How do domes work in Iray?

LindaB

From what I understand Iray has it's own 'built-in' dome that can be accessed in the render settings, and you can turn the dome on or off in the render settings. There are things I don't understand - can you apply different environments to the built-in Iray dome? What if you buy a scene that comes with it's own dome? In that case, can you still use Iray or do you need to use 3Delight in order to use the dome that came with the scene? I'm using the prison set http://www.daz3d.com/prison-yard, which comes with 2 skydomes. It can be rendered in 3Delight with one of the skydomes, but not in Iray from what I can see. When I added one of the skydomes that came with the prison set the screen goes black. I can't figure out a solution (if there is one) because I don't understand how the Iray dome works, it's not listed in the scene, can someone explain? thanks.

Richard Haseltine

There are ways to use a modelled dome in Iray - using the Emissive sahder preset on the dome and aplying its map to Emissive colour, for example, or applying the map to the environment map in Render Settings (which answers the question about using other maps). The issue with domes is that Iray, in Photoreal mode, does not allow objects not to cast shadows to a dome will block the HDR light and any distant lights.

TheKD

Skydomes in iray, you are better off plugging a real hdri into the environment section in render tab really.