Iray HDR Beauty Canvases, and light scale.
SlickSHWart
Posts: 14
Hopefully someone here knows the answer to this. I searched high and low, but there seems to be a great deal on confusion with regards to HDR, HDRi, and HDR tone mapping, and that makes actually finding what I am looking for rather difficult.
What I'm looking for is a way to lower the internal light scale. I render with tone mapping disabled, so at the most basic level, I would like like the render window to not show a blown-out over-exposed supernova, but something that can actually be seen. Yes, I know I can take the resulting Canvas exr file and lower the exposure by 10-13 stops and then it'll look better, but 1) I'd rather not have to do that, and 2) even after lowering the exposure, it seems Daz is clipping data on the brighter end of the light scale.
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Comments
I'm guessing you have the camera headlight on. You can turn it off in the Camera settings or in the Render settings. Frankly you should just turn the Headlamp off permanently in the Render Settings>General>Auto Headlamp>Never dropdown. The headlamp works like a built in flahs on a camera and is never a better solution than using an "off camera" light.
Beyond that, you can control the HDRI brrightness in the Render Settings>Environment tab. The Environment Map tab has a slider that will change lighting. There is also an Environment Intensity Slider just above the Environment Map tab that can also be used to adjust the scene.
Yeah as fastbike mentioned I simply lower my environment map value from 1.00 or 2.00 down until things are just a bit darker than I would want because it will come out very light when opened up for editing. Sometimes I have had to go down as low as .003 or so for the environment. I also do the same for any lights in the scene if I use more than just and HDR.
@fastbike1 & @shaneseymourstudio, that's not what he's asking. He's talking about EXR files and how, when you render a Beauty Canvas and open it, you get an overblown white image whose exposure you have to edit down many stops to get a decent looking image. Personally, I have no idea how you would go about achieving that with tone mapping disabled though. Is there a good reason why you're disabling it?
" I would like like the render window to not show a blown-out over-exposed supernova, but something that can actually be seen"
That is what he asked about. To see the image without it being over-exposed/supernova, but can be seen...I simply turn down the environment/hdr(i) so that it becomes visible. That is what was asked or interest expressed.
Not sure if this is helpful, but I render to Beauty Canvases all the time. At first glance the image appears to be blown out in almost every case.
However when I open that EXR file in Photoshop (or most any graphics software capable of opening an EXR), I can then adjust the over all brightness and "develop" the image, so to speak.
I can't control the individual light sources, but I can control the over all luminosity.
However, my main window (standard render) still renders at one light level without being blown out. If your main window is overexposed, you may have a different issue going on.
I'll hit these point by point:
1) The headlamp has nothing to do with the question I'm asking.
2) I am talking about how disabling tone mapping over-exposes the output EXR.
3) I'm disabling tone mapping because:
a: The Daz iray tone mapper is garbage. I'd rather tone map in a dedicated program like DarkTable.
b: Even with 32-bit canvases enabled, if you have the tone mapper enabled, you will still not get the full dynamic range of the render. You must disable tone mapping to get the full range.I'm just trying to figure out a way to make working this way more intuitive.
4) Lowering the scene lights is what I'm doing now, but it requires more than just changing the environmant render settings, every light in the scene has to be lowered at an even proportional scale. The only easy way to do this that I have found is to set up a scene with the tone mapper enabled and at roughly default settings, then disable the tone mapper, and finally use Iray light manager to do a blanket 1/10 multiplication across all lights in the scene before rendering. This is the irritating itch I am trying to scratch.
Yeah I have not found a better way other than what you are already doing with tone mapping off. What I ended up doing most of the time now is to leave tone mapping on and to change the settings to make it so that it is linear so that I do not have to do all that adjusting. Crush blacks = 0, Highlights = 1 and gamma 1...alternately I also will put gamma at 2.2 and leave the blacks and whites as before and get the look I want on final project and still render to canvases.
Well, I was hoping to find people out there with more expert knowledge of HDR rendering. Alas, this thread has thus far only confirmed my fears; I'm as much an expert as anyone else already.