Sunny Day/High Noon rendering. Advice.

[DanSHP]

After some testing, it seems the problem I've been having is actually HDRI's not driving enough light into my scenes. The HDRI multipliers supplied in the 3d Collective pack for example, when combined with realistic camera settings, do not provide enough power to drive realistic direct lighting.

Simply setting my camera EV at 15 (as I always have for mid day scenes), ensuring shaders are on point and boosting the multiplier way above the suggested value (until it looks right) I've started getting some really nice high noon photo-realistic visual imagery.

[glorybound]

Yeah, every HDRI I get is different. I have to crank up from 30 to 100X's.

[Richard7666]

I was checking properties of late (as a game of sorts), and the southern in Italy i moved, the more those pictures at high noon looked like *ugly* renders.
Flat, seemingly uninteresting.
Also, the colors turned definitely towards deeper reds and blues, all the more so as one approached the coast.
I found detectable differences also in areas which had radically different daytime exposures (say, sitting east of big mountains, versus sitting west of them.), not to mention based on the amounts of vegetation.
Last but not least, the atmospheric medium adds to hues and saturation: a leafy valley in a wet area will carry definite blue shades suspended mid-air, and contribute to scattering of direct sunlight, thereby reducing contrast.
On a coast, by the sea, under windy conditions, there's hardly an atmosphere to talk about, and the pictures all look stark and contrasty.

Principling lighting is still one of the hardest tasks at hand, regardless of the tools used (well, provided they allow for variation, ofc.).
I'm very glad it's what i do for a living!

I know what you mean, often I'll see a midday PHOTO taken by a real estate agent and think "damn, that's an ugly render, doesn't even look real"...then realise it's just a photo with extreme contrast where all the details look flat because they blacks/whites are so crushed