More than happy to contribute! :)

Solved my problem after watching a lot of the support videos (very useful, especially the combined one, but didn't glean anything about my problem) and looking through various help pages - I eventually came across a page about legacy workflows for Maxwell, which isn't something I use but there was a big clue in there.

I'll put it simply in case anyone else encounters the problem I was having.

The mistake I was making was that I was loading a scene in Maya then hitting the HDRLS start connection button on the shelf, which automatically creates the skydome and initialises the connection. This isn't the way to do it.

The solution for me was the following steps:

• create a skydome manually (rename it although not necessary for this to work)
• make the rotation adjustment (.rx=90)
• connect a Maya file node outColour output to the skydomeShape node color input
• assign a (random) .exr file in the file node
• then hit the connection button

The hook modal window identifies the skydome and names the hook after the shape name.

Hit the OK button and it all works as expected :party: