[3Delight] Environment Light Demystified

Hi All,

I am still playing around with the 3Delight exporter.
There is a shader called envlight which can be used to light the environment. However, it always returns black unless you specify an environment map. The exporter does not seem to make environment maps for you. So in order to use the envlight you have to manually convert your .JPG or TIFF (PNG not supported) image into .TLD file that 3Delight can process as an environment map when rendering.

This involves issuing commands at the command line. This assumes that sky_midafternoon.jpg is a long/lat map, like the ones you can get from the free hi-res sky post.

tdlmake -envlatl sky_midafternoon.jpg sky_midafternoon.tdl

the program that does the conversion, tdlmake, comes with 3Delight.

Once you have a TLD environment map you can use it in many places. There are a lot of shaders that will accept/require an environment map.

Here is the train scene lit by the sky_midafternoon.tdl environment map at 81% intensity.

With AO turned on: