Blurry Reflections without the huge render time

Jonstark

I was thinking it was a matter of doing several renders at different intensities of the lighting then combining to do tonal depth, but I have no idea whether that's right or not :)

Headwax

nice to see a scientist at work

off the top of my head if you wanted to go post work way

first render scene without reflections
then render scene with reflections (not burry) and also render out a reflection pass

in photoshop

take first render and paste the reflection pass over it in a new layer
make this a screen parameter (from memory?)
copy this layer
gaussian blur the top reflection pass layer (maybe try smart blur but prefer gaussian, you could also do a radial blur if you are fancy)
change opacities of the two reflection layers to suit
presto :) you have blurred reflections

you could also drop a burred texture map in the reflection channel of your mesh but this might be a pita and not work depending on your uvee setup and how much work you want to do

for hdri from a carrara spherical render

you need to combine three or more renders with a program like eg http://www.oloneo.com/

for the first render - arrange lights for best detail in highlights
second render- arrange for best detail in midtones
third render- arrange lighting to get best detail in shadows

combine in eg http://www.oloneo.com/ and export as a hdri

looking forward to more experiments from yourself

PS blurred reflection method also (almost) works for fudging soft shadows but use parameter 'multiply' and probably smart blur rather than gaussian?

PhilW

Yes you can do a number of spherical renders at multiple light intensities and then combine the results to get an HDRI. You should have a way to make any light sources visible so that they show in the final image. A pity that you can't output higher than 8-bit images. As a "by-the-way", Octane Render CAN output in HDRI formats and supports the spherical camera, so if you have that, you could more easily produce a spherical HDRI for use in the background.