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Skydomes don't work

RemiliaSuttonRemiliaSutton Posts: 173
in Technical Help (nuts n bolts)

No matter what my skydomes don't show up as showing sky clouds light etc they just show up as if it's inky black night. Doesn't matter if its free skydomes paid skydomes daz site downloads third party downloads. it's really pissing me off. anybody able to help me figure out what the heck is going on and how to fix it?

Comments

  • FishtalesFishtales Posts: 6,162

    If you are using Iray Skydomes that have geometry they don't work without a bit of work, they block the light from the Iray Dome. The easiest way is to load the Skydome, select it and go to the surface tab and look for the Diffuse image used, open up the Environment Settings for Iray and use the Diffuse image in the Environment Map and then delete the Skydome.

  • kenshaw011267kenshaw011267 Posts: 3,805

    Skydomes are mostly meant for 3Delight so if you render in iRay they are troubling.

    HDRI's work wonderfully in iRay and I've pretty much stopped using anything else. HDRIhaven.com has lots of free ones so you can try it out.

  • P302P302 Posts: 37

    I found HDRI inflexible in some cases. I found 2 ways to work with skydomes which works for me. (Which doesn't mean that the workflow is good for you too.)

    Variant 1:

    Place a lightsource within the skydome. I like to use single sided meshlights, even though they tend to render a bit slower. 

    Variant 2:

    1. Select the not used portion (the protion not visible in the scene e.g. behind the camera) of the dome in the Geometry Editor Tool. (I prefer the lasso tool for that.)
    2. Geometry Assignment: Create Surface from Selected. (Name it "Invisible" or something.)
    3. Set the new surface's material opacity to 0.
    4. Use sun-sky in  Render Environment to have more flexibilty over the positioning and character of the light.
  • RemiliaSuttonRemiliaSutton Posts: 173

    Okay I have hdri in .hdri format. How do I use them?

  • DripDrip Posts: 1,206

    Go to the Render tab. Somewhere there you should see an entry "Environment", and behind that the property "Environment Map". Click on the arrow and select "Browse". Find your HDRI file, and load it. Make sure the option "Draw Dome" just above it is turned on. At the top there should also be an option "Environment Mode", check that it's set to "Dome and Scene" Your HDRI file should now function as both a background and a lightsource for your scene.

    You can hide the HDRI and still use it as a light source by turning Draw Dome off.
    There's a lot to play around with here, for example, you can change the dome from infinite to finite (you should notice the difference when you translate the camera sideways), switch draw ground on and off (for example, to get ground shadows) and a bunch more stuff. Using HDRI images is actually quite easy, it takes only a few minutes to figure out the basics. There is some more advanced stuff possible, but that takes a bit of digging through documentation, youtube videos, and running into them on a couple of tools available in the store here.

    For the most amazing of HDRI tools, I'd suggest the Iray HDRI Toolkit by KindredArts. Once you get the hang of the basics of HDRI's, you'll also know about the biggest limitation they have: they do not interact with your models. And that toolkit allows for just that to become an option.
     

  • RemiliaSuttonRemiliaSutton Posts: 173

    Thank you very much Drip. I got the hdri to work with my sunset lighting (both free downloads) working and they look sweeeeeet!

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