Daylight Control

 

 

When using the DreamScape Sun as the only light in the scene, you will get very dark and unrealistic shadows. The Daylight feature (when used) is able to calculate the indirect illumination coming from the Sky and illuminate your objects in the scene.

 

Note: The Daylight feature performs numerous calculations for each shaded pixel, which can slow down the rendering process.

 

 

Render Daylight

Render Daylight - By default, the Render Daylight checkbox is not active, but when it is turned on, it will calculate the indirect illumination coming from the DreamScape Sky.

 

Sample Rate - Controls the number of sky samples that the DreamScape Daylight plug-in needs to take for each pixel. More samples will result in a smoother image, at the cost of rendering speed.

 

Sample Rate = 6	Sample Rate = 12	Sample Rate = 20

 

If most of the materials in your scene use texture supersampling, you can freely reduce the DreamScape Sample Rate.

 

The 3ds Max native texture supersampling will take additional samples and average the result. Thus, you can use a smaller Dreamscape Sample Rate and get similar results.

 

Simplify for DS Terrain - Use this option to speed up daylight rendering of large terrain meshes. When checked, terrain meshes will skip self-shadow testing during the daylight calculations.

 

Exclude - Click on this button to bring up a standard 3ds Max inclusion/exclusion dialog box where you can choose objects to be added or removed from the daylight calculations.

 

 

Sky

Strength - This parameter is similar to the Multiplier parameter of the native 3ds Max lights. Higher values produce a brighter overall image and conversely, lower values create dimmer results.

 

Strength = 0.5	Strength = 1.0	Strength = 2.0

 

Overcast - With the Overcast spinner set to 0%, direct Sunlight and Skylight are used equally to illuminate objects in the scene. With Overcast set to maximum (100%), only the Skylight is used to illuminate objects.

 

Overcast = 0%	Overcast = 50%	Overcast = 100%

 

Higher Overcast values simulate the effect of cloudy day illumination (if thick clouds cover the sky there is no direct Sun illumination). However, if you use clouds with the Clouds Ground Shadows option enabled, proper illumination will be computed automatically using the Sun, Daylight system and clouds. In that case, you don't need to use the Overcast parameter.

 

User Color - Normally, Daylight will sample the sky dome to get the sky color (this process is completely transparent to the user). If you want to define your own sky color to be used for Daylight calculations, then select this checkbox.

 

One of the disadvantages of user-defined Colors is noticeable when you animate the Sun gliding over the Sky, from sunrise to sunset. In this and similar cases, the shade color will be constant and you will have to animate its hue manually.

 

 

Ground

This group of controls regulates how much of the light will be emitted (reflected) from the ground to your scene objects.

 

Strength - This field determines the influence of light reflection coming from the ground to the objects. The ground "catches" only direct sunlight, which is partially reflected to the objects.

 

Strength = 0.1	Strength = 0.5	Strength = 1.0