Pulling my hair out with hdri
Choppski
Posts: 438
I keep trying to use hdri files, both freebies and the ones I buy here. In spot render, the images are crystal clear, but in the main renders, the backgrounds look just slightly blurry. I have tried in iray and in 3dl, using pruchased presets. I also use Parris' IBL light set. in all cases there is this blurriness. The only option seems to be to render larger than I want and then reduce the image size.
I am just wondering if I am the only one with this issue. On allthe promos for so many of the light sets, the images look crystal clear. I cannot grasp what the issue is. Do I need a special camera setting?
Just really frustrating. I don't mind if the distances look a little blurry, but when stuff right near the person looks out of focus--even with a 16k hdri image, I just don't get it.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
224 S 200 W, Suite #250
Salt Lake City, UT 84101
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Can't clearly recall right now, But, there was a setting on the environment tab for multiplying sphere size. As far as I remember, anything bigger than 1 enlarges the image, causing blurriness. Check that one if it works for you. As I said, I can't recall the exact setting (I'm not at home), so check anything that "multiplies" sizes there.
Also, For the render bluriness, on the filter page for the render, use lancoz or mitchel, values equal to 1 or lower. Never go higher, the higher you go, the more blurred the render result will be. If you go too low, moire will occur on the patterns. Try to find a right balance.
Post some of your settings and we can try from there. I used to have similar issues until I learned how to set it up in a more effecient way.
Ok, these seem to be settings for iray. I will try these. Mine was set to gaussian and 1.5 To be clear though, the people in my renders are not blurry, just the background image.
In 3dL: Progressive off
Buckets horizontal size 16, Sampling max raytrace depth 3, pixel samples 4 shadow sample 41 (and I have tried increasing all of those), Gain 0, Gamma off (and I have tried with it in using Parris tool, and the figures often look awful even with the 2.2 setting he recommends), Shading rate 1, pixel filter Sinc with 6 for x and y.
In Iray it depends because I often use one of my light set's settings. Rendermode is photoreal, the light setting I use bumps up render quality to 2.2., filtering is gaussian at 1.5, so I can change that. Spectral rendering is off, and the rest is default I think.
In 3DL the lower you set shading rate the sharper the image. A shading rate of 1 is pretty high, try 0.1. Also gain should be left at the default 1, gamma correction on with gamma at 2.2 I strongly recommend for a linear workflow. The higher you set pixel filter the blurrier the image. Try the gaussian with a width of 2x2, or use progressive mode, which disables the filter completely (box filter at 1x1) and calls the raytracer, meaning shadow rate is being bypassed. Instead increase the pixel samples a bit if you experience jagged edges. I use 10x10 or 12x12 depending of the camera DoF settings. Stronger DoF requires highter pixel samples.
Thanks for teh suggestions but still having the same problem. The figure rendering is better with your settings but the background image is blurry.
I had an issue with HDRIs being blurry when I would do a render. For example, I would set up a scene to render in Quad HD (2560 X 1440) and use a 4k HDRI, thinking it was more than enough resolution. Then I read this article (http://blog.gregzaal.com/2016/02/23/what-makes-good-hdri/) that talks about lots of HDRI aspects. In the section it recommends that the minimum resolution for a 1920 X 1080 render that shows the background would be 14000X7000, based on multiplying the width of the render in pixels by the percentage of 360 of the field of view (in this case 1920*(100/14). Rather than do all that math, I started using 16k HDRIs minimum (even for Quad HD) and the background comes out much clearer.
My rule of thumb is that if I am only using the HDRI for lighting, and don't have any surfaces that would clearly reflect it, then I use 2k just to get the light. If I am showing the background, I use 16k for 1080 and above.
I agree about using 16k HDRIs. But many of them have built in DoF to some degree, so if you're using them with a shadowcatcher/ground shadows, the ground where the figure is standing will be too blurred no matter render settings. So my advice would be using some geometry in the center of the scene + using DoF to blend in the background/HDRI.
I think the issue is 3dl and Parris' IBL set up. I used a 16k HDRI in iray and it came out crystal clear. But us it in the IBL for either iray or 3dl and it gets blurry. The problem is that I like using hdri in my 3dl renders as background and ground, With most, the blurriness is not SOO bad when the image is not enlarged to full size. Since the main figures are clear there is no real problem. ANd yes, if I use some ground prop then the DoF effect is actually nice.
Oh an my other problem is the 16k hdris, especially from dimension theory. Running one of those ALONE in iray and there goes most of my memory. I don't see how I could a figure in with it. I might go back to the oldfashioned route and use them to run a few nice background images. Still it sucks.
As for the IBL prop item, well, It took me more then 6 months of use before I noticed it (and mostly because a couple of hdri files I paid for were not as clear as they should have been.
Hm I wonder if there's a compression/converting issue or something going on? You could ask him in the IBLM commercial thread
Did you try turning off Environment lighting blur in the environment setting?
Is that for iray or 3dl?
Change your texture size compressions. It compresses the HDRI images, for some odd reason. The one thing you NEVER want compressed. (Shrinks it to a default of 512/1024 or "max 1024x1024", or something crazy, then blows it back up to actual size, for rendering. Leaves 8x8 or 4x4 or 16x16 odd cube patterened blurry texturing on the HRDI, or any image that is above 1024x1024.)
Min/Max threshold sizes, In the ADVANCED tab, at the top... set both of them to 4096, which is what most HDRI images are, if not larger. (However, that will allow ALL images in the scene to be 4096x4096, including skins, eyes, fingernails and all sorts of other things that SHOULDN'T ever be that size. But, who follows standards?)
Set it to 8192, for the 8K HDRI images (or larger)
That will remove the "checkerboarding gradients", from the poor scale-resizing code that Daz uses. It doesn't scale-up correctly, from a scaled-down image. Leaves an abnormal cube-gradient with a trangular top-left to bottom-right shade/tone discoloration.
I wish they had an option to "Not compress", specific objects images. Like the torso, which has as much detail as a pupil or fingernail, in some models. You want the pupil or fingernails images to compress, not the body/skin. Or HDRI background, or a background-plane, or a water-plane, or a landscape...
It's for iray, I never use 3dl anymore... also, thanks JD for that bit of info!
you lost me. do I do this in the texture panel or in the rendering panel? Cna I do it JUST for teh hdri file?
wait I just checked. This is for iray. I will keep this in mind for iray. But I am most concerned with 3dl.
I think I discovered the issue, at least with 3dl but probably period since I use Parris' IBL prop to help with iray. The dome size needs to be larger. I have always thought the hdri dome seemed small, but if I make it larger the image gets clearer even in the foreground. Not too large but larger than the default load.
Apologies, I made it smaller not larger. reduces the radius to the background is more distant.