Iray skydome without HDRI light?
marchell0023
Posts: 26
I recently started to use Daz studio, I was using Poser for years, I made this change because the Iray render really is better, but I got this question, hope someone can help with.
When I was using Poser, the skydome is just a prop, I just load it into scene. However, the Iray skydome has it's own light (HDRI), so if I want to add Iray lights on my own, is there any way to remove the HDRI light from the dome?
And if I can't do that, is there any "non-HDRI skydome" product can be used on Iray render? I've tried the old "prop skydome" products, and the Iray render just go completely black.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
If you only want to use Iray lights in your scene, you can disable the HDRI light by going into Environment Settings => Environment Mode => Scene only.
This will disable the HDRI light from the scene and the scene can only be lit up by using the Iray lights.
Hope this helps. :)
I want the opposite.... I want to keep the dome but disable the light.
....would like to do that for the HDR "sun" as often the shadows are too hard edged with no diffusion unlike shadows created by real sunlight.
I think setting Environment Intensity to 0 will do that.
That will turn everything black as will setting the map to 0.00
@marchell0023
Do you want an image as a background? If that is the case then use Window/Panes(Tabs)/Environment click on None choose Backdrop click on the down arrow beside Diffuse Color and choose an image. Make sure to resize it to your render dimensions first or it might look wrong depending if it needs to be stretched or squashed to fit. This way you can use Scene Only and Environment Intensity to 0 and use your own lights. Be aware though that what you see in the image will be the background and can't be scrolled around.
Yes, but you can use your own lights instead then. But what to use the dome for then I don't know.
Sorry, what I meant was there would be no background just black, and yes you can use your own lights and then use PS to place a backdrop in.
Yes, in Poser, the skydome is pretty much a 3D image for the background, it brings no light, and other lights are hardly effect it as well. It's pretty convenient when you just want a piece of sky in your scene, and don't want to add more lights. I guess there are no such thing in Iray :P
I know I can still use a image as background anyway, but a plane image doesn't work as well as a dome, the perspective won't match your scene everytime. Still, thanks for the anwer.
Well there is blur over a distance. I assume it reflects how it is in real life which you would expect with unbiased.
You can also decrease Ground Shadow Intensity but it will only work on the Iray ground, not anywhere else, e.g. if you're using a plane as ground. Here it will remain at default. Doesn't seem very smart if you reduce ground shadow intensity and then other shadows don't follow though, as in render 3.
1. shadows on Iray ground with Ground Shadow Intensity 1.0 (default)
2. shadows on Iray ground with Ground Shadow Intensity 0.2
3. shadows on Iray ground with Ground Shadow Intensity 0.2 and on wall
So what do you use for Sun or Ambient light in your poser scene?
There are a lot of light set product for that, some scenes come with light, too. there are lots of products, like DM's series, it got everything in it, except for the skydome.
Which means you are taking out the dome light to put it back in again. Seems a waste to me when you can get the backdrop and/or sunlight or ambient light all at once :)
@marchell0023
Are you aware that you can use your own lights with the HDRI? I also don't see how you expect to illuminate the sky with just your own lights. Don't care how it worked in Poser, this is a completely different engine.
Actually, that's pretty easy. Just make your poser/3dl skydome's surface emmisive and dial the brightness to the point where it reads well without washing out anything else.. I regularly use the "monitor screen" shader in Dzfire's Real LIghts for Iray to do this. Alternatively, you can create a second dome inside the skydome, make that the emmisive light source and dial its cutout opacity to 0.01 percent... or just scale up the dome that comes with Kindred Art's Ghost Light 2 kit.
Kinda defeats the point of using unbiased rendering such as Iray. Biased lighting uses cheats to light a scene such as skydomes and other, non natural light sources. Unbiased relies on the mathematical calculations programed into the renderer to react to surfaces the way real light would depending on how you have your surfaces set up.You could try using 3Dlight if you are more interested in biased rendering. Applying an image to the background in DS isn't the same as using a plane, so it's worth a try.
