I've been out of touch with the advancements of various techniques recently, as most of my work has been in PHP/MySQL. But when I had the chance to sit down with Maya 7, I noticed a new option in mentalRay's Render Globals tab - Image Based Lighting. Clicking Create will create a new Image Based Lighting node, and make it active in the Attribute Editor:


Attribute Editor: Image Based Lighting

This new option takes all of the hard work away from lighting with HDR. The default options are fine for basic rendering, and all you need to do is select an HDR image for the environment.

Apart from making set-up a whole lot quicker, another benefit is that render times are drastically reduced. Notice that the physical object is a sphere; this does not need to surround your entire scene. mentalRay assumes that this is your intention anyway, and you can happily tuck this object out of the way.

So, since this new option has essentially made my previous tutorial defunct, I'd better do something to salvage it! On the next page, we'll learn how to create our own HDR images, instead of being stuck with photographic captures.