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View Full Version : Is there a Maya equilvalent to 3DS max's Skylight?

Dangertaz
06-26-2009, 04:38 AM
I'm working through a few tutorials for compositing in a CG object into a scene via Matte Shadow, Camera map, Mirror ball, and Rayswitch environment. The tutorials I've found thus far are only dealing with Max and and for outdoor shots they always incorporate Max's skyight and tell it to "use environment" instead of it's default sky color.

Maya has a physical sky of course but as far as I'm aware you get need to use the physical camera lens node and I'm not sure there is a way for it to sample the environment the way Max can.

Is there a way to do this in Maya? Would a dome with a surface shader assigned to an HDRI be equilvalent?

I remember reading somewhere that there are such things as Final Gather children rays...Is this somehow utilized with a rayswitch advanced? i.e. We have an HDRI plugged into one slot in the Rayswitch advanced and a physical sky node plugged into another...but there is only ONE final gather spot...how to get BOTH the HDRI and the sky to cast Final Gather?


Thanks in advance!
klingspor
06-26-2009, 03:48 PM
I'm not familiar with max's skylight, but from the sound of it you want to use the IBL node feature and use a color instead of a texture.
Ash-Man
06-26-2009, 05:44 PM
ther is the Sun/sky system
Dangertaz
06-26-2009, 10:53 PM
Maya does have a sun/sky system but as I said above, it leads to exposure issues and it cannot take it's sample color from an environment.

IBL is nice but there may be complications with where to connect it and still have the rayswitch environment plugged into the Camera's mental ray environment channel, I'll give it a shot though...


Thanks!
Dangertaz
06-27-2009, 02:20 AM
Ok...after a bit more fiddling it's looking like Portal Light attached to an area light is doing the trick...it's pushing final gather rays farther and it can sample a spherical environment....still experimenting.
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