Okay, here is a quick tutorial that covers the new light dome that is new with Strata CX. For all of you who read about all those other expensive apps having global illumination, that's exactly what this is.

This is my scene for this little tutorial. It contains a camera, a beach with a sand texture, the standard beach ball that comes with CX and water with the water texture that comes with CX.

The first thing I do is shut off or turn down the modeling light. I will be rendering in Raydiosity so I won't need any other light source, if you want to render with raytracing then you should put a light in your scene.

Now let's select the image for the light dome. I chose one that is already built in to CX. If you have a .HDRI image, or any other kind, then you will want to select the "new" selection in the drop down. Then you can load your image. For this tutorial I chose HQ-Hawaiian Sky.

Okay, now what CX has done, is that it has made a dome around your whole scene with the HQ-Hawaiian Sky image. You will not be able to see it in your modeling window but it's there. In the old versions of strata pro we had to actually make the dome with geometry but now CX has it built in.

You can tilt the dome with the little red and green dots on the sphere widget. Just click and drag them around to re-orient your dome. I also cranked up the intensity to 200%. The slider only goes to 100% so you will need to type in 200% and hit the enter key.

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So let's choose our visible background. Choose the same image that you chose for the light dome, it will match the lighting and make it more realistic.

Now choose the Reflect map so that if you have anything reflective in the scene it will reflect the same as what is seen in the background.

Here is a quick look at my render settings. Nothing special for this quick tutorial.

Here is my final render. There is allot to play with when you are using the light dome. This tutorial should help you get your head around the new tool.