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I am doing a scene, where I need to have a environmental texture as the background,and that texture is called an equirectangular map. I also need to have a volume lighting in the world as well. But when I add both the enviromental texture and the volume lighting, and when I render, I get a pure black render, with nothing on it.

These are my material notes for the world.

enter image description here

Does anybody, know if its possible to have both an environmental map, and volume lighting ? If so, how can I do it ?

Thank You

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The light coming from environment map is infinitely far away, so it get's absorbed by any amount of volume.

Build a sky dome - sphere big enough with inverted normals. Assign and emission shader with environment texture node plugged into it with the hdr.

Set your volumetric environment like you want.

Tadaa! And yes, expect your render times to be infinite, hope you don't have any glass or glossy in the scene.)

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  • $\begingroup$ Hello, thanks for the answer. Unfortunately I do have glass in my scene, for the headlights of my vehicle. When I render it, I get a lot of fireflies, even with a lot of samples, any ideas what I can do ? $\endgroup$ – Viktor Raspberry Oct 27 '15 at 15:15
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    $\begingroup$ @ViktorRaspberry For this you need bi-directional path tracing, which cycles doesn't offer yet. You can try LuxRender, Mitsuba or a commercial solution. $\endgroup$ – Jaroslav Jerryno Novotny Oct 27 '15 at 16:18
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    $\begingroup$ @ViktorRaspberry Or you could compromise the image quality for the speed and use some heavy clamping in the Sampling render section. I guess your environment volumetrics are already set to homogeneous. Here are some render speed tests: adaptivesamples.com/2014/03/14/world-volume-tests $\endgroup$ – Jaroslav Jerryno Novotny Oct 27 '15 at 16:23
  • $\begingroup$ Thank You, can you explain for me, what is the difference between homogeneous volumetrics and heterogeneous ? $\endgroup$ – Viktor Raspberry Oct 27 '15 at 18:49
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    $\begingroup$ @ViktorRaspberry the homogeneous can have only the same density everywhere. The heterogeneous density can be influenced with (for example) a 3D noise texture so there are areas with less density and areas more dense. It renders also much much slower. $\endgroup$ – Jaroslav Jerryno Novotny Oct 27 '15 at 19:15

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