Dome light vs. environment light...

V-Ray V-Ray for 3ds Max General
21

When using the dome light, how can I tell it to not effect the alpha ?
I still need to add pretty background footage in the animations.

Regards,
Mike

22

Doesn’t making it invisible work?

23

I havent tried that, but then wouldnt you loose the specular from it ?
I really like the way exterior glass looks when using the dome light.

Regards,
Mike

24

nope, unless you uncheck affect specular.

25

Thanks rivoli. How about reflections ? If I have the dome light using a
HDRI for reflections on the glass, can I keep the reflections and still get
an alpha ?

Regards,
Mike

26

yes, reflections will render just fine. actually I thought that was what you meant by speculars :smile:

27

Indeed, Chris, it was wise to suggest that.
I was interested at how the shadows patterns resolved in that case of dimmer light, and the three methods lead to very very similar results.
When i rendered out a VRay sky with a dome camera, and mapped it back onto the domelight, some interesting things happened, however.
I also raised the resolution a bit to bias the tests a bit more towards the interpolated methods, not really at ease with tiny pictures (the opposite is true for direct methods like QMC of course).

Direct, 32 samples, noAA

Store with IrMap, same as above.

And here the surprise: same image as BG, pure IRmap (150Hsubdivs ( !! ), high preset)render without lights.

Since the hdr is comprised of a super-bright, tiny spot (the sun) and a comparatively under-bright sky, the standard BG method falls to pieces, where the importance sampling shines brightly, for both speed and quality.

Lele

28

I’ve been trying for a while here and can’t seem to render out my VraySky through the DomeCam and have it work properly on the DomeLight.

Lele- can you share your settings for getting an hdr image out of the VraySky? My images looks fine, but when I attach it to the DomeLight, there are no shadows at all. So frustrating!!!

Thanks

peakyfreak