Environment Tab

PHYSICAL SKY

SKY SETTINGS
Turbidity: describes the scattering of the atmosphere that is caused by haze.
Ozone: Defines the amount of ozone gas in the atmosphere. Values higher than 0.35 will give the sky a blue color.
Water Vapor: Describes the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere.
Turbidity Coefficient: This is the power for exponential transmittance for atmospheric aerosol.
Wavelength Exponent: This number shows the average size of the particles in the atmosphere.
Albedo: Albedo option can influence the overall appearance of the sky. High albedo values can occur for example in winter scenes by the snow reflectance while small values occur at environment with grass. Especially in cases with high turbidity settngs, changing the albedo value changes the overall brightness of the sky.

SUN SETTINGS
Color: Defines the color of the Sun.
Soft Shadow: Enables/Disables soft shadows for the Sun.
Soft Shadow > Radius Multiplier: Defines how soft the shadows will be. High values will give softer shadows.
Power (W/nm/sr): Defines the intensity of the Sun.
Efficacy (lm/W): Defines the energy loss of the Sun. Lower values means more energy loss.

UNIFORM ILLUMINATION

Enable: Enables or Disables Uniform Illumination
Color: Define the color that will be used to light the scene.
Intensity: Controls the overall intensity of Uniform Illumination.

IMAGE BASED LIGHTING

Image‐based lighting (IBL) is a convenient way to add illumination to your scene, coming from captured photos of the surrounding environment. Since a photo of a real scene can be used, the lighting is highly convincing and enhances the realism of your renders. In most cases, the images used for this kind of lighting need to be of high dynamic range (hdr) in order to provide enough lighting for a scene.
Enable: Enables or Disables Uniform Illumination
Texture: Specify the image you want to use for illumination.
Wrapping: Specifies the wrapping of the inserted image.
Rotation: Rotates the image according to the camera view we want.
Intensity: Adjusts the intensity of the inserted image.

BACKGROUND MAPPING

We can specify the background mapping of our scene. This means that even if we have used already an image for illumination (which is also used as a background), we can now specify another one for background and overwrite the one that was used.
Options are the same as in Image Based Lighting.

REFLECTION MAPPING

User can specify the reflection mapping. If we do not enable this option, reflections are according to the map inserted at the IBL panel.
Options are the same as in Image Based Lighting.

REFRACTION MAPPING

The exact same things that we described at the Reflection Mapping are valid for the Refraction Mapping panel.
Options are the same as in Image Based Lighting.

GLOBAL MEDIUM

Enable: Enables or disables Global Medium
Index of Refraction: Specifies the index of refraction of the global space of the scene.
Absorption Color: Defines the transmittance color – this is actually the color visualized after a distance of 1 meter.
Absorption Texture: Defines the transmittance color using a texture as an input– this is actually the color visualized after a distance of 1 meter.
Scatter Color: Defines the scattering color – this is the color that bounced particles (in the medium) have.
Scatter Texture: Defines the scattering color using a texture as an input – this is the color that bounced particles (in the medium) have.
Absorption Density: Defines the density of absorption in 1/m units. The higher this density the higher the absorption.
Absorption Texture: Defines the density of absorption in 1/m units using a texture as an input. The higher this density the higher the absorption.
Scatter Density: Defines the density of scattering in 1/m units. The higher this density the higher the scattering.
Phase Function: Defines the variation of outgoing radiance over the sphere of directions and it is the medium analog of a bi‐directional scattering distribution function.
Assymetry: defines the asymmetry parameter of Henyey‐Greenstein phase functi􀀵on. This parameter is unitless and takes values from –1 (totally back scattering) to 1 (totally front scattering).