V-Ray 2.0 for SketchUp - Dome Light Video Lecture | V-RAY Tutorial (English): For Beginners to Beyond - Professional Skills

hello everyone this is core rubadoux
from the chaos group in this video I
will introduce you to the new v-ray dome
light feature in v-ray 2.0 for Sketchup
the very dome light will streamline the
workflow and improve the quality of your
lighting and shadows when using image
based lighting in your scenes part of
having the v-ray dome light
the most common way to illuminate a
scene was to use an HDR image for the
v-ray environment texture which is
exactly how we're illuminating this
scene we have mapped an HDRI image to
our environment let's render the scene
to have a closer look at the results
that we get when using this method as
you can see there are plenty of
artifacts in the rendering we have
shadows that are not defined very well
there are objects that seem to be
floating in the air and you can see some
bright spots throughout the image we can
try to solve this by increasing the GI
settings however this will create longer
render times unfortunately this would
still not resolve all of our issues we
could almost resolve them by using a
blurry version of our hgri however even
this technique will introduce two more
issues our shadows will be too soft and
the contrast of our image will be
reduced the very dome light is your best
solution for these common problem
so let's go ahead and add it on my tour
scene
in the dome light properties let's make
sure that we're using the same HDRI that
we're using in our first rendering now
let's render the scene again to compare
the results as you can see nothing
appears to be floating in the air we
have more defined in sharp shadows there
are no artifacts or bright spots and
finally the contrast in the scene is
very good the results are more accurate
even with the medium quality gie
settings that we have if you want to
achieve this rendering quality without
the dome light you have to drastically
increase your GI settings this would for
sure result in longer render times for
you one important thing to note about
the dome light is that v-ray analyzes
the HDR eye and recognizes where the
brightest spot is within the image and
v-ray treats that spot as a direct light
source to prove this let's turn off the
indirect illumination and render the
scene as you can see the image
much darker there's no one direct light
bouncing around and the illumination is
coming only from a direct light you get
three major benefits from the v-ray dome
light acting as a direct light first you
achieve very sharp shadows when using
exterior HDR images that contain the Sun
second it's now possible to render
realistic caustic effects using HDRI
images if you have reflective and
refractory materials in your scene
third producing flicker free animations
is now easier than ever as you can see
the new v-ray dome light feature makes
using image based lighting easier than
ever thank you for watching this video
and we hope you enjoy this powerful new
feature of v-ray 2.0 for Sketchup