...where I am running into an issue with this is using one of the settings from IBL Skies -Perfect Skies Bundle with IBL Master in 3DL for a more accurate looking sky environment and an AoA distant light for the "sun" (which allows for adjusting shadow softness to create more "natural" shadows). In one scene I converted, everything looks fine, but in another I am getting a double shadow one from the distant light and apparently one from the "sun" in the HDR (the latter which creates hard edged unnatural looking shadows). I wouldn't think that a light, set for use with Iray would work in 3DL but apparently it is having an effect and have no idea why the same didn't happen in the other scene.
Turning down the shadow intensity "flattens" the look of everything in the scene as it also reduces the much softer shadow effect created by the IBL ambient component.
I am playing with this now. I converted a Google Streetview location to a 360 Panorama PNG file. It works great and is 16K in resolution which is amazing. Only problem is lighting is not saved in the file. So the shadows that are cast with HDRI mode are soft as if it is an overcast day. But the 360 photo has a sun with sharper shadows. So I would like to fake the sun and just use the 360 photo as a background where the perspective is matched. There are tons of scenarious where this could be useful!
^maybe render in 2 passes - one with just the skydome and one with 'sun-sky only' and a transparent background. Use the sun-chain to line up the sun with where it is on your skydome and then layer the 2 together in postwork (PS / GIMP / etc)
I created a fake HDRI in photoshop by saving the Google Street View image at 3 different exposures. Then combined them as a HDR file. However the sun light cast is that of an overecast sky because there are many bright spots in the clouds. Even though on the ground there are harder shadows in the photo.
So I think for situations like this I would setup the camera view per my preference and render the HDRI background out at my deisred resolution and save it as a birmap. Then use it as an environment 2D backdrop. A matte ground plane would receive all the shadows and I can then use a sun as a light source and eyeball the location so the shadows match. The Google Street View lightsource is not needed because it is not accurate. Would be nice if DAZ provided an option to only use the HDR iimage for backgrounds in cases like Google Streetview where the ligthing info is not sufficient as it is with a true HDRI image.
Of course I would still keep the environment map but turn off the dome. Mutliple renderings would be required to superimpose the HDRI reflections and scene / sunlight ligthing versions so the shadows and reflections are included in the final composition.
Update: After my post above I tried something else. In Photoshop I created layers of the panorama and when I reduced the exposure to -8 I kept the original exposure as a layer above it with a mask. I then punched a hole through the mask with a circular brush. Then I did a gausian blur on the mask to feather it out a bit. I added a second layer and punched a smaller hole through that mask. So in effect I faked the sun's spot in the exposure. From the photo I could tell where the sun actually was. But the clouds watered down the sun's location so that the fake HDR did not have a clear light source.
I repeated these steps with the other eposures and now I am able to use Google Street View Panoramas and still get decent looking shadows that match the environment. Here's a screenshot:
I use a Distant Light shining from the sun's direction on HDRI that don't have enough light to fake the sun.
...yeah been noticing issues with the "sun" in some HDRi's. I took one scene and rendered it first with an HDR and then with the Iray Sun/Sky using the exact same render settings. The HDR version looked somewhat muted and the shadows were too sharp while the Sun/Sky seemed more nattural looking and accurate both with regard to GI as well as the shadows. Sad as this was a set of sky HDRs I liked (no ground scenery) which was not inexpesnive. My one complaint with the Iray Sun/Sky was that it only provided a "cloudless" sky.
However I did finally pick up the Cloudscape Creator which gives Daz similar tools to that of Bryce and Carrara for sky generation that works with the Iray Sun/Sky setting. It is unfortunate though not just because of what I invested in the HDRI set, but because that also reminded me a lot of the old LightDomePro2 for 3DL since it had multiple sun elevation settings and was so easy to use.