What's happening ladies and gentlemen, this is Minh from Architecture Inspirations. Today I'm going to show you how to use HDRi and Dome Light in Vray 3.4 for Sketchup. Let's get started First, Open up the Asset Editor and go to the Light List You can see that by default, we have a sunlight in our model If you render this, it will use Sketchup's shadows settings to light up the scene so however you change the shadows, it will reflect it in your rendering. But if you want to use a Domelight or HDRI for lighting, we need to first turn off the Sunlight. You can do that by first clicking this arrow to get to the settings. Now let's turn off the sunlight by unchecking this box here Then on the Lights toolbar, click on this icon and click on a spot in your model to add a Dome light. You can now see that a dome light is added to the list. You can also change the settings of it here but for now, let's keep it as it is and do a test render. As you can see, By default, vray's dome light already has an HDRI map but you can replace it with a custom map. Before I change the HDRI, let's download some free maps. Here are a couple of free resources for free HDRIs. I will leave the links in the description box below as well. Now I will download a free bundle from this website. Then I can unzip it to get access to the HDRI's. I like this package because it comes catalog that contains preview images for each map Now to load a custom HDRI map, you can click on this button, and locate your HDRI that you want to use. Then let's render it again using Interactive mode. As you can see, the rendering has been updated with a new HDRI but it seems a little dark. So make it brighter, you can increase the intensity here. There we go, that's better. Keep in mind that every HDRI is different so you might need to play with the Intensity to get the right brightness. Now let's zoom in and take a closer look at the dome light. You can see that there is an arrow inside the dome light pointing in this direction. And if we compare the direction of the shadows in the rendered image with the direction of the arrow, you can see that they are the same. So what does this mean? This means that the sun faces or points to the direction of the arrow. Now to change the orientation of the HDRI The first step is to go to the dome light settings, then in the options roll-out, check "lock dome light". When enabled, this will lock the HDRI texture to the dome light so that when you rotate the dome light, the HDRI texture will also rotate. The Interactive Render comes handy in this situation, because you can see the changes instantly. Another setting you should keep in mind is the spherical option. If you look closely at the horizon of the rendering, you can see that the ground of the image is not visible. I'm going to rotate the camera a bit so you can see it easier. See how the bottom half of the HDRI is not there? You can fix this by checking the spherical box like so. There we go, that's better! Another cool way to use dome light is to create materials mockups. Here I have a model with three spheres with different types of materials. I can also add a depth of field effect here You can even add a custom background to your rendering. To do that, first turn off the HDRI texture by checking this box here. This will make the background invisible Now to add a custom background Go to the corrections control on the Vray Frame Buffer Window. Then Enable Background and expand the roll-out to load a custom image. There we go. That's pretty freaking cool huh? Well that is all I have for today guys. If you found the video useful, please leave a like. Let me know in the comment section below what I should do next? And as always, stay inspired guys, and I will see you, Next time
