I recently switched from maya vray/mentalray to mantra. Everytime I was rendering interior scene with hdri I was selecting "infinite" in ibl tab. That option is disabling virtual infinite and is going to finite mode [and you can control scale of your enviroment sphere, you can also translate objects to be in proper places in scene].
Now I want achive same thing in mantra and I believe it won't be some super hard thing. Any advices?
Peter Quint basically covers everything you need for a good start. Beside rendering tutorials, he also has lots and lots of other very usefull tutorials worth taking a look. Mantra in general is in my opinion not so intuitiv and straight forward as Vray is, but if you manage mental ray, you will manage mantra aswell!
Peter Quint basically covers everything you need for a good start. Beside rendering tutorials, he also has lots and lots of other very usefull tutorials worth taking a look. Mantra in general is in my opinion not so intuitiv and straight forward as Vray is, but if you manage mental ray, you will manage mantra aswell!
Sorry, but I think u misunderstood me. I know basics of mantra, but I need to change "behaviour" of environment light. So, I'll explain it: when you casts rays from your hdri by default u cast it from infinity. You can place your objects in 1000;1000;423423 and that object will be still in the center of hdri [the place where u took hdri]. Alias solved that problem really easy - they gave possibilty to disable infinity mode and go on in finite mode - now your hdri can cast rays from sphere for example. That's it what I am looking for.
I was lookin' for that option in interface options of envlight, nothing found.
Also I went 1 step down in enviroment light and changed null to sphere - I thought it did the thing [when I rotated sphere the rotation of hdri was also rotated], but still - rays are casting from infinite.
oh...sorry for that missunderstanding but now i get it. Eventhough, I'm afraid I have no idea how to solve your particular problem
I also took a quick look at the env-light and couldnt find a simple switch or so for your requested feature.
You can edit environment light in a way, since it's internally a digital asset, corresponding light shader and some soho python hooks, but I don't think this is a first option here. As a simplest try you could take a look on the Geometry Light with Sphere object and plug HDR via texture map parm. This is the same as taking any geometry with a shader emitting light (Ce export), but perhaps better filtered in path tracing via MIS (?).
(...) It was late, late in the evening, the lovers they were gone; The clocks had ceased their chiming, and the deep river ran on.