Environment and Exposure Settings

You use the Environment panel to set up atmospheric and background effects, as well as exposure control.

• Standard menu: Rendering menu > Environment > Environment and Effects dialog > Environment panel
• Enhanced menu: Rendering menu > Environment and Effects > Environment and Exposure Settings > Environment and Effects dialog > Environment panel

You can use the environment functions to:

• Set and animate the background color.
• Use an image in the background of the rendered scene (screen environment) or use texture maps as spherical, cylindrical, or shrink-wrap environments.
• Set and animate the ambient light.
• Use atmospheric plug-ins, such as volumetric light, in the scene.
• Apply exposure controls to renderings.

Atmospheres

Atmospheres are plug-in components that create lighting effects such as fog, fire, and so on. See Environment dialog for all environment parameters.

Exposure Controls

One of the limitations of rendering perceptually accurate images is the limited dynamic range of computer monitors. Dynamic range is the ratio of the highest to lowest intensity a monitor can produce. In a dark room this ratio is approximately 100 to 1. In a bright room, this drops to approximately 30 to 1. Real environments can have dynamic ranges of 10,000 to 1, or larger.

Exposure Controls map light-energy values to colors in a process known as tone mapping. They affect the brightness and contrast of both rendered images and viewport displays. They don’t affect the actual lighting levels in the scene, but only how those levels are mapped to a valid display range.