HDRIs using Vray 1.5 RC3 Renderer in 3DS Max 9

Now lastly, time to put some proper lighting in our scene. While doing this we have to be careful of putting the light approximately where the source of light in your environment image is. We can do this with the help of the image loaded in our viewport. In many machines, when you change the perspective of the scene to find the source of light or do anything, the image doesn't get updated and stays in one postion, so you have to deselect and select the "Show Background" option in the viewport everytime.

In our scene here, as I've loaded a particular HDRI, the source of light in the image, which in this case is the sun, lies somewhere here:

Here in this scene we'll be using a "Target Direct" Light and will be carefully placing it approximately at the same place as the sun by using different viewports to view where the light is being put up.

In this scene, the settings for the Direct Light go something like this:

Be careful to not use a very high intensity which can burn the output, and also to use the color of the light similar to the color of the ambience coming from the HDRI; which in our case here is pale yellowish.

Now when we see the render with the Target Light, it looks like this:

We can see some nice illumination as well as shadow casting taking place.

As we now reach the final stage of our scene lighting, we can do with some higher rendering quality. So open up the render settings again and change the settings something like this.

Remember though that this will take a bit more time, depending also upon the textures that we may give later. If patience is your thing, then you can also tweak the settings further to higher quality :)

Check out a render of this, and we'll see the quality of the output is better.