Lighting with HDRI and V-Ray Sun

hey guys in today's video we're gonna see how we can light up an exterior scene by using an HDRI image before we diving deeper into the settings for the HDR I I want to show you what I have set up for a scene here it's a very simple scene of a house and the house is a really low poly model it can be used for gaming and we have a very plain that's supposed to be the ground the basic settings for my v-ray camera are very basic as you can see I haven't changed the f-number which is a more or less the ideal for outdoor scenes the only thing that I've changed is the white balance of sub down is neutral we have shutter speed of 200 and I've increased the ISO at 200 from up I've opted from the initial 100 so that's it I haven't changed anything else so let's see how we can make this scene get lit up by an actual HDRI what we want to do is go over to create overhead lights and choose a very light here now in the type here it should say don't by default it should be at planed so feel free and change it as a dome light and click anywhere in the scene it doesn't matter where as soon as you click it you're going to get a dome light right click to confirm select it and into the modify tab go over here and make sure your multiplier is set at 1 by default it should be 30 set it up as 1 as soon as this is done go over here with this texture it says none click on it and from here from the v-ray tab choose a v-ray HDR I double click and now press the M button click hold in one of the empty links and click instance okay right away you've instance this map over in the material editor now we need to choose our HDR I now click on the three dots over here and choose your HDRI and from here just try and find the one you want to use for example I'm going to use this one I will leave a link on the website so feel free if you don't know where to find some nice quality HD or ice go over to www.dvc.edu/financialaid the map over here and now we can see how this thing looks like so by default it's the mapping type is wrong so I want to change it to a spherical mapping type as soon as we click it like this we can see now that it's starting to look like a realistic image alright so let's see what we've accomplished so far I'm going to go down back to my camera and quickly let's just go over the settings for v-ray see what we have set up over here so the image sampler is an adaptive which is okay right one with 20 and 0.01 that should be fast column mapping is exponential that's okay as well the GI irradiance map with light cache the radiance map is a very low which is OK the light cache is lost 500 subdivs again okay the settings well everything seems to be alright you just up just to like 12 gigs I don't want to use 16 and close all right with all of this now I'm going to run a single render and see how things are looking alright we're just going to wait for a second Julie this instance is from the model and there we have we are starting to get some lighting happening into the scene but in this case the lighting is way too dark there the way to fix this would be to go here and change some of the parameters now the thing is that usually if from what I've learned or if what I've seen from the students I've taught usually when they have an issue with a dark image what they would do is select the light source over here which is the dome light and increase the multiplier that would be a wrong way of doing it so you want to keep this multiplier set at one the right way of doing it would be to go over where the map is and where it says processing you have two values both of them which are one by default you want to change the render multiplier and increase that value for example with a value of ten I'm going to be getting ten times the lighting information coming from this image so let's try it and see how it's going to look like its render fast we're going to wait for a few seconds till it does the calculating and as we can see the scene is getting more light coming from that HDRI image now let's increase it more to something like maybe even 250 that should give me more control or actually more light coming to the scene and make it to look more like a daylight seed then again a lot more light we can see some shadows rather diffuse shadows but shadows nonetheless and our scene is starting to look realistic now we can call it quits here and just be done with it or we can take it a step further and try to gain more control over where the light is coming from and how to control how to further control the shadows and the lighting in the scene now let's see how we can do that first thing we're going to do is I want to make sure that this goes back I want to make sure that the environment but you can get it when you go over from rendering you just sketch the environment or you just press the number 8 here I want to make sure that the environment is the same exact v-ray HD right that I'm using for lighting so click and make sure you have instance in the environment now what we've done is we've made sure that the entire environment is exactly the same texture as we have for the lighting now the reason for doing this is so I can visually see how that texture is being applied to the scene that I am working with and the way to get that is you know over here it says cheated you drop down to viewport background and you go over here and change it from solid color to an environment background so now everything in the background is going to be seen as it is from the HDRI and that is as I'm rotating around I can see how that HDRI is shown in 3ds max there you so basically this scene is lit up with information coming from all around now get back to the scene and let's see how we can further control how the shadows are going to look in our scene we can do that by simply go into the top viewport get back to the create tab in the lighting section choose v-ray and again this time around though choose vr8 Sun so click and click and drag once you let go is going to ask you would you automatically like to add a v-ray sky environment map since we're using an HDRI images in an environment map we're going to say no we just want to add the simple of erased Sun now we're just going to get it upwards a bit so just rise it up and with this I want to render out a single scene and see how this V is going to look like all right so now we have a much stronger shadow a much stronger light and basically we're getting light from two sources now we're getting light from the environment and from the Sun so before we start to tweak around the shadows in the intensity of the light we have to tackle another problem and that is the position