Dome lit by self?

mmdestiny

Morning folks,

I usually am not a fan of turning Draw Dome on, but I found an HDRI I absolutely love for the render I'm making.  However, correct my if I'm wrong, but is the dome lighting itself?  It's a very sunny outdoor HDRI, and the lighting it provides to the scene is gorgeous, but the dome looks blown out.  Obviously, I can't turn down the Environment Map or Environment Intensity settings, as this would affect the scene lighting.

Is there a way to only affect the appearance of the dome, or do I just need to render twice (with one pass being with the Environment settings turned down to the desired dome look) and composite ?

Sevrin

Yes, there is a way. Canvases!  You can do a google search for "Daz Studio Canvases", and find some Youtube videos, etc, which are mostly all right.

Here is a way how to accomplish the particular goal you are asking about is a single render pass.  These instructions assume some knowledge of 2D image editing.  If you're not there yet, look for tutorials.

1-Light your scene so that your foreground looks good

2-Save!

3-In Render Settings:

 Tone Mapping, set Crush Blacks to 0 and Blow Highlights to 1.

In Advanced Render Settings, select the Canvases tab

Check the Canvases box

Click the "+" sign to create a canvas.  A little lower down, check the "Alpha" box.

Render.

You will get your usual render, and a folder with the name of your render followed by "canvases".  This contains an EXR file you can open in Photoshop or any other program that can open 32-bit colour files.  When you open the file, you will see two layers.  One that looks like a mask and one that doesn't.  Make the one that looks like a mask into a proper mask.  Different programs do  Duplicate the other one that looks all white.  Adjust the Exposure for each of the duplicates, one for foreground, and one for the HDRI.  Use the mask to composite the two, and then do whatever other adjustments edits you like.

mmdestiny

Thank you very much, I'll give it a try.