Now, we're using this v-ray dome light, well really it's just a v-ray light set
to dome with an hdri in it to do the basic lighting of our scene so all you
do to create this is to go to light > V-Ray, V-Ray light put a random light out
here and then set it to dome
and it does that it doesn't really matter where you've placed it or
anything like that because it's a dome that will encompass your scene once you
have your dome created you can modify it to be what you want and the essential
part is this texture here which you just put a v-ray HDR high texture and I'll
have a look at that in a second multiplier is set to one let's look at
some of the other options here just to see what they are spherical full dome
that's great that means it has a ground and a sky effect alpha can be turned on
and off so that when you render it will either show as an alpha so you can
replace the background or it will not depending on how you have that set and
you'll want it to and then it has the settings of a basic light so you can
turn on invisible if you wanted the light to emit light for your scene but
not be shown as your background you would make it invisible okay but we want
it basically just default and all we need to do is replace this texture here
so that it's actually using an image to emit light and if you don't know what an
HDR eye light is well a dome light is just a light that encompasses your scene
but when it really starts to work is not as a solid color but as a high
definition range image which has enough depth in it that it can actually provide
light information for your scene and I'll show you what that means the way
you would set this up is by well let me show you here if we drag this over here
and hit in make it an instance will then have control of this map over here if
this wasn't here then we could click on it and say go to v-ray and say v-ray
hgri and then you'd select an hgri for there
and then you you just drag it an instant like I just did so this actually wants
to be instance here so we need to make sure that this and this are linked and
now we can edit it here and it will have an effect on our light so let's look at
what I have there I have this basic HDR I so HDR eyes you can search for them on
the internet you can purchase them this is a purchased one so I can't provide it
for you it does not belong to me
you can search for HDR eyes and pop them in here and you can see that that is
just a 360-degree panoramic image but if you look at it in Photoshop or in other
photo editing software you'll see that it has so much depth like this spot is
very very bright it's not just white it's white times four or something like
that and the dark areas are very very dark so it has that whole range in there
and 3ds max is able to take that range and say oh this is extremely bright it's
white times four so that's like emitting a certain amount of light and this is
really dark so it's not emitting any light so it actually is just using this
image to to actually light your scene to physically light your scene so the way
they create those is with multiple different exposures on the same picture
and then they combine them together offering that huge amount of range and
that range is enough to actually provide light information to your scene most of
you are probably familiar with HDR eyes and how they work I'll provide some
links of where to find some good free HDR eyes for your scene so amazingly
that image applied to that v-ray dome light is all we need to light our scene
the way we saw in our rendering another interesting thing to consider is that we
put a middle gray on everything as our material override but actually in this
scene it's going to be kind of overwhelmed with white surfaces if these
panels remain white like this then our scene is going to be a lot more towards
white than it is towards middle gray so if we change this to be closer to white
like here then we'll get a more accurate accurate representation of what our
rendering will be when we have all our real materials on here so this is
something to consider when you're doing an override rendering let's see what
that looks like okay by turning up the brightness of the material the override
material we're now getting a more accurate representation something that's
closer to what our final materials would actually look like so that actually
brightens up the room quite a bit now if we wanted to darken up the room if we
wanted to do one of those dark panels with just highlights around where the
table is we could do that too again we would just do it with override
material to give us an overall much darker scene so if you wanted to go with
a theme of darker materials then you could change your override to something
that's much darker and that will give you a good idea if you're lighting there
so let's do that with a dark grey and maybe I have these lights here for the
candles and we'll get into what those are and how they're created but for now
I'm just going to turn them on so we can see what it looks like with very dark
textures and just candlelight lighting the table see what that looks like okay
interesting this looks dramatically different right
but keep in mind we're not changing the exposure of our camera at all
it looks like nighttime over here but it's not we just put a darker material
overall on our scene so this gives you kind of a preview of different kind of
effects you could get depending on what kind of materials you use so if I use
like a black wood floor and dark grey panels then my lighting overall would
look kind of like this if I use the white materials that I have in here
currently it will look more like the final rendering I've showed you before
so that's something to keep in mind depending on what color scheme and
material scheme you want to go with that will adjust that will change your
lighting quite a bit so I know that this is going to be a light room so I went
with a light override material and that give me a more accurate accurate
representation but amazingly you can see that with just the simple light coming
in from outside and in this case these little candle lights how much changes
you can make and how much lighting can go on how much reality you can create
with just some very simple lighting techniques one thing I should mention as
well before I go with the HDR I is some of the settings inside of the actual
v-ray HDR I'm at okay so the light the default light or the dome light we
basically left at default settings but in here is where you can make additional
adjustments so that image the main things that you adjust in here are the
overall multiplier or at least the way I do it and then the horizontal rotation
so when you're looking at this consider that point zero right there okay now
when you're looking at the top of your scene and your light is here
that line going out that's gonna be point zero so the middle of your image
is going to be right out here so a lot of HDR eyes are set up so the Sun is
right in the center right here and that will be right here at this line that
consider that zero so if you do 290 rotation it goes 90 180 270 to 90 okay
well to 90 right about here so the middle of my image is up here that's how
it's being emitted that's how it's emitting light in this one I think the
Sun is off to the side a little bit and so or maybe it's because my image is
rotated yeah so it's actually coming the bright the middle part of the sky is
coming at the same angle as this Sun right there
so that's kind of perfect you need to make sure you're on mapping type
spherical for almost all HDR eyes I've seen that's the mapping type that you
want and sometimes HDR eyes come with their own instructions but most people
when they construct them they construct them to be used with a spherical mapping
type which is great it's like taking a spherical image on your phone same thing
except with multiple exposures okay so the horizontal rotation I showed you the
overall multiplier you just mess with if it's at 1 it's like that I put it at 10
because think about when you're inside and then looking outside into a bright
afternoon what happens your eyes you start squinting because it's so much
brighter outside than it is inside so what you are doing is exaggerating the
brightness of outside as compared to inside to make it really really bright
and so you saw in the final image that the light coming from outside is kind of
blowing out in that in that window bench area and that's how it should be if you
look at interior foot photography again you'll notice that the outside is almost
always unless it's very overcast or unless they do camera tricks is going to
be much more exposed than inside so that's why that's turned up to 10 to be
very bright and that's why you get that sharp direct light coming in through the
window let's move on to some of the creation of some of these other lights
and start adding them in so they add to this light and start creating the
overall effect that we're looking for