Increase light in a HDR lit scene
Widdershins Studio
Posts: 556
in The Commons
I'm using a dome with HDR to light my scene.
I found that I can increase the light in Tone Mapping, but this also affects the HDR image.
Is there a way to increase the light generated from the HDR so that it more brightly lights the scene but leaves the background image (on the dome) the same ?
Thanks.
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Comments
P.S. This is with Iray.
Have you tried adjusting the intensity and/or lighting resolution in the environment tab? Not sure but this might have the effect you're looking for rather than the tone mapping settings which tend to lean more towards increasing/decreasing the amount of light the camera let's in overall.
I've been struggling to find a way to do this as well because I have lots of sky only HDRis that are turning out waaaaay too dark in Iray by default.
Adjusting the lighting resolution won't affect the brightness of the lighting. Not from my experience anyway. Adjusting the 'Environment Intensity' setting will make things brighter, but at the cost of washing out the HDRI image.
The best compromise I've found is to increase the value under 'Environment Map' (which is also where you load the HDRI into render settings). It still washes out the background image a bit, but not as much as with 'Environment Intensity'.
I'd be interested to hear if anyone knows of a better way than this? Other than just adding some extra non-HDRI lights to the scene, of course.
I know this is a kludge but, what if you render the scene twice? Render it once with the tone mapping normal, and everything off BUT the HDR image. Then turn all the objects back to visible, turn the HDR image off, save as PNG for the transparent background, and render it again with increased tone mapping exposure. Then in PS or your favorite photo software, composite them.
If it is a bright background and a dark foreground getting it right will only be a compromise. A camera isn't the same as our eyes and can't cope very well with the large difference in light values.
Not all HDRI have the dynamic range for lighting you may want.
Yes, I have the same experience that tl155180 reports above.
At the moment this seems the best way, but I thought there would be something built in.
Are you using a physical dome or plugging the HDR into the Iray 'dome'?
Out of curiosity what HDR are you using? As pointed out earlier in the thread, some just don't have the required lighting information to work effectively how we'd maybe like them to.
I'm using the Iray dome.
It's one I made with Google Photosphere of my back garden. It was a dull day, but the light it's generating for the scene is still too low to look effective or match that of the HDR image.
Did you create the image with multiple exposure levels? One needs to do the series of shots with a very wide range of exposures and combine them properly in HDR software for the 'HDR.' A common issue with HDRs is that people don't include a wide enough exposure gamut to create a proper HDR.
Yes I've used bracketing recently with my full camera with reasonable results but nothing I can yet use in Daz as I can't find anything cheap to make the 360 x 180 degrees image. I have stitching software but can only do regular horizontal panoramas with it.
Photosphere is so much easier and produces something useable in Daz. My phone does shoot HDR in normal mode but not in Photosphere mode. So what I did was use some software to create the HDR from the JPG - by simulating multiple exposures. It works reasonably well, I still need to practice with it, I've only just started.
If I could control the level of light generated by the HDR but keep the image in the background the same then it would be fine.
For stitching the images and making the pano map...
http://hugin.sourceforge.net/download/
And for creating the HDR out of those panos...
http://qtpfsgui.sourceforge.net/?page_id=2
Yep like I said I've already gone down that road, but thanks for the thought :)
Try this one.
http://www.kolor.com
Does various ones including mirror ball, spherical, planer and others. I did it with a straight pano of mine using 32 exposures using the mirror ball render, but that obviously didn't work properly as the two ends didn't meet up.