I Ray and Star Domes and Sky Domes

Rockitscience

I am trying to get the Inside of the Digivault stardome for a Space Render in Iray - Every light and Lighting set up, I put in the dome just ends up black.

Any Ideas on getting the texture to show up properly for my background?

Tobor

One method that seems to work pretty well in most cases:

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/63014/yet-another-iray-skydome-technique

SpottedKitty

Is this an actual dome object with the star texture applied to it? If so, that's why your scene is black — objects in an Iray render can't be set to "don't cast shadows", so the dome is blocking any outside light from getting in to your scene.

Probably what you need is the default Environment light in Iray; go into the Render Settings tab, and click on Environment at the bottom. Now you can see the environment light settings. Click on the little box beside the Environment Light parameter and find the actual texture that was being applied to the stardome you were trying to use.

One other thing: also in the Render Settings tab, look at the Tone Mapping section. This is set by default to the exposure settings for a bright sunny day, so obviously if the amount of light in your scene is much less than this, everything will be dark. You must adjust the exposure settings to compensate for the non-default light level.

MJW

In hopes someone can guide me. How do you make images for the SkyDome, I have loads of shots that would but you seem to have to distort them in some bizarre (no doubt mathematically logical) way. Is there a template for such deformations (assuming that such a word exists) please?

Tobor

Skydome images are specific to the dome you are using. Most of these use standard photographs that don't need "pre-distortion."

I suspect you may be talking about Iray's Environment dome, which is something completely different to skydomes. These images assume spherical or cubic mapping. The image needs to be pre-distorted to look right when projected onto the environment dome (which, by the way, doesn't actually exist as a geometry object like a skydome does -- it's virtual, and made up on-the-fly by Iray). There's software for taking standard photographs and converting them to spherical projections, but the good ones cost, and are not cheap.

AnotherUserName

Rockitscience said:

I am trying to get the Inside of the Digivault stardome for a Space Render in Iray - Every light and Lighting set up, I put in the dome just ends up black.

Any Ideas on getting the texture to show up properly for my background?

Here is how I use sky domes in Iray. There is probably a better way but this one works for me. In the first pic Im using http://www.daz3d.com/fm-solar-system.

Load your sky dome (obviously) and select all of its material zones in the surface tab. Then apply the Iray Uber Base to the sky dome mat zones (the fm solar system has 6 zones altogether). After that is done, scroll down to the emission color area. Select the texture drop down box (is that what its called?) and load the same texture that is used for the Base color. Then adjust your emission temperature. This will probably vary for whatever look your going for but for my space dome I crank it all the way up to 10000. Then adjust Luminance. For a space dome ill raise it 500,000 or whatever looks good. Please note, however, that depending on the dome you may still have to supplement the scene with more lights. In the image attached, all the the stars look great, but they shed practically no light. What light you do see came from a spotlight that I added and its still fairly dark.

AnotherUserName

Here is an example that uses a sky dome only with no additional lights and it turned out looking alright.