How do i remove a Skydome?

DDCreate

When using 2 environments I purchased, my renders are pitch black. I was advised that this was because they had Sky Domes and those aren't compatible when rendered in Iray which is my preffered render engine. I was told that I need to basically ignore the lightsets that came with these environments and set up my own which is fine. I'm not opposed to putting forth effort. What's upsetting is that even when I set up a lighting system it still renders black. When buying an environment, it never says on the Description Page "Not compatible with Iray without 6hrs of workarounds" so I'm playing Russian Roulette with my purchases. Am I being a little dramatic? Yeah probably but it's just frustrating to have to spend money and  half my time in Daz defusing issues instead of just doing the fun part. This is supposed to be fun! On the plus side, most issues are pretty simple to fix but still! A lot of my frustration comes from the fact that I'm using a dinosaur laptop at the moment and I never know something is wrong until 30mins (at 9%) into my render that i just spent an hour on. I'm just venting at this point I guess.

Back on topic! How do I do an Iray Render in environments like this? And please, talk to me like I don't know anything because I really don't. Mucho respect to you Daz pros but saying something like "Use mesh specularity in conjunction with your bit mapping after you eliminate your lighting defusers and you'll achieve the desired opacity."  is not really helpful. I love you guys, I'm just having a hard time. I just want to have fun and make pictures. Please help.

jestmart

A skydome will be an object in the Scene pane, right-click on it and choose delete.  If there is anything parented to it select it or them and right-click and choose un-parent before deleting.

kaotkbliss

what is happening is the "sun" is outside the dome so the dome is blocking the light from the sun.

What you can do is select the dome and apply the iray base to give it iray properties. Then you turn on emmissive for the dome to make it a light source.

 

Many people don't like that method so there are other things (which I've never done) like cutting holes in the skydome, lowering the opacity so it is see-through, etc.

 

Probably the easiest thing is to select the skydome from the layout tree and hit delete. Then what I do is I find the image that the sydome used (or another sky image if the skydome's is unusable) and place that in the enviornment tab. Then the sun can light your scene and your background has the sky image.

Most people use HDRI images, but I don't know anything about those yet.

DDCreate

Thank you both. I will give this a try. I am just perplexed because i don't see why the sun should matter. The scene I'm using is indoor and has 6 overhead flourescent lights as part of the scene. That is where I mounted my spot lights. They don't emit light themselves, they're just props really.  I mean, if it's midnight outside and you turn on lights inside, you get light. I figured it would be the same in Daz Studios. But thank you again for the direction. I've been bummed that I can't use these environments.

Fishtales

Use the lights by finding them in the scene tab and in the surface tab set them to emit light using the Emissive Shader. Set them to Emission Temperature-4500; Set Luminance to Watts-65 and Efficacy to 15.  Then set the Tone Mapping to get the light settings you want.

This image of mine is only lit by Emissive Shader set on all the light fittings and the monitors.

Click on image for full size.