hdri, mental ray and max

L2K

hi folk.

i'm curently willing to pass from vray to mental ray as my primary renderer.
it's a lot to assimilate, as they dont work the same way.

so right now, i +/- got the basics with the photon and final gather, and those fantastic arch design materials, that are extremely similar to the vray mat.

i tryed to apply some hdri map to the scene, but...
where vray took everything, from the cylinderic projection map, to mirror ball and crosses, MR seems to just take what the standard bitmap has to offer...
i'm sure a renderer that advanced do other types of typical hdri projection. but where are them ?

thx

Melak

The selection of environment mapping modes is pretty limited, but if you create a large geosphere and assign the HDRI as a bitmap to that, and use the actual mapping options, you have spherical, cylindrical, shrink wrap...etc to chose from.

Another thing you can try is looking through the mentalray maps, I think there is a light probe map, or mirror ball, or something like that? maybe that can be useful.

L2K

in the version i'm using (max 2008. thank you, boss...), there is no light probe map or mirror ball. i've heard there was one in newer versions, but that doesnt work very well.

i solved the problem by taking a small external software that convert mirror ball and fisheye projections to environmental projection (understand spherical or cylindrical). and it works pretty well.

artizen hdr, the name.