

You can drag and drop any material from the material editor to the override slot. Under Render Setup go to the tab click the roll out, and check. This will set all of your objects to the same material at render time with out effecting the materials in your actual scene. This will override the 3ds Max environment so that we now only receive lighting from our HDRI dome light.Ī good way to speed up render times while you are in the process of tweaking your lighting is to use a global override material. Under Render Setup go to the tab click the roll out. This is not an ideal situation as it increases render times and makes our settings less precise. As we have both a dome light and an environment map, the scene is going to be receiving the lighting from our HDRI image twice. I added a VRay plane and a cylinder for our lighting test.īefore rendering some tests, we need to address an issue. Now let’s add some simple geometry to the scene. This makes it very easy to place the sun exactly where you would like it in your scene. You will now be able to see the VRayHDRI image in your viewport.Ĭhanging the parameter under the mapping settings of your VRayHDRI will rotate the image in your viewport background. Ĭlick the background tab and select the radio button. We are now using the same map for our dome light and Environment map.Ĭlick the In the upper left hand corner of your perspective viewport. ĭrag and drop the map from the material browser slot to the Environment Map slot. Using the HDRI image also as background imageįrom the menu select. Most HDRI environment images will use spherical mapping. Under the mapping type rollout choose the correct mapping for your image. This will allow for direct control of the map associated with the dome light.Ĭlick the button to browse to the desired HDRI image on your hard drive. Drag and drop the VRayHDRI from the texture button to an empty material slot. In the texture section check the box and click on the button.

With the dome light selected, go to the modify tab. Alternatively, if you are using V-ray 3 you can simply click the Dome light button. Usually you can define the brightness or color of the light in a dialog, but in this case this information should be derived from an HDRI image that contains these information.Īdd a v-ray dome light to your scene. The basic idea is that we want to create in our 3D environment a light source which generates the lightning information based on a texture image. Your setup may look slightly different but the process will be exactly the same. I am using Max 2014, V-ray 3, and have customized my UI a bit. Please note that this is an intermediate-level tutorial, assuming that the reader knows the basics of modeling, materials, rendering, and navigating the 3DS Max interface.
VRAY HDRI HOW TO
How to light an interior architecture scene with an HDRI-image? Let’s go over how to light a simple scene using an HDRI image. Fortunately, there are some excellent HDRI libraries that offer high quality images for free!

There are many sources for great HDRI photography, however the images can be costly due to the great skill and expensive equipment required to create them.

There are different types of panoramic images – most of the time you will find spherical images. For these images a bunch of photos pointing in all directions have been made from one location in reality and stitched together afterwards. Most of the time you will find HDRI images that are 360° panoramic photo of the real location. This allows for a great degree of control and realism when lighting your scene that simply cannot be achieved with a standard 8-bit image. Pixels can also have values above 255 white, making it possible for bright pixels to have varying intensity. Simply stated, if pixels are overexposed in the image, the exposure can be lowered and the blown out pixels will contain actual color data for the lower exposures. What makes these file types so versatile is the fact that they are 32-bit. EXR are the most common high-dynamic range file formats. High Dynamic Range Images are ideal for this type of setup as they contain the data for multiple cameras exposures within one file.HDR and. What are HDRI images and how can they be used in 3DS MAX? The most realistic lighting can be achieved by using image-based lighting. While both of these methods are effective, I find that the lighting produced lacks the subtle imperfections and variations of reality. Some artists like to use a standard direct light while others prefer a simulated sun and sky, such as the v-ray sun. There are a variety of lighting techniques to use when creating an exterior light source for architectural interiors. Image based interior HDRI lightning compared to alternative techniques
