New "IBL Skies" - Beautiful HDR skies but much too weak light! Any solutions?

Rafa20

I got the skies from "Terra Dome 3" and "Skies Of iRadiance" (and some HDRI skies). They have beautiful, realistic light but the problem with all of them is that they are muuuch to cloudy! Finally I've found beautiful not too cloudy skies but now the disillusionment: here the light is much too weak and has a little bluish cast. If I increase the "Environment Intensity" to "3.2" then yeah, I get the realistic bright sun light (on the ground) I need but the sky becomes of course much too bright as well! That's the product I'm talking about: https://www.daz3d.com/ibl-skies-scattered-clouds

And here is what I mean:

Environment Intensity 1.0 (Beautiful and natural sun and sky...BUT...)

...too weak light on the ground!!! It looks as if the sun is hiding behind the clouds!

 

Here how realistic sun light should look like at Environment Intensity: 3.2

BUT now of course the sky becomes much too bright!

Is there a way how to get brighter light on the ground without changing the brightness of the HDR sky? An extra spotlight? Rendering twice a scene for the ground and the sky and then combine in photoshop? Maybe there is an adjustment in Daz Studio I'm overlooking?

Richard Haseltine

have you tried experimenting with the Tone Mapping settings?

Rafa20

I've found another solution. I've just included a distant light and andjusted the same angle and position like the sky sun (einvironment). Now I can easily adjust the sun light brightness (distant light) by leaving the sky like it is.

algovincian

In general, I also find myself wanting more light in the scene from an HDRI given how bright the HDR appears in the background. One thing that can help is to render out a 32-bit beauty canvas and then dynamically tone map outside of DS in a 2D image editing program.

- Greg

agent unawares

algovincian said:

In general, I also find myself wanting more light in the scene from an HDRI given how bright the HDR appears in the background. One thing that can help is to render out a 32-bit beauty canvas and then dynamically tone map outside of DS in a 2D image editing program.

- Greg

This is the best way. In reality also it is very hard to take a picture of both a beautiful and natural sun and sky and a scene that looks properly to your eyes using a camera. The dynamic range is not enough. You can also render two exposures and composite the sky in. This is how I fake a decent photo from my trash phone camera.

Rafa20

Another way would be: rendering the scene twice! First time the sky only! Then the scene only by turning "Draw Dome" off. Then combine it in PS! But nevertheless I don't understand why they created such huge (to intall and download all the files it takes about 6 hours!!!) and great content files but with such a shitty light balance!!! All the other skies of different creators got often even TOO bright lights where I need to turn it down to intensity 0.6 - 0.9 what is not a problem of course! Their main problem is that all of their skies are just much too cloudy! It's really pitty cause I thought I've found with the "IBL Skies" the skies I was looking for a long time! But now I will spend more time on every outside scene render cause of their weak light!