Environment displays the Environment panel, which is used for setting up atmospheric and background effects.
You can use the environment functions to:
Atmospheres are plug-in components that create lighting effects such as fog, fire, and so on. See Environment dialog for all environment parameters.
One of the limitations of rendering perceptually accurate images is the limited dynamic range of computer monitors. Dynamic range is the ratio of the highest to lowest intensity a monitor can produce. In a dark room this ratio is approximately 100 to 1. In a bright room, this drops to approximately 30 to 1. Real environments can have dynamic ranges of 10,000 to 1, or larger.
Exposure Controls map light-energy values to colors in a process known as tone mapping. They affect the brightness and contrast of both rendered images and viewport displays. They don’t affect the actual lighting levels in the scene, but only how those levels are mapped to a valid display range.
The Environment panel lets you assign and adjust environments such as the scene background and atmospheric effects. It also provides the exposure controls.
Use Fire to produce animated fire, smoke, and explosion effects. Possible uses for Fire effects include campfires, torches, fireballs, clouds, and nebula.
This plug-in effect gives the appearance of fog or smoke. Fog can cause objects to appear to fade as they increase in distance from the camera (standard fog), or can be layered fog that envelops all or parts of objects in a blanket of mist.
Volume Fog provides a fog effect in which the fog density is not constant through 3D space. This plug-in provides effects such as puffy, cloudy fog that appears to drift and break up in the wind.
Volume Light provides light effects based on the interaction of lights with atmosphere (fog, smoke, and so on).
Exposure controls are plug-in components that adjust the output levels and color range of a rendering, as if you were adjusting film exposure. This process is known as tone mapping. These controls are especially useful for renderings that use radiosity, and when dealing with high-dynamic-range (HDR) imagery.
You can create three types of atmospheric apparatuses, or gizmos: box, cylinder, and sphere. These gizmos contain the fog or fire effect in your scene.
