I need a general overall illumination level in a raytraced (Cycles) scene which has certain places lit with a few spotlights. I’m not using Sunlight. I only want shadows to be cast from the spotlights.
I am triggering the raytraces from the render panel.
Adjusting the ambient light colour in the Render panel – which I believe has worked in times past – has no effect today. The intensity input field aligned with “Skylight” (which is checked) is greyed out unless an environment is selected, but I don’t want an environment. Even if I select “no environment” in the environment field, no adjustments affect the ambient lighting whether Skykight is selected or not.
In Raytraced and Rhino Render global illumination will always cast shadows. The ambient light setting does nothing in Raytraced, never has.
If you want the same skylight color from all directions add a new basic environment and tweak only its background color. Note that with such an environment the skylight intensity does nothing, since that works only with HDRi images. You could of course create a small EXR with one color, but if you don’t then if you want less strength from the skylight pick the color you want, then decrease the value.
Here a scene with three boxes, two have a material, the smallest has no material assigned. Skylight is a light blue background color, which you can see from the blue tint on the smallest box.
Thanks Nathan. I am unable to follow this sentence. I don’t know what an EXR is. In the second and third part of the sentence I am not clear where this is done.
EXR is a image format supporting HDRi (values beyond the typical 0.0-1.0 and 0-255 range for the triplet values in which colors are expressed). At least GIMP 3 can create these easily, for instance I just created this 32x32 pixel EXR file: bg.exr (681 Bytes). With that I created this simple solid color environment: solid color bg.renv (8.5 KB)
With that set as the custom skylight environment you can change the intensity of the skylight, meaning the strength of the ambient lighting effect.
Pick a color with HSV then adjust the value slider to a lower value to get a darker color. This translates to less energy from the skylight. It is a poor mans intensity control
Thanks Nathan. That must be RHino 8, to which I’m going to upgrade on my next project. I imagine I can find the RHino7 equivalents when I’m next at this stage on this project.
