Before you start

If you discovered this Vray tutorial page through a direct link or search engine, please note that you're on page 2 of the tutorial! Please complete page 1 first if you haven't done so.

Vray environment

In the vray environment rollout, turn on the reflection/refraction override and choose a pure white color. When this is turned off, vray uses the max environment which is by default black.

This doesn't change that much in the rendering, the reflections get brighter a little bit.

Environment multiplier

Change the reflection/refraction multiplier to 2.0. This brightens up reflections a lot, and immediatly makes the images a lot more real. In fact we are using a white HDR map already, because the white used is now twice as bright as it could possibly be in a LDR image :-)

Load HDR map

Press the get material button and double click the VrayHDRI map.

Now you need a HDR map of course. There are many free maps you can find on the internet, even on this website :-)

Download these two maps:
free-hdri-001
free-hdri-002

Save and unzip them somwhere on your hardrive. Load the cloudy map for now by clicking the browse button. This map is in the mirrored ball format, so change the radio button to 'mirrored ball'. This ensures a correct mapping of the hdri onto the environment.

Vray environment

Now drag the hdri map into the reflection/refraction environment slot, make sure you instance it!

If you render now, notice the reflections on the objects. They look more real now, it looks as if you modeled an entire environment around it.

If you want brighter reflections, you should change the multiplier in the hdr map. The multiplier in the Vray environment rollout has no effect if you have chosen a map! So in the VrayHDRI map options, change the overall multiplier to 3 and render again.

The reflections are stronger now, as expected...

Vray GI environment

Drag the hdri map also to the GI environment slot (instance). Now instead of a simple color skylight, the hdr map will provide the lighting.

When rendered, the image is a bit blown out... This is because we changed the hdri multiplier to 3.

Change it to 1.35 and render again. This lighting is now exactly as the lighting where the HDR map was shot. So if in that location would have been a teapot and 2 spheres on a white groundplane, it would look like this :-)
So HDRI's are not only good to simply make your lighting and reflections realistic, they can also be used to recreate specific lighting situations. For example when you need to place a 3d object into an existing picture, it is very handy if you also have a HDRI environment of that specific location so you can light the 3d object with it. This way it will fit seamlessly into the photograph since it has the same lighting setup.

Another map

In the material editor, change the hdri map to the other one we've downloaded. This map has a smaller bright area, a window, so shadows will become more pronounced. As you can see, the light clearly comes from one direction.

Also note the quality of the shadows... We use the IR map as the primary GI engine, with pretty low settings. This causes the blotchy look in the shadows. It is of course more difficult for Vray to compute the HDRI GI lighting than when using a simple solid color.

This is how the shadows look like with Brute Force GI.
Of course much sharper, but this image took 20 times longer than the one with IR map as primary GI engine.

So remember that HDRI lighting can be very realistic, but that it is also time consuming. This is why many times people will use HDR maps only for reflections, and setup lighting with a simple skylight and some Vray lights.