vray sun help

[posterus]

hello,
its been a long time since i used the vray sun/cam and i'm having issues with my shadows. thay are coming out way too dark. i've been trying various sun intensities and cam exposures...nothing working very well. i'm sure its something simple though. the image below had the sun intensity at 1. camera f-number at 8 and vray environment light at .4
any suggestions?
thanks,
-joe

[vlado]

You seem to be missing the GI in your scene; do you have the V-Ray GI environment override turned on?

Best regards,
Vlado

[posterus]

Hi Vlado,
The vray GI environment is on, as well as GI. you're right, it does look as though GI is not even on.

edit:
i made a simple test scene with the same lighting setup. when i disable GI it looks slightly different than with GI enabled. GI enabled still has very dark shadows.
http://www.3dspeedmachine.com/misc/lighttest.max
thanks,
-joe

[voxel3d]

Are you sure you're not rendering with lwf but seeing results at gamma 1.0? It looks like that to me...

Also, when you say "vray environment light at 0.4", what are you using there, the VRaySky or just the color?

Jorge

edit: I just took a look at your posted scene and you're just using a color with multiplier 0.4 in the vray GI environment, that's gonna be way too dark when compared to the VRaySun, you have to put in the vraysky in that slot (as well as in the max environment map slot, where you do have it.) Either that or pump up the 0.4 to 20 or so.

[posterus]

thanks voxel. that makes sense...i'll give it a shot.

[tom182]

up the .4 to 20 , 30 or 40 etc and use Reinhard colour mapping, drop the burn value down to .3 or something, soa s to reduce the intensity of the burnt out (white areas) on the image.
tOM

[idtools]

like voxel 3d told you when i was'nt using gamma 2.2 my shadows was very dark like yours, in Linear WorkFlow shadows are more progressive in the dark areas.
hope it will help you.

[posterus]

thanks for the suggestions.
i think i have the shadows where i want them. the images below are using the vray sky in the GI environment. as tom suggested, i used Reinhard color mapping and i lowered to burn value to .5