Adaptive Dome Light Workflow

How Adaptive Dome Light works

With the Adaptive Dome Light, Skylight Portals are no longer needed. It automatically figures out which portions of the environment to sample and which ones to ignore. This makes it much easier to set up and much more efficient.

Now, the Adaptive Dome Light uses the Light Cache calculation phase to learn which parts of the dome light are most likely to affect the scene.

Recource : https://www.chaosgroup.com/blog/v-ray-first-look-smarter-rendering-with-the-new-adaptive-dome-light

Steps:

Step 1:

Adaptive Dome

Add Dome light with adaptive dome light tick on (It's on by default).

Step 2:

Vray Dome Map

Add Vray Sky to Vray Dome map slot.

OR:

Step 2:

Vray Dome Map

Add HDRI to Vray Dome map slot.

Step 3:

Global switches - adaptive lights

Adaptive lights – Uses information from the Light cache to determine which lights to sample. If a Light cache is not used, light tree sampling is used. Depending on the scene, it can be faster than the Full lights evaluation mode https://docs.chaos.com/display/VMAX/Global+Switches

Examples

Render Time differences between Full light evaluation and Adaptive light in Global Switches

71.07% faster

Full lights evaluation - 25min 02s

Adaptive lights - 14min 38s

55.56% faster

Full lights evaluation - 1min 52s

Adaptive lights - 1min 12s

20.25% faster

Full lights evaluation - 3min 16s

Adaptive lights - 2min 43s

Adaptive lights - How Adaptive lights value affect render time

Conclusion: Most of the time we don't have more then 8 light sources in our scene so default value of 8 should work. In the example above the chandelier has light source in each bowl, that's why the time is better when the value is 16.

Dome - Tex resolution 512/1024/2048

Vray Sky

Dome Light - Vray sky

Tex resolution - 512,1024 and 2048

Conclusion: The result is absolutely the same. This value didn't affect the render time and quality of the lighting when use Vray Sky.

HDRI

x3 tests

Dome - HDRI Tips

Direction - Lock

Lock texture to icon

Direction - Vray Bitmap

Horiz. rotation

Inverse Gamma

Example how you can soften or sharpen the HDRI lighting with Inverse gamma.

Tip: Use values around "1" - Example "0.8", "1", "1.2"

Legacy SCENES

OLD SCENES

All old scenes with Skylight Portals are working exactly the same as with old VRay 5.00 version. Everything will be rendered the same way. The only thing that is different is that Skylight Portal and Simple ticks are missing from the VRay light properties.

REHASHES

If you have to do a rehash from an old scene you have two options:

SWAP - if you have to do a simple product Swap, then you don't have to change the lighting setup to Adaptive Dome. You can render the scene exactly as it was before. Keep the setup the same as original file if you want to render the swap as a Region or Selected. The lighting will be the same.
Note : Keep in mind that the lighting result is slightly different between Portals and Adaptive Dome.

REHASH - if you are doing a rehash from an old scene and you are changing for example wall colour, change the architecture a bit, you can switch to adaptive dome light workflow.

References:

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