While HDRI's are great to capture the general lighting conditions of a scene, they cannot account for geometry and lighting conditions at a close distance. Paul Chambers illustrates this issue and offers a way to solve this, creating much more realistic renders.
Here's a tutorial that I hope others will find helpful that demonstrates how to squeeze additional power out of your HDRI set ups in animated and CG integrated projects and give you much more convincing lighting in the process...
3 Comments
Really great tutorial! Thanks for sharing!
Fantastic tutorial. I really appreciate the writing style. Easy to read, fun and informative. Something I do know and implement, but showed me a couple of new techniques to add to my repertoire. Thanks!
Thanks both for your kind feedback. This was actually my first Blender tutorial. I wanted to wait until I felt I could cover something that hadn't been covered several times by other much more experienced folks.