Peter Guthrie HDRI

[pjkw]

http://noemotionhdrs.net/

Knock yourself out Bobby... all Free and top quality.

They looked good but after I downloaded loads of them Ive noticed the dynamic range isnt enough, the sun isn't strong enough..

[rivoli]

They looked good but after I downloaded loads of them Ive noticed the dynamic range isnt enough, the sun isn't strong enough..

yes, the range is way too low. they're free, so one can't really complain, but I don't think they're really useful.

[Syclone1]

yes, the range is way too low. they're free, so one can't really complain, but I don't think they're really useful.

I suspect that in the FAQ this is the reason for the low range:

"6.Why am i not getting sharp shadows from sun on your HDR?!
You need extremely high floating point values in the sun area to get sharp shadows. It`s a bit more complicated to capture, but more importantly, it just does not make sense to do it from a rendering point of view. In almost every practical situation, you want to define your directional light source's position precisely, based on shot, camera angle, character pose etc, You don`t want it to be fixed, without precise control. Also it will be slower for any render engine to clean/sample the areas where you have float values like 0.3 and 53.5 next to each other. Situations like that can create unwanted artifacts commonly known as 'fireflies'. "

[Syclone1]

The only ones I have ever bought are from "http://www.viz-people.com/product-category/hdri-skies/hdri/" I had used nothing but free ones and rarely had any kind of lighting out of them that I was looking for but the ones I got in the V2 pack have been working great for what I need them for as I can get the nice shadows from the sun. But now that Chaos decided to launch V-Ray 3.3x and now I find myself using the V-Ray Sun which I didn't like before but now I am starting to be a big fan.

[joecharon]

"6.Why am i not getting sharp shadows from sun on your HDR?!
You need extremely high floating point values in the sun area to get sharp shadows. It`s a bit more complicated to capture, but more importantly, it just does not make sense to do it from a rendering point of view. In almost every practical situation, you want to define your directional light source's position precisely, based on shot, camera angle, character pose etc, You don`t want it to be fixed, without precise control. Also it will be slower for any render engine to clean/sample the areas where you have float values like 0.3 and 53.5 next to each other. Situations like that can create unwanted artifacts commonly known as 'fireflies'. "


OK, so what is the workflow then? Use Vray sun and use HDRI as a background spherical image,
or replace Vray sky texture with HDRI? How to set appropriate HDRI intensity related to Vray sun in this case?

[glorybound]

I was buying mine from (https://hdri-locations.com/) and they work great, however, very expensive. With Peter's, he drops the inverse gamma down to .75, which increases the HDRI's contrast. The other ones I tried, other than (https://hdri-locations.com/), I couldn't use as back plates, with Peters, like (https://hdri-locations.com/), I can.