of the v-ray Sun is not exactly the same as the position on the Sun coming from the HDRI as you can see the Sun from the HTR is coming from this side while the v-ray sun is coming from that side so we're going to get a problem because we'll be getting double shadows and it's not going to be realistic so let's see how we can fix this issue first of all I'm going to delete the Sun I'm going to select everything in the scene right click and hide all right now since I've done this I'm gonna go over in the top viewport and I'm going to create a new v-ray camera just like and drag anywhere it doesn't matter and press C now what I want to do is while I'm in the v-ray cameras you can see I'm hearing the v-ray camera number 2 if I rotate around you can see I can look around on the image what I want to do is I want to look directly into the Sun something like this now in case you have HDRI that's too bright or maybe even if it's too dark in the over an HDR eye you have to either brighten it up or down the way to do it is again press the M button and in the options for the HDRI it says overall multiplier if it's too bright you can lower this something like 0.5 maybe press Enter as you can see now the scene got darker if I put it at 0.1 now I can see even better where the Sun is so let's try and just position it in the middle something like this all right there we go and now this is what we want to do the Sun is facing from this side and this is the camera looking directly into the Sun what we want to do is go over lights v-ray very Sun and just click and drag towards the camera something like this oh yeah again no that's just straightening it up and there you now get back into the camera viewport and rise it up something like this now if we zoom in a rotate it around Sun should look something like this it doesn't have to be perfect you just need to make sure it's close to it all right we have that set up then I can delete this very camera because I'll no longer need it but now I need to make sure another thing is set up correctly and that is the v-ray dome light needs to be in the middle between the Sun and a target so I'm going to go ahead right click unhide all and I'm going to select both of these so the Sun and the target and as soon as I select them both I can see a visual presentation where the center between those two don't between those two is so I can select my v-ray dome light and simply move it towards the center again select both of them doesn't have to be perfect but close enough yeah this is close enough all right there we go all right this is perfect so now we just want to make sure that the Sun is linked to the sphere or the very dome light the way to do it is simply select the Sun select the target click on the link selected link and click and drag to the dome light now if I rotate this around the Sun and the target are following the dome light I'm going to go back one more time just back and now since the Sun is linked correctly to the sphere you only think that's left now is to link the actual texture or the actual HDRI to the rotation of our dome light and this is relatively easy to do all you got to do is right click on the dome light go over in wire parameters click and now you have to go transform rotation and the Z rotation and click it's going to give you an option to click something click on the same exact dome light and this time around they'll go object very light go down to texture and from texture choose horizontal rotation this it's going to give you a small window now the only thing that you need to change here is on the right side on the lower right side you just need to add a minus in before the Z so now over here you have a choice if you click on this button over here then that's going to mean that whenever you're physically rotating this dome light the texture or the hgri is going to rotate with it if you click on this button though then the only way to rotate this would be through the material editor now since I think this is going to be easier to do it manually like this I'm going to click here one way connection and click on the connect all right click on it close and now when I rotate this you can see that the texture or the HDRI is rotating along side with the v-ray Sun right get back to having this viewport and now if I want to rotate the Sun all I got to do is get into rotation and move it like this and I can visually see where my son is at all right let's try something like this and render and here we go now the entire scene is lit up from the HDRI and v-ray Sun and with the fact that we've added a v-ray Sun we have a much bigger control over how this scene is going to look like because we can now go over here select the v-ray son and indeed options over here for example we can make it so it's either stronger by playing with the intensity multiplier or for some reason if our shadows are let's do something like this so it's stronger if our shadows or look okay let's go if the Sun is higher the shadows are going to be more strong or better they'll stronger or sharper so better defined now this would be ideal as you can see it over here if you have a very nice and clean or clear day but if for some reason if you have an HDR eye that's with a cloudy day in that case what you would need to do is select your son and you can control the strength of or the intensity of the actual shadows by the intensity multiplier but more importantly this size multiplier is going to control how fuzzy or how blurred your shadows are so for example with a size multiplier of 1 you get nice long shadows example if we put an sized multiplier of five that means that these shadows should now be more diffused and more blurrier all right let's see all right to better shoot show keys this I would probably have to rotate it from the side so we can see even better see those shadows let's go to something like this and now the shadow should look better or be more visible on this side yep they are there y'all so by doing this we've basically set up the lighting for this scene by simply using an HDRI image and one simple very Sun so I hope you guys learn something from this video and if you liked it then liked it subscribe comment and share it around so it can reach more people so until the next video take care

Channel: Denis Keman

Views: 94,445

Keywords: V-Ray (Software), 3ds max, Autodesk 3ds Max (Award-Winning Work), HDRI, HDRI Lighting

Id: E53qC2-PalU

Length: 23min 18sec (1398 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 11 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/Jonsie-]

When I switch to environment background, It is pure white, can't seem to figure out why ?