Originally posted by undseth Yes, the cylinder in not primary visible. The blue is the camera's background-color. it is just how it looked like. as you dont even need final gather to light it like you had - global illumination and a point light and sphere for sky could do that. no offence meant. but why use the car if you could walk faster and cheaper? Primarily I wonder how to make the hdr image darker. I can lower the lighting produced from that file, but I can't make it get real dark. dont tweak only the lighting of the file. that wont be right. as hdr defines with what f-stop and time you made the picture. if you have one made at daylight, a hdr image at night will be completely differant. but you can adjust the brightness in maya. i figured that you need to make the incalandecence very very very low. just dont use the slider, but go to the color of the incalandecence. set your color model to HSV (more accurate if it comes to intensity). leave hue and saturation at 0 - but "higher" the V (value) to about 0.05. that is a good start to play with the setting. you see it is virtually impossible to place the slider that exact. and from there you need to play with the value (again, dont trust the slider). at least that worked for a hdr image when i played with it.