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Another trial - this time I have decreased Exposure Value to 10 in the render settings.
I cannot fix this HDRI, so I will start with the another one.
Small steps, but at least I can get rid off with the fireflies in HDRIs.
The light in the HDRI depends on the light used to make it and the camera and tone mapping settings. I don't use this script/programme and make my own with the spherical camera but the same thing happens with some renders.
In your scene, the lights seems to come from behind regarding the shadows directions on the ground, but from "above" if we look at the rendered shadows in the hdr. Maybe because the "white wall" on the left of the image makes a big source of light in the hdr whereas the light coming from the right is much less powerfull. I don't know exactly why you have a lighting issue with this specific scene. Did you make any manipulation in an external software which could have "removed" the 32 bits details even if keeping the 32 bits formats? Aside from that, you can also be pragmatic and add a large powerful spotlight or a distant light to compensate for the lack of lighting, still keeping your hdr as the background.
edit : or, you're in one of those renders, such as Fishtale mentioned : "same thing happens with some renders"....
Thanks for the comments.
It was HDRI made from https://www.daz3d.com/chinatown
and I suspect there are some tricks used there.
Ah yes, a bit of magic when it comes to Stonemason.
I just render a HDRI from the another Stonemasons asset - will be interesting to see, how it goes.
Just another thought: what is the difference of Dome Radius = 100, that is the default settings used in V3D EXR Creator
and the Infinite Dome Radius, that is used in many ready made scenes?
I have forgotten to mention, that I have not changed anything in the generated EXR with HDRI.
I were very happy, that the fireflies have not appeared in HDRI.
This dial is just here if you need to change the dome radius of a finite dome (environment settings) that you may use as for instance the sky of your 3D Environment. It was handy for me to be able to tweak a bit a finite dome before rendering from time to time. It can be useful in other circumstances too, but I don't feel like detailing all my dev steps here. Just know that when something is in my interface is generally here because at one stage I found it annoying to close my interface to go and look for it too often. If you use an infinite dome, then you can simply ignore this dial (it will be ignored when rendering), and if you want to set up your infinite Dome, just do it as usually in Daz Studio, before you launch the creators.
Ok, thanks for the explanation. Will need to experiment with it more.
In the quest of finding minimum usable resolution of HDRI, I have tried 9000 pixels wide and 4500 pixels high.
It only takes 437 MBytes on the disk.
It is still too small for my purposes, while creating HDRI from https://www.daz3d.com/misty-river-gorge
Note the fuzzy background, but the rendering of HDRI was ended too early, because of time limit (~ 32 minutes).
A few more observations which I think make a difference.
1) Under the Render Settings/Advanced change the Texture Compression/ High Threshold to 16000. my belief is that setting it to the maximum means that all large images used wont be compressed so they wont look fuzzy.
2) No matter what the image is that is used as an HDRI Light Probe some are changed when added to the Environment Dome. They look different from when they are viewed in PS or a graphics viewer and I can't figure out why. I am sure it has something to do with the Gamma but can't trace the cause.
3) Under the Render Settings/Editor/Environment Lighting resolution set it to the same as the image used or higher. I just keep mine at 16500 most of the time although I will lower it to the resolution of the Environment Map image if it doesn't look sharp to see if it helps, mostly it doesn't as it just seems to be the image (see #2).
4) When using Finite Sphere for the dome set the Dome Radius to half the image size i.e 16000 would be 8000, 4000 would be 2000 etc. Sometimes it helps and sometimes it doesn't :)
There are also some rendering settings that are normally hidden that I use which I think helps with renders but that isn't a help here.
@Artini, when the character is not lit well enough by the HDRI, the easiest thing for me is to just add a ghost light on the character.
I tend to use a distant light which emmulates the sun better as the rays are parallel.
I'm also more often on distant lights in those cases (pure laziness), which does not excludes cases of figures where I find ghost lights better...
Otherwise the resulting lighting quality also strongly depend on the initial scene lights, I fast rendered a "china" (same environment as Artini, same location), and I manage to have good lighting. I'll post later or tomorrow..
edit : OK that was later. I forgot to add nominal luminance when rendering the exr, so I had a bit of postwork on fireflies. This is the same china as Artini, approximately at the same place, but with a strong sunlight to compensate the globally gray environment. This is fast made, don't judge the figure, outfit or pose (or hair), this is just to show light of the hdr. No additional light added, only the hdr. Postwork to remove fireflies (the good news is that I now have the perfect scene to start to analyse the nominal luminance trick in order to find the right range to recommend to the users for the creator).
BTW : thanks again Fishtales for all your information, this is super interesting!
Here is an HDRI created from Stonemason Streets of Japan. First image is with no additional light, second has added distant light from the same (as close as I could get) direction as the HDRI sun), the third has the distant light and a ghost light to fill shadows on her face.
Thanks a lot, everyone.
Great tips and I will try to test them myself.
Tip #? :)
To get a darker or lighter shadow open Render Settings click on the breadcrumb panel at the top and choose Preferences/Show Hidden Properties. Open Environment, scroll to the bottom and use the Ground Shadow Intensity slider to lighten/darken the shadows being cast. I would recommend opening the properies and removing the tick in the Hidden setting.
I would also recommend getting all the settings configured and then saving these as a render setting so you can set them anytime with a click. I have all mine in the script menu for easy access.
