Sky Domes with Iray

Petercat

Never mind.

I plugged this into Google and found plenty of answers:

iray skydomes site:www.daz3d.com/forums

Oso3D

There are a bunch of ways you can go. In any case, what you want to do is to put the Skydome's image map into Emission channel, set Emission color to white, Temperature to 0 (removing it from consideration), and set Luminosity scale to cd/cm2 (just makes life easier). You probably want a Luminosity around 5 or so.

You can light everything locally. Another pretty easy approach is to set the skydome to Cutout .8 (80% opacity) and use Distant lights or Sun/Sky or whatever, then do a second render with skydome, and composite it as postwork. (If you really want fine control of this, a third masking render, with everything in foreground as white and skydome as black or vice versa, could help)

I've tried a lot of other approaches, and don't think they are generally worth the trouble.

 

Petercat

timmins.william said:

There are a bunch of ways you can go. In any case, what you want to do is to put the Skydome's image map into Emission channel, set Emission color to white, Temperature to 0 (removing it from consideration), and set Luminosity scale to cd/cm2 (just makes life easier). You probably want a Luminosity around 5 or so.

You can light everything locally. Another pretty easy approach is to set the skydome to Cutout .8 (80% opacity) and use Distant lights or Sun/Sky or whatever, then do a second render with skydome, and composite it as postwork. (If you really want fine control of this, a third masking render, with everything in foreground as white and skydome as black or vice versa, could help)

I've tried a lot of other approaches, and don't think they are generally worth the trouble.

 

Where do I find the control to set the skydome to Cutout .8?

I've got the local lights exactly as I want them, I just want something other than a black sky!

Oso3D

It's under the materials of the skydome, in the Surfaces tab.

In 3DL it's called Opacity, in Iray it's called Cutout.

 

Basically, the material is set up 'realistically.' The skydome is black because nothing is lighting it. Emission makes it glow, and a texture map in the emission channel makes it glow with whatever it looks like.