I had been working with revit on a project for school and I decided to take it into 3ds max for rendering and one thing I noticed on the mental ray physical sky is an additonal node onto the haze attribute that is called adsk hemispherical map and it had an openEXR file from revit attached to it for the background. one thing i was wondering is how to access this node without having to import a revit fbx. I cant find it anywhere in the mental ray extensions but it work so im assuming its something thats hidden just like the mi exposure simple node (since the added photographic exposure control they hide this one for some reason). just figured i would see if anyone knew how to unhide the adsk hemispherical mental ray extention so i could using natively in 3dsmax without importing a revit fbx?

I didn’t know there was a hemispherical map until I read this.
It wasn’t difficult to find.
Add the # to disable the hidden.

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Anyone know how to use it? I just tried it and it renders green.

EDIT: It works as a haze map in physical sky, is that what it’s intended for? Just wondered why it’s green.
It could be useful ‘cos the sky maps are usualy hemisphereical. I normaly set them to mirror and offset them to appear right.

thanks, what the shader lets you do is attach a hemispherical map onto the haze which gives the appearance of clouds in the sky. ill play with it to see. seems to work best with hdri’s or open exr files. i attached a jpg of my scene results and the openexr map set to rgb level 10. I’m gonna keep playing with this thing to see if i can use it as a background stuff.

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In my experience, using this sky in an imported Revit model really slowed down the renders.  I think swapping this sky with a standard mrPhysical Sky changed the render times from two minutes to a minute and a half or so.  Pretty significant if you’re doing an animation.

3DS Max Design 2011 64-bit - Advantage Pack
Dell Precision T5500, Dual Six Core Xeon X5650 @ 2.67GHz, nVidia Quadro 5000, 24 GB RAM, Win 7 Enterprise 64-bit
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Does it harm the render time if you apply it from within max? I already re-hid this shader cos it caused me a load error with the Fast SSS Skin + shader, That’s not the standard one but the new variation that Zap did to combine A&D features with it:-
http://mentalraytips.blogspot.com/2008_04_01_archive.html
I like it. No idea why it happens, but now there may be another reason not to use hemisphere sky.

I use these coord settings to get the same effect.

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I never tried adding it within Max.  We almost always add our skies in post production.

3DS Max Design 2011 64-bit - Advantage Pack
Dell Precision T5500, Dual Six Core Xeon X5650 @ 2.67GHz, nVidia Quadro 5000, 24 GB RAM, Win 7 Enterprise 64-bit
Minneapolis, MN, USA