VrayHDRI won't render direct light

[danwright]

I am having problems rendering direct light from an HDRI when attached to a Dome Light.

 

I am using a Vray Dome Light with a VrayHDRI map attached to it as the light source. I have a copy of this VrayHDRI map attached to the Environment Slot as my background.

 

When I hit render, the general illumination is rendered, but the direct (hard) light is not. I have a work around for this, which is to:

 

-turn the dome light OFF

-click render (watch it start to build the light cache, and see that direct light is not being rendered)

-click stop render

-turn the dome light ON, and without touching anything else, click render

 

It will now render the scene correctly. It's very irritating and on top of that prevents me from batch rendering or network rendering. Every time I want to render I have to go through that process. If I were to do anything within 3d max (select an object, select a tool etc), I have to go through the process again to render direct light.

 

Does anyone have a solution for this irritating problem? Thanks

 

Dan

[Nicolai Bongard]

Is the HDR image you use actually HDR? If you use a jpeg or something similar, there will not be any dynamic range in the image, thus the illumination part wont work. Open the file in photoshop and lower the exposure - if everything turns dark except the sun, the image is hdr. If everything turns uniformly dark, it is not.

 

When using the vray dome light, there is usually no need to copy the hdri into the environment slot, unless youve ticked the "invisible" checkbox in the vray domelight, or want to comp in a custom sky or something in post.

 

Not knowing your experience with hdris, here is a small guide if you are a beginner:

All you should usually need to do to light a scene with a hdri is to create a vray dome light, create a vray hdri map to plug into the dome light, then load your hdri image into the vray hdri map. Set the mapping to spherical and maybe adjust the inverse gamma for more contrast if you need more of that. Then it should just be a matter of adjusting the horisontal rotation in the vray hdri map to make sure the scene is illuminated the way you want.

 

If this does not work, and you have made sure the image is actually HDR, try resetting your render settings to the defaults and see if that helps.

[Jesper Pedersen]

Hi Dan,

I'd recommend simply buying a HDRI sky (or possibly there are free sample scenes available) from Peter Guthrie or similar.

I don't have any connection to him so I'm not trying to promote the site, except to say we use them and find them very good.

The sample scene will let you go in and check all their setting which takes awhile the first time but well worth it.

 

Good luck.

 

 

Regards

Jesper Pedersen

http://www.pedersenfocus.ie