HDRIs using Vray 1.5 RC3 Renderer in 3DS Max 9

Now, this is not going to do any good to us, as here we don't have any option to load a specific HDRI. This will keep the VrayHDRI map empty! So what we do is; open the 3Ds Max Material Editor(shortcut key M) and in an empty material slot drag and drop this VRayHDRI map from the renderer to this slot and say "Instance".

This brings up the VrayHDRI map in your Material Editor, where you can play around with the map, and as it has been Instanced with that in the Renderer, every settings you do will get reflected in the rendering output. So, click on browse and load whichever HDRI is suitable for you. I'll go ahead and select "Snowfield" here.

When you have selected the HDRI, select "Spherical Environment" in the "Map Type" section on your Vray HDRI map.

Also, now that we're going to have a certain Global Illumimation through the HDRI in the scene, we can go ahead and Switch OFF the "Default Lights" option in the "Global Switches" section of our Renderer settings, else our lighting in the output will go awkward.

Now lets take a quick render of this.

We can clearly see here that the ambience of the scene has been affected. It has more of the ambience of the HDRI now . Though we still don't have good shadows and proper lighting, but this is what HDRI lighting is for; for ambience and realistic feel to the scene's lighting. Lets see one quick render of what happens when we change the Intensity Multiplier of the HDRI in the material editor.