V-Ray Tip: V-Ray Adaptive Dome Light: Cleaner, Faster HDRI Lighting

Get cleaner, faster environment lighting by letting V-Ray’s Adaptive Dome Light (ADL) do the heavy lifting. Here’s a practical guide you can apply today.

• What ADL does: It analyzes your HDRI and scene occlusion to importance-sample light where it matters most. This reduces noise dramatically, especially in interiors, without skylight portals.
• Key benefit: Expect quicker convergence and fewer fireflies from small bright HDRI features (sun, studio spots), with no extra setup complexity.

Quick setup

• Create a V-Ray Dome Light and load your HDRI via VRayBitmap/VRayHDRI.
• Adaptive is enabled by default in modern V-Ray. If your host shows an “Adaptive” toggle, keep it on.
• Set the HDRI’s input color space correctly:
  • EXR/HDR: linear (no gamma). Avoid double sRGB conversion.
  • ACES workflows: set the proper input transform in VRayBitmap to prevent desaturation or dull light.
• Use “Invisible” on the Dome if you intend to comp a different background; reflections/refractions will still use the HDRI.
• Control intensity in exposure stops (e.g., dome 0.8–1.2 multiplier) and fine-tune in the VFB Exposure or Light Mix.

Performance and quality tips

• Skip portals: With ADL, skylight portals are obsolete—remove them for cleaner, faster interiors.
• Sampler strategy: Iterate with Progressive and a Noise Threshold around 0.05; tighten to 0.01–0.02 for finals.
• HDRI hygiene: Prefer tiled EXR with mipmaps; ultra-high-res HDRIs (16K+) can be downsampled without visible loss. Use VRayBitmap’s filtering to reduce tiny hotspot noise.
• Affect toggles: Keep Affect Diffuse and Affect Specular on for physically plausible results; if you need comp control, separate them via Light Select/LightMix.
• Clamp carefully: Avoid harsh clamping; use a sensible Highlight Burn or filmic tone mapping to preserve HDR information.
• GPU notes: ADL is GPU-friendly. Ensure textures fit VRAM by using tiled/mipmapped assets and enabling texture compression if available.

Grounding the HDRI

• Use Finite Dome/Ground Projection (where available) to create believable ground contact without geometry.
• For compositing, a matte/shadow-catcher (VRayMtlWrapper) provides shadows from the dome onto plate footage.

Animation stability

• ADL is flicker-free by design. For secondary GI, Light Cache with default prefiltering remains robust for walk-throughs.
• Lock HDRI rotation once approved; small shifts can change specular highlights across frames.

Troubleshooting

• Flat or washed lighting: check HDRI color space and disable unintended view LUTs during lookdev.
• Speckles from tiny sun pixels: slightly blur the HDRI or reduce extreme hotspots in a copy for lighting while keeping the original for reflections.
• Scale issues: physically correct scene scale improves GI accuracy and noise distribution.

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