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Topic: Skylight setup

posted by 586
archived on 24.7.2002

How do you set skylights up ? Looked in environment and I can't find anything that resembles that. Looked in materials.
Are skylights just another name for the Vray lights ?

Follow-ups

A: This depends on exactly what you mean by skylight. You can set up an environment light in the render rollout for Vray under "environment." Check the box that says "override max evironment" choose your eviron/skylight color and, if you want, you can place an HDRI map in the map slot next to the color (if you do that, just set the color to black). This is usually how I set up an HDRI lighting situation:

1) add a Max omni light to your scene, then turn it off (to disable Max's default ambient lighting)
2) choose the diffuse color map slot of any standard material
3) from the map browser pop-up, select VrayHDRI
4) in the resulting map selector in the material selector browse for your HDRI image
5) once you've gotten that image into the map slot check the radio button that reads "spherical environment, drag the map to another material slot at the top of the rollout (you know, the spheres) - you can either make it a copy or instance, I choose copy, so then you have direct access to your environment map
6) open up the render settings rollout an go to environment
7) drag the HDRI that you just copied directly from it's place at the top of the material editor to the environment map slot
8 ) now you can render using an HDRI map!
9) to adjust the level of light energy from the HDRI map, you can go back to the material editor, select the map and change the multiplier up or down from its default of 1, or adjust the multiplier in the render settings rollout under environment.

For the exclusive use of an environment light without HDRI, I would suggest using the "add omni, turn it off" method also.

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