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Before you start

This tutorial is all about HDRI, used for realistic lighting and/or reflections.

Read the vray essential tutorials first before starting with this one!

The Vray version used to create this tutorial is Vray 1.50.00. This is the version that requires the hardware lock (dongle) as a licensing system. Please do not email me with questions about this tutorial if you are not using this Vray version, since the answer to your question is most likely that you're using a different version.

Make sure you have basic 3D Studio Max knowledge too, I will not explain every little detail so you have to know how to use Max. For example things like the material editor, creating and manipulating objects, modifiers etc should all be familiar.

Startup settings

It is important that you start the tutorial with exactly the same settings as I do. Click the screenshots to view all the startup settings. I also use the gamma 2.2 setup so change your max preferences also like in the screenshot.

These settings also use the Vray frame buffer, the adaptive DMC image sampler, no GI etc...

What is HDRI?

HDRI is short for High Dynamic Range Image. It's a special kind of image that contains much more color info than normal images (low dynamic range images). HDRI images have 32bits of color info, while LDRI only have 8 bit.

This is especially important when brightening or darkening the images. The example on the right shows what happens when a HDR and LDR image are darkened by 5 stops.

Notice the window in the HDR image, still showing all the color info while in the LDR image all this info is lost. This is because the LDR image can only contain colors from RGB=0,0,0 to RGB=255,255,255. So the white in the window from the middle picture gets clamped to pure white, while in fact it is much brighter.

HDR images can be used in 3D programs to create realistic reflections, but also to light an entire scene, if the hdri contains the 360° environment.

The two renders use the same map, but the second one uses the LDR version. Note the reflections on the teapot and the glass sphere. Also the lighting is completely different because the LDR doesn't have the correct lighting info. In the hdr version you can clearly see the light coming from the window side.

Create a simple scene

Create a groundplane (I used a big cylinder), and some simple objects.

Add materials & skylight

Create 3 materials: glass, chrome and plastic. Refer to the basic materials tutorial if you don't know what you're doing here. The screenshot shows all the necessary settings for these materials. Assign the chrome to a sphere, the plastic to the teapot and the glass to the other sphere.

Then turn on GI and the Vray skylight (see screenshot). Make sure you use the settings in the screenshot (see basic skylight setup for info on this).

Dull image

This is what we have so far... There is only the skylight, but nothing to reflect in the objects.