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HDRi Sky Lighting Tutorial

3DsMAX for Beginners

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Trang Trúm Trím
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31 views

HDRi Sky Lighting Tutorial

3DsMAX for Beginners

Uploaded by

Trang Trúm Trím
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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HDRi Sky Lighting Tutorial

February 18, 2010

Thought I should do a quick tutorial on how I use these HDRi Skydomes I'm selling. Note that
this is just one of many possible workflows, and there are probably lots of tricks I'm missing and
even things I do completely wrong. I should also say that I work mostly with still images, not
animations.
1. Here is a typical architectural scene. It is a model I made of Waro Kishi's Fukaya house in
Japan that never really went anywhere.

2. I use a gamma 2.2 workflow together with reinhard color mapping, so not strictly LWF but
shares some of the advantages. I don't want this to turn into a LWF tutorial or discussion, but
this post on cgpov.com pretty much sums up how I feel a gamma corrected workflow helps us as
visualisation artists.

The reinhard color mapping helps to control burnt out (overexposed) areas. Screenshot of my
color mapping set up: The burn value of the reinhard color mapping typically ranges from .75 for
an exterior to 0.05 for an interior. You need to experiment with the value until you gain control
over the burnt out areas. Here is an example with a camera pointing at the HDR sky:

For the final render, I use the Vray Frame Buffer, and add a slight s-curve to the output to
compensate for the lack of contrast that the gamma corrected workflow introduces:

3. Add a vray dome light and load the exr/hdr using the max bitmap loader. Set the mapping type
to environment/spherical. If you are using .hdr files, you can use the vrayHDRi loader instead. It
makes no difference whether you use the bitmap loader or the vrayHDRi loader, the vrayHDRi
adds a bit more control in that you can control the render multiplier independently from the
viewport multplier. Set the output of the .exr to 1 and the vraylight multiplier to 1. If your hdr/exr
has no alpha channel it seems you can save quite a bit of memory while rendering (approx
200mb in my case) if you load the exr/hdr as realpixel float rgb rather than the rgba option.
(NOTE: ONLY applicable to 3dsmax 2009)
EDIT: Please don't pay too much attention to the 3dsmax 2009 realpixel hdri loading
option, it just saved a little bit of memory which is why I mentioned it. I now use a later
version of max and no longer have this option either.

4. To rotate the HDR you need to enter a U offset value from 0-1, so to rotate 180 degrees with
would enter 0.5, 270 degrees 0.75 etc.
5. Add a vrayphysicalcamera, and set the aperture and shutter speed to something that would
work for a typical outdoor scene, like F4, 1/200th & ISO 100. Remember that you are in effect
using a completely manual camera, there is no 'P' or automatic mode so you need to experiment
with different exposures until you get a good result.

6. Hit render and see what you get. If it looks too dark/bright I tend to adjust the bitmap's output
rather than the vraylight multiplier, so that I can have a couple of ready setup HDRi's ready to
drag and drop onto the dome light. In the examples below I use an output value of 1.5.

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