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I've tried that but that's not good either with vray physical camera. on standard camera with reduced sun intensity it works just fine, but not with vray physical camera. Other thing i've found slightly better result with is to abandon lwf mode, it gives comparatively better result with increased overall multiplier. And yes, as already said earlier unticking affect background results in desired background image but the scene won't be lit based on image anymore. I was working on a minute long exterior animation so wanted easy way to not render background and scene separately and later composite via alpha channel but that seems to be the best way to go.... Thanks a lot for co-operating...

You meant f-number right??? I've tried that also, setting it at 7 gives me perfect scene lighting but only the background renders black, but when i bring it down to 1 or 2 it gives bright background but washes out the whole scene. The main problem for me being I need the background too..

Yeah, I've read it somewhere else and tried it too but gives me somewhat washed out result, not too desirable, vray physical camera with vray sun and vray sky works great but not with hdr background, so maybe it's not meant to be.

I've tried altering the value of shutter speed to different levels but they're not working... like you said in value of 50 it is not bright enough (actually it's dark, just brighter than previous one), i've even tried it in 5,10 but all of them are not working. when i untick the exposure check box like you've said, it works fine as a standard camera, gives background as i was looking for. But maybe i'm looking for everything in one package it won't give me the controls i can have with vray physical camera, one most important for me being white balance. So maybe i'll have to go one way or other. Thanks a lot for helping

I've been out lately, so i'll give it a try and let you know.

Hi Luke, thanks for reply, before telling whether it worked or not i would like to clarify my points further regarding background and lighting. Step 1 - In vray render setup I choose default lights off in global swithches, then in frame buffer i tick on enable built in frame buffer, colour mapping as exponential and in global illumination tab use irradiance map and light cache as primary and secondary engine. Rest settings are as default. Step 2- For my background setting I first go to environment and effects (keyboard shortcut 8) and from there i choose vray hdri as environment map. I open material editor window and copy vray hdri map in environment tab in one of the material editor slots as instacne. Step 3 - Then for extra lighting I choose daylight from systems, and in skylight drop down menu i choose none, in sunlight drop down menu i choose v-ray sunlight, when asked about assigning vray sky environment map i choose no (as i prefer to use hdri spherical map as background for animation) Step 4 - Then I use vray physical camera for camera with values f number = 7, shutter speed 175 and rest as default. Now after step 2 when i render without any vray camera the objects are properly lit as well as the background image appearing fine. But as soon as i assign vray physical camera with above mentioned settings and render i get dark image(near black), multiplying the intensiy multipliers in material editor slot somewhat brightens it up but not as what it should look like. After assigning vray sun for direct light and hitting render i can see the objects in the scene but they are dark and the background even darker. Objects and background works fine with all the above settings but with vray sky environment map in place of vray hdri. I tried as you've suggested with dome light as direct light source with settings you've mentioned but got the same result with dark background. However, when i unticked affect background in colour mapping rollout it does resulted in fine looking background as i was looking for but vray hdri spherical map was no more working as hdri spherical map but as any other background image. I tested it in my scene. Like I mentioned in stepwise manner above, after step 2 unticking affect background did result in desired background but the objects in the scene rendered pure black (so hdri image was not lighting up the scene as it was supposed to do) I hope I made it clear Thanks..

I'm having a problem with hdri spherical background. When rendered through vray physical camera it renders dark. when i render it in perspective view (other than vray physical camera) it looks fine, when i increase the multiplier in material editor for vray hdri it doesn't give desired result, even when i increase the multiplier upto 100, still looks dark with vray physical camera. I tried with altering f number, shutter speed, unticking vignetting which somewhat brightened the background hdri but not like when rendered without using vray physical camera. I'm sure i must be missing something here but am not able to find out what... I'm working in lwf mode 3ds max 2009 32 bit vray 1.5 sp4

nice work..

i wasn't sure under which section to post this one, so posted in the general one..... recently read a post asking all to post thread in the right section but if confused then to post in the general section:o

i was using mental ray for this but the real problem here seems to be vue objects..

Thanks dean, i think i sort of got the answer to it...... I use 3ds max 9 and vray 1.5 sp2 I think the problem here was the trees from vue 7, which is not affected by matte shadow material, for other objects it works fine but not with vue objects.. I had my previous animation done in vray and since vue 7 is not compatible with vray i was trying to do it on mental ray for compositing later but without any success... so i think i had to go back to proxies.....

any idea about whether this is possible or not....... pls anybody??????

I'm trying to add some objects like trees, people in an already animated scene, so for this i just wanted to render the added objects that's why i gave matte shadow material to the rest of the scene objects, but got stuck in one thing...... the added objects do cast shadow on matte shadow objects, but are totally visible from anywhere, i mean if only a portion of a tree lying behind a house is visible for a certain camera angle, the rendered output shows the whole tree, is there a way that a matte shadow object also blocks the visibility of those added objects depending upon their placement.... I tried different options on the matte shadow material editor but to no avail, so i'm wondering whether this kind of option does ever exist..... is there any other way possible with which i can render only the added objects and composite it in AE...

Thanks everybody, got it to work now..

Thanks Merlyn & Fernando, Hope I'll get it right this time doing as u people said.. @ fernando - I don't get it what you mean by merging the max file where your proxy is, so could you please elaborate it a little bit:o