Another tip is to save a blank scene with all your goto settings and camera setup as a Scene, I call mine Default Scene, and have this loaded when Studio loads and also when you open New Scene from the menu. This can be setup under Edit/Preferences/Startup/Load File and choose this Default Scene. Then under Edit/Preferences/Startup/Scene "On New" Load File and choose the Default Scene, choose Accept, re-start Studio and that scene with all your goto first settings will be loaded then it is just a matter of changing the ones needed for the particular scene you are building.
Thanks again, @Fishtales, for sharing your knowledge.
Render Settings/Advanced change the Texture Compression/ High Threshold to 16000 has fixed fuzziness for me.
HDRI created from https://www.daz3d.com/the-streets-of-steampunk ; with dimensions 12000 pixels wide, 6000 pixels high.
Rendering Time of this HDRI: 1 hour 25 minutes 16.5 seconds
Below is the render of the example scene made with this HDRI
Rendering Time: 54 seconds
Here is a mystery I don't understand. I recreated by Desert Depression HDR to be 16K with Nominal Luminance 0.2 to get better resolution and no filreflies. Then I rerendered my scene, changing only the HDR to the 16K one. The lighting on the 3D objects in the scene is much brighter (man, horse, some rocks and cactus). I don't know why. The background (HDR) lighting looks the same. The original remder is earlier in this thread.
Hi, @barbult
I have compared these 2 images and the new one is better lighted.
On the previous one lighting on the 3D objects is more greyish.
I think, if you change slightly Environment Lighting intensity in the settings on this new scene,
then you will get similar results to the previous one.
OK, it seems so far that Nominal Luminance at around 0.2 has great advantages at several levels. Better (IMHO and in this case of figure) lights, fight agains fireflies... I'll add something about that in yhe 1.2 version, even if I still don't know which "way" I will do that.... Thanks all for experimenting all that!
... And i have to have a look at texture compression...
For those using 0.2 for the Luminance value you are effectively removing all the reflected white from the render. The 1500 luminance I suggested as a start is the Luminance of a 100 watt bulb so that is the brightness of the fireflies that are removed.
Yes, the 0.2 can sound mysterious, but perfectly makes sense when you know that I make operations on the amount of light in the scene in order to make sure that people have an hdr with the correct level of lighting for default environment intensity and environment strength at the end. The operations I make could totally justify going from 1500 nominal to 0.2 nominal (if everything was perfectly linear the value that should correspond to your 1500 should be around 0.09, which is the same order of magnitude as the 0.2 proposed). This is why you can consider that my 0.2 is completey equivalent to your 1500 since it is as if I used a "0.006" Watts light bulb (which is "roughly speaking" the case).
If people want to render with a 1500 nominal luminance, it would be possible with my interface, with a luminance corrective factor in second tab (it is not the nominal luminance), of 50 000 (and a nominal luminance of 1500 via DS interface), but then the hdr would require either an exposure correction in photoshop before reload (and not everybody has it), or would require a very small environment intensity (0.0001 or such) after reloading the - non exposure corrected- hdr. This is why I finally opted for the "0.006" Watts light bulb - corresponding to the 0.2 nominal luminance - so that people have "directly" a correct exposure of their resulting hdr without any additional operations after rendering.
@Fishtales : re-reading my post I realise it may not be super clear. So I'll say it more simply. Considering the huge lighting modification the script makes in the background to ensure a correct exposure of the HDR "out of the render", the 0.2 nominal luminace people talk about here acts the same way as the 1500 you are talking about, since the scene rendered can be considered as at least 15000 times darker than a usual scene, and supposing that the evolution of the nominal luminance required is roughly proportional to the total amount of light in a scene. I hope I'm more clear...
I tried to make an HDR from the BOSS pro lights, which are scene lights. I used Safe Mode. The resulting HDR was way too dim and dull. Is there a better way to make an HDR from bright scene lights like BOSS Pro? Do I have to do the PNG series?
Before making the png series, I would try to increase the luminance corrective factor tab2 to 6, 10 or 15, or even 100 for instance (feel free to use other values) to see if things go better. If you are in "dome and scene" rendering mode, it would then be better to lower the environment intensity to compensate the corrective factor increase. If it is not better for higher corrective factors, then yes, I would recommend to test with png xEV. But I don't have this product, and I never tried "scene lights only" scenes since the purpose of the product was to be able to replace "heavy" 3D environments by an image an so to make your GPU less stressed. I don't know the exact potential of an hdr replacing mainly scene lights, to be totally honest, I'm not sure what can be expected of it...
edit1 :Try also at the end to make the dome smaller (since it will make the lights "closer" to the figure, otherwise your dome, so your lights, is far from the target). Furthermore, you lose the "light aperture" of a spot when you make it in a hdr (the dome won't make a difference between a 10 degrees or 160 degrees aperture, it will become a point uniformly emissive). So you lose a lot of light..
edit2 : said differently, the scene lights must be boosted because they lose both their focus (because they are just bright pixels on a dome), and because they lose their short distance with the target (because the dome is far). But I don't know if it will be enough...
The BOSS Pro lights use Scene Only. I tried a luminance corrective factor of 100 and Safe Mode, but the result was that the HDR was very bright, but when I used the HDR, the character looked almost unlit..To get light on the character, I reduced the Exposure Value from 13 to 10, but the light was very uniform and not at all like the direct lights of the original BOSS Pro. There are so many options, I might be doing something wrong. I think I'll give up on this one for now and move on.
Edit: Oops I see why it was so dim. I still had Nominal Luminance at 0.2. I changed it back to 0 and now the HDR I created with luminance corrective factor 100 is way overlit. So I changed Exposure value to 17, but the light is still to uniform.