Why old designs render with brighter lighting after opening
Learn why an old design's saved environment map silently falls back to Sky and how to spot and fix it.
The environment-map catalogue has been renamed and pruned over time. When a design loads, its saved environment-map name is validated against the current list: a few legacy names are migrated to their new equivalents (skyDusky to Sky Dusky, sataraNight to Satara Night, noonGrass to Noon Grass, and one garden variant), but any name that no longer exists at all falls back to the default 'Sky' map - silently, with no toast or warning. The design still renders fine, just with different (usually brighter, daytime) lighting than the client's original renders. This explains tickets like 'my old project's renders used to look moody and evening-ish; now they come out like daylight and I changed nothing'. Diagnosis: compare the environment-map name recorded in an old render's Gallery info panel against what the render settings show now; if they differ and the old name is missing from the current picker, the fallback happened. The fix is manual: choose the closest current map (night and dusk maps still exist) and re-tune - remembering that selecting a map resets Map Intensity, rotation and sunlight strength to the new map's defaults, so tune those after picking the map.