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Proper HDR Lighting (Remix)

7

reyn_method

Reynante M. Martinez follows up on an article by Greg Zaal on HDR lighting in Blender, and demonstrates further improvements.

Reynante writes:

HDRI- and image-based lighting is simply awesome and highly addicting! This is one of the nicest things that has ever dawned the world of computer graphics. And on that note, I want to share with you something.

I've recently been inspired by Greg Zaal's recent posts (in fact, all of them!) on his blog Adaptive Samples

To be specific, I've really been thrilled by his post titled 'Commonly Ignored Features #2: Proper HDR Lighting'. If you haven't seen that yet, I highly suggest you visit it first before reading any further.

Though it does seem like a plausible solution to the issue, there is something missing, or rather something that was lost.

In the post/article, Greg showed us how to accurately use an HDR image (which is used as an Environment texture), to cast shadows. His technique and workaround is incredible, HOWEVER, I did notice that by using that node setup, the environment lighting/reflection had already been outpowered by the shadows (through a Multiply Math Node), thus reducing the brightness of the reflections/ambient lighting and even darkening/burning the tones, generally.

Link

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

7 Comments

    • I could be wrong, but I think the environment image is always an infinite distance away, and thus it doesn't matter where the camera is. If it did, it would also matter where the objects were and things would only look as they should in the center of the scene.

  1. I could be wrong, but generally CGI is in a linear colour space and we are seeing it in a sRGB monitor so it looks flatter. If you apply the curve corresponding to your display type, would not fix this? It's like looking a logarithmic image and say that the black and white points and gamma are not ok when you haven't done the appropiate colour space conversion...

  2. Lawrence D’Oliveiro on

    I think this is another case where you get better-looking pictures by being physically inaccurate. I suspect if you went out and took an actual photo of a similar scene, the result would look most like the first, straightforward environment-lighting example. I was looking around for measures of sky brightness, and according to Wikipedia, a clear blue sky is about 1/10th the brightness of the Sun itself. And that’s pretty bright. So naturally you’re going to get somewhat diffuse shadows.

    But of course you want it to look more dramatic than that. You can either fiddle around in an image editor (applicable to photos as well as CGI), or (with a CGI model) by pulling tricks with the renderer settings. The latter is what this item is about.

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