HDRI without light (only VRay sun)

[Stephan Dupont]

Hi,

 

In my scene I placed a hdri as a background image and a Vray sun. I would like to keep only the light that gives the Vray sun. Do you have any idea how can I do ?

 

Thx a lot !

[Nicolai Bongard]

If what you want is to remove the lightgiving/shadowcasting abilities of the HDRI and only keep the vray sun as the one casting the shadows, what you could do is save a copy of your HDRI image as a .jpeg and use that in the background. It will make sure that all the pixels in your image are uniform in their intensity. That removes the problem you are most likely having with objects casting two shadows (one from the vray sun and one from the sun in the HDRI).

 

If what you want is to replace the background image in the environment slot with the corresponding vray sky that is linked to a vray sun, just delete your vray sun and create a new one, you should get a prompt asking you if you want to replace the image in the environment slot with a vray sky.

 

For future reference; if you are to light your scenes with spherical HDRIs, you may want to insert the hdri into a vray dome light. It will act like you expect, and it will give you more control/options that simply inserting the HDRI into your environment slot.

[Francisco Penaloza]

Put a solid black color in the GI environment overwrite in the VRay rendering window.

You could also put a VRay dome light and give a very low value on the intensity.

[Corey Beaulieu]

Just put a Vray Sky in a Dome light and in the options tab set it to invisible. Then put your HDRI in a Dome light and in the options Tab set it to Visible while un-ticking Diffuse/Reflection/Specular. When you render using your Vray Sun, the Dome light with the Vray Sky will be your GI, but the HDRI will be your visible background. You could even go a step farther and use a third for just Reflection if you wanted, but you have to untick and tick the right options for each Dome Light.

 

The only hiccup is that if you are using Camera Clipping the Dome won't be visible under any circumstance. For this you must use the Vray Clipper Object.

 

Otherwise. Go nuts. Thee won't be multiple shadow and light sources.