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The Dome light shines inward at the scene as if from a spherical or hemispherical light source outside the scene extents. This light is frequently used for Image-Based lighting using panoramic HDR images used as environments.

UI Path: ||V-Ray|| > V-Ray Lights > Dome LightImage Removed

Enabled – Turns the LightDome Dome Light on and off.

Color – Specifies the color of the light rays and of the light source itself when visible in renderings.

Intensity – Multiplier for the light color Color.

Dome Spherical – When enabled (the default), the dome light Dome Light covers the entire sphere around the scene. When disabled, the light covers a hemisphere only.

Dome Adaptive – Speeds up the rendering by optimizing the sampling algorithm for the dome light. No light portals are needed with this setup. Light Cache must be set as the GI engine for this feature.

Finite Dome

Finite Dome – When enabled, changes the way the Dome Light is calculated so that it emulates a dome with a physical size in the scene. This is useful when we need to introduce some parallax for the background when moving the camera and also to project the light texture on the ground. The finite dome consists of a ground plane, a hemispherical upper part and a transition area between the two.

Finite Radius – Determines the radius of the Finite Dome.

Projection Height – Offsets the height of the environment map projection.

Finite Ground Blend – Controls the transition between the ground plane and the hemispherical upper part of the Finite domeDome. A value of 0.0 means a sharp transition, whereas a value of 1.0 means that the dome morphs into a sphere. Intermediate values blend between the two.

Invisible – Controls whether the shape of the light source is visible in the resulting render. When disabled, the source light is rendered in the current light color, otherwise, the light source itself is not visible in the scene.

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Shadows – Enables or disables the tracing of shadows.

Shadow Bias – Moves the shadow toward or away from the shadow-casting object (or objects). Higher values move the shadow toward the object (s) while lower values move it away. If this value is too extreme, shadows can "leak" through places they shouldn't or "detach" from an object. Other effects from extreme values include Moire patterns, out-of-place dark areas on surfaces, and shadows not appearing at all in the renderingrender.

Shadow Color – A multiplier for Controls the shadows color. color of shadows for this light. Note that anything different from black is not physically correct. This options is not available with V-Ray GPU.

Let's first add a Light Mix Render Element to the scene. Go to V-Ray menu > Render Elements and select the Light Mix Render Element by dragging it into the central panel.

You can enable more than one Dome light.

Now render the scene. The light setup is available in the VFB - pick and choose between the dome lights from the Light Mix rollout.

You can also combine different HDRI textures by adjusting the light intensity of the dome lights.

The resulting lighting scenarios can be saved as presets.