While hdri lighting is not very complicated its necessary to know some details in order to get a useful result.

Also they have an accurate white balance that will bring convincing and colorful lighting into your scene with a few clicks.

Then you need to add the hdri skydome to the texture map color slot of the Skylight so the skydome is used light up the scene.

We will later see how you can adjust gamma and exposure within this slot, but for now, lets keep it simple.

Make sure that you set map amount to 100 and check Sky Color in the Skylight.

Set the mapping to Environ and Mapping type to Spherical Environment.

If you want to use the same hdri skydome also for the background, here are some additional steps.

Its a standard map that can be used to change the gamma and exposure on another map.

Within this map in the input map slot create an INSTANCE of the original hdri skydome bitmap that you created before for the skylight.

If you create a copy, you can later change the direction of the background independently from the skylight light direction.

If you render now, you will probably get wrong lighting and over- or underexposed images.

So we need to adjust the camera exposure settings to match the lighting and background.

This will give you access to color mapping, exposure and other parameters that need to be adjusted according to your light and background setup.

There are lots of tutorials on the web explaining photography and we dont want to go into too much detail here.

As the settings may vary strongly depending on the used hdri map, its not very useful to define specific settings here.

But a good starting point for the EV would be something between 5.0 and 15.0 with a Skylight value of something between 1.0 to 10.0.

Anyway its necessary to play around with these parameters in order to get a good result.

Next the shadows also depend on the gamma value and contrast of your hdri map.

You can adjust this within the Gamma and Gain parameters of your map (see point 2).

They are high quality and have improved my abilities greatly.

There are contact shadows on the plane below bc I have enabled AO for that material.

The HDRI Skydomes from us include demo scenes for mental ray which are setup to work out of the box.

Mental ray has some disadvantages with the skydome light, which works not as good as vray, but you can get shadows in a similar way with mr.

Just open one of the scenes if you own the HDRI sky domes and see how they are set up.

If you need further help, please get in touch via support form.

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