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Environment Setup - Arnold for Katana

Further Reading
See also Environment in the Arnold User Guide

These settings provide control over the background sky and atmosphere (fog or atmosphere_volume).

  • Atmosphere Volume
  • Fog
  • Sky

Atmosphere

There are two types of atmosphere in Arnold, fog, and atmosphere_volume. Fog simulates the effect of light scattering, which causes more distant objects to appear lower in contrast, especially in outdoor environments. Atmosphere_volume simulates light scattered by a thin, uniform atmosphere. It produces shafts of light and volumetric shadows cast from geometric objects.

Note:

It is not possible to render both fog and atmosphere_volume in the same scene.

Fog

This atmospheric shader node simulates the effect of light scattering, which causes more distant objects to appear lower in contrast, especially in outdoor environments.

Atmosphere Volume

This shader simulates light scattered by a thin, uniform atmosphere. It produces shafts of light and volumetric shadows cast from geometric objects. It works with point, spot, and area lights, but not with distant or skylights. This is a scene-wide volume shader (or an atmosphere shader in Arnold's terms).

Contribution parameters

Sky

This shader is intended to be used as a global environment shader (or a background shader in Arnold terms), thus affecting all objects in the scene. By default, it has a simple white color and will illuminate the whole scene evenly using this color. For image-based lighting, use the skydome_light instead.

Important:

> The sky shader is considered deprecated and will be removed in a future release. You should instead use the visibility options on the skydome_light instead.

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