A lightweight night skydome? (Iray)

odastein

I would need a night background for a scene, but background pictures generally don't look great and there's the problem of shadows being cast, and while I have some of Orestes HDRI, my modest computer seems unable to handle both one of his skydomes and the rest of the scene, it just freezes. 

So, do you know of a lightweight night HDRI/skydome/environment/background? 

FSMCDesigns

Maybe time to upgrade since in my experience the HDRIs from Orestes are fairly lightweight already. I can't think of any HDRIs that are even lower resolution than those. You could try compositing the image in photoshop

chris-2599934

If your machine is that low-powered, I think compositing is the way to go. You're not going to be getting much light from a night sky anyway, so the lighting effect of a HDRI is insignificant.

Shoot your scene with no skydome or background image, so the background is transparent (be sure to save it as a png, not a jpg). Then use photoshop or gimp or whatever to place the night sky image of your choice on a layer behind your render.

odastein

Thanks.

I assumed that this HDRI was heavy because my computer froze after I installed it in Iray view, but if you say that it's lightweight, then maybe it was just the straw that broke the camel back (my computer isn't good, but not *that* terrible) and I'll try to see what else in my scene it might have difficulties to handle. I suspect now a "snow" asset to be the culprit, but my computer seemed fine with it until I added the HDRI. 

Unless it could be the interaction between the snowflakes and the light added by the HDRI (the headlamp was the only light in the scene until I added the HDRI)? Snow alone fine, HDRI alone, fine, but snow+HDRI --> crash. Is that a possibility? 

It really would be useful to know how much each element in a scene "weight". If not the HDRI, it could be an accumulation of several items that are heavier than I suspect (at first glance, the scene isn't large and my computer should be able to handle it, but I noticed in the installer that some things are surprisingly "heavy"). 

Sven Dullah

Just a quick hint... from HDRI Haven you can DL HDRIs in 1k, 2k, 4k, 8k and 16k resolution.

odastein

Sven Dullah said:

Just a quick hint... from HDRI Haven you can DL HDRIs in 1k, 2k, 4k, 8k and 16k resolution.

Yes I just discovered them a couple days ago, when the page was mentioned here in another thread.