HDRIs using Vray 1.5 RC3 Renderer in 3DS Max 9
So well lastly, we put up some nice textures(quite unnaturally neat in my case :P ) on the whole scene and the final renders will look like this:
I also took a few more renders from other views of the whole scene. Here I Did Not have to change my settings again and again to suit every render, which was achieved due to the uniform ambience from HDRI lighting in our scene
Oh and 1 last but important thing, here how you can achieve a Water texture in your scene. First again open your Material Editor and choose an empty slot dedicated to the object that'll play as water in the scene. Now click on "Standard" Map, which will give you a material browser. Scroll down and choose "VRayMtl" which is short for Vray Material. Now change the diffuse color from the default grey to something like purplish blue or something. Also, in Reflection Map, put a Falloff material.
In the Falloff settings, change the color White to somewhere light grey. You can also change the Falloff type to "Fresnel" according to your reflection needs in the scene. In our case here, we'll use "Perpendicular/Parallel", which means that the part of the water almost perpendicular to the view of the camera will reflect Black or No Reflection and part of the water almost parallel to the camera will reflect Grey or certain level of reflection. If this is to be kept totally white, it gives back full reflection of the environment.
Now again go to the Renderer Settings in your Render Dialogue box, and again scroll down to Environment. Here just below the GI Environment Override, we have "Reflection/refraction environment Override"
Here too you can do the same thing as you did with the GI override, i.e. drag and drop VRayHDRI map in Material editor and loading your HDRI on it, which in our case is the same Snowfield, with a lower intensity
In the end you can do with a good Noise map for the Bump map option.
This gives us the water that we see in our renders here in this scene.
So this is one of the ways how you can achieve a decent realistic output in VRay, by using HDRI Lighting. We also learnt a few basic other things like one of the ways to create water with Vray Material. You can further experiment your own scenes by making may be an interior and using some interior HDRI or something like that :).
Thanks for bearing with me in this tutorial; You can find me on this site here: shashanks18.3dm3.com
Cheers!