[snowdogg]

Greetings! Would anyone know how to change the background so it would be black as opposed to gradient gray BUT still have the same ambient light quality? I think its gradient gray because Skydome is using my white background (per my scene in Sketchup). Would I have to setup something like a black HDRI to achieve this?

[JDHill]

The official way, if I understand correctly what you are after, and if you are using Maxwell Render Suite, would be to enable the Alpha channel. A pseudo-hack way, in the case that you are using the Standalone plugin, and similar to what you guessed, would be to switch to Image Based Environment, don't assign any HDRI, set Active Sky to Skydome, and set only the Illumination channel to use Active Sky. Doing that, I have to adjust the camera exposure a bit, but the result is quite similar to the alpha-based approach.

[snowdogg]

The official way, if I understand correctly what you are after, and if you are using Maxwell Render Suite, would be to enable the Alpha channel. A pseudo-hack way, in the case that you are using the Standalone plugin, and similar to what you guessed, would be to switch to Image Based Environment, don't assign any HDRI, set Active Sky to Skydome, and set only the Illumination channel to use Active Sky. Doing that, I have to adjust the camera exposure a bit, but the result is quite similar to the alpha-based approach.

Thanks for the tip! Yes, I am using your standalone plugin. I'll give this a shot.