HDRI Sharp shadows

[sjonsjine]

or just an extra slider to blur the shadows? (no blur - blurry)

Sjonsjine

[Proupin]

Let's see, the sun has an area, which creates the soft shadows aka PENUMBRA (it doesn't hurt to use the right terms), if the sun was bigger the shadows would be softer, that is a more pronounced penumbra. Which is something nice to control (the sun size) to accentuate (or decrease) the effect of penumbra.

One curiosity, the shape of the sun's shadow is normally round; in forming eclipses the shape of the shadow is a half moon. It's really neat.

[e343mg]

Hey,
Just jumping real quick on this conversation. I just purchased a licence octane to use for sculpture visualization, and I'm very excited about the results im getting with the renderer. I've been working as a freelance animator for a while, and it seems the whole sibl system by hdrlabs is a fairly standard workflow for dealing with hdri lighting on small scale jobs. Not sure if this could be implemented within octane, but just wanted to toss that out there.

-e.

[radiance]

Hey,

we have it already on our list.
probably in a few months.

Radiance

[hmk]

Well, I think I prefer Radiance solution, I like sharp directional shadows, and HDRI's usually don't really have a true high range, thus creating soft not directional shadows, I just bought 2 hdris from Peter Guthrie http://www.peterguthrie.net/blog/2010/02/hdri-skies/ that I'm using in my current project, and I have to say that they are over the top, but even those won't render really sharp shadows (much, much better than the average) , not in octane not in others, and the best solution, at least in my opinion, is a combo directional light + HDRI.
Just my 2 cents

kubo: I was looking for a good HDRI for my project and found your post, just bought one from him too, very very nice HDRI, Thanks.

[sam75]

sibl should do it I think.

[Proupin]

Sharper shadows in Hdri, yes. This tutorial is a must-read: http://bertrand-benoit.com/blog/2010/02 ... -lighting/... basically, you adjust the gamma of the hdri to get sharper shadows out of brighter areas...

[radiance]

there's a gamma control on our image nodes,
but it might not have the correct min/max limits.
if not, let me know and i can raise/change them.

Radiance

[kubo]

@hmk, I'm glad you liked them, he's a very talented artist, I've learned a lot with his tutorials and I had heard great things of his HDRI's so I bought one to test it out and a few days later I got another one both for my latest job, I know I'll get more in the future
@Proupin, that's a great tutorial on HDRI, I think you already pointed it out in some other thread, the only thing I could add is that it greatly depends on the HDRI, at least with pathtracing in Octane you have to watch out or those damm fireflies will swarm your scene like one of those great ICE tests by Face but without the color variation

[Proupin]

there's a gamma control on our image nodes,
but it might not have the correct min/max limits.
if not, let me know and i can raise/change them.

Radiance

Except for the fireflies/extra noise, it works wonderful