From the course: 3ds Max and V-Ray: Exterior Lighting and Rendering
Add an HDR environment
From the course: 3ds Max and V-Ray: Exterior Lighting and Rendering
Add an HDR environment
- [Instructor] Now let's start off the lighting process by adding in an environment. Now, the environment won't necessarily create lighting in our scene, but it will create something to reflect. So let's go ahead and go into Rendering, Environment, and we're going to add an Environment Map. This will be a bitmap. And we'll find it in our sceneassets images folder. Going to scroll down until I find HDR_Sunrise, and let's go ahead and open that up. Now, because this is an HDRI file, it will give you this particular menu. And we just want to leave this at the default, which is real pixels. So I'm going to go ahead and select OK, and that brings it in. Now, notice how the background changed slightly. Now, this particular map is not positioned exactly the way that we want. So we can position this by going into our Material Editor, and we're going to left-click and drag this map into one of the slots in our compact Material Editor. Now, it's going to ask us whether we want to instance or copy this. We want to instance it so that way our changes here are reflected actually in the environment. Now, when we double-click on this, we can see the map that we have, and we actually see it's kind of a beach scene. But actually we're just going to be using the sky of this, so that's not going to matter too much. Now, what we want to do is actually fit this to the camera that we've selected in our scene. And we can do that by changing the offset of this map. So if we change it in the U direction, you can see how this rotates this map through our scene. If we want to get a better view of this, we can toggle our Scene Explorer and turn off the Landscape_Front layer. And this just turns off all the landscape in the scene so that way we can see how the clouds are in the scene. So I'm going to go ahead and dial this around so that the U offset is around 0.45, and that should give a pretty good level of clouds. And if we want, we can tilt it up or down by working with V. And so I'm going to actually make the V very small, about negative 0.1. And let's go ahead and turn on our landscape again. Now that I have this in place, I have a background image that I can use, and I also have something that can reflect in the reflective surfaces. So if we do a very quick Render Production, you'll see we have a nice sky behind the building, but we don't have that much light. We also have, as you can see, reflections in the reflective surfaces, and that's another thing that we want. So we want a background to render against, as well as some reflections. So go ahead and position the sky to your liking. You can certainly use a different sky if you want. And do a test render just to make sure that everything is in the right place.
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