reflection.
One more thing, its weird that I have to enable both Affect Specular and Affect Reflections to actually see the reflections on glass. When I enable only Affect Reflections, reflections are not visible.
I dont hide/unhide one of the dome light. I just changing glossiness of a glass material. With 0.99 and 1.0 there is clouds (first dome light). With 0.98 and lower there is trees (second dome light).
I’m running into this problem as well, For simple scenes I use 2 Dome lights with an HDRI, one with diffuse and the other with reflections only. But recently, I don’t remember when, I’ve noticed that the reflection only light doesn’t do anything and I have to add specular to get the reflections to work.
So to break it down.
Diffuse only = works as expected
Specular only = I get reflections with any material that does not have 1.0 as the glossiness eg .99 is fine
Reflection only = totally black
Specular & Reflection = this will switch on the reflections
I’m a bit confused as to the difference between specular and reflection.
I have a question: why use two domes, at all?
What’s the benefit, particularly for the reflection/refraction parts, which won’t benefit from IS or the adaptive dome?
I would use an environment, and a black GI override, to achieve the same.
Why not do so?
I wouldn’t mind if the reflections were ALL in the specular but they’re not.
Any reflections set to 1.0 will only show when the specular and reflection are both switched on.
All other reflections (less that 1.0) will show with the just the specular on.
I use 2 seperate dome lights so I can control the amount of reflections easily, just lower the strength of the light and it dims the reflection, easy.
I know it’s not physically correct but a lot of time I’m just wanting something to look nice.
For a lot of my scenes I light them like this:
Dome (for illumination) - light blue - (0.7) - Diffuse only
Dome (for reflection) - HRDI - (1.0 ish) - Reflections only
Spot (aligned with sun in HDRI) - light yellow - (0.7) - Diffuse Only
No GI
Of course it’s not quite as pretty as scene illuminated with an HDRI but it’s much quicker. Most of my jobs need to be animated and saving a few secs here and there can make a big difference. The last project I worked on went through a lot of revisions and there were over 10,000 frames in my render directory when I finished. Speed is king.
Hi Lele, I tried only one dome light and environment for reflection but it still didnt help, problem persist. Now I tried black GI override in settings and it didnt help either.
Problem is that I have to leave Affect Specular checked in dome light for right lighting and specular in a scene. But when I leave it on, problem with reflection is there no matter what I try to change.
It’s best if you send it to support, they’ll be closer to the metal than i am, if this was a bug.
Rest assured they are reading, but just for completeness, also mention the thread.
The current way that V-Ray Lights options work is the following: “Affect specular” OFF in VRayLights now removes all reflections of the respective light. “Affect reflections” OFF now removes only theclear reflections (non-glossy) of the respective light.
The different reflections in the scene are produced by another map used as Environment Background - when enabled, it substitutes the Dome’s disabled “Affect reflections” option, hence appearing in the reflection. If you disable it (hit 8 to open the Environment and Effects dialog and disable the Use Map option), or if you instance the same map slotted in the Dome light, this issue will disappear.
But that not solve my problem. I want to use one hdr for lighting and second as background and reflections. I do this in purpose because my lighting hdr has close trees and I dont want to see them and reflect tham in my scene of a big square. So how I can solve this? My lighting HDR should light the scene and should use specular too. Because when I use specular from different HDR, lighting and specular doesnt match and it looks terrible (double shadows, specular reflection where light doesnt even lit the scene so there cant be specular…).
Rather than using a second Dome light, try utilizing V-Ray/3ds Max’s Environment options.
Make the dome light invisible and disable both Affect Reflections and Affect specular - this will control the scene’s lighting. Note that V-Ray strives for physical accuracy, so currently direct and indirect reflections are linked.
Plug the second HDR in the Environment slot with which the reflections and background will be controlled.
Another way to override the reflections is from the Environment override options in the V-Ray settings.
I tried both scenarios - with two dome lights and with only one and environment slot. But as I said previously, I cant untick Affect specular in dome light. When I do this I loose all specular on all surfaces. I need diffuse and specular linked in one dome light from one HDR map. When I use specular from different HDR, It will render specular in places which are not the same as diffuze lighting so I cant do that. Its not physical and even correct. Do you know what I mean?
I need from second HDR to affect only background and reflections.
