HDR splotches - any help appreciated

[sv]

Paul Debevec's time lapse HDR's produce some really nice lighting, but as has been pointed out many times before they can also produce spoltches. How can you remove this? I've tried clamping colours, clamping the HDR in HDRshop, reducing the exposure in HDRshop and CS2, reducing the size, bluring (which is a rubbish option) using the splutterfish plugin to import it at 16bit, but this looses all sort of shadowing.....

This is the image rendered with the untouched HDR:



This is the image rendered with an adjuested HDR, but stll splotches are evident.



How can you reduce the range or clamp the colours so you don't get these splotches?

I've seen that throb used this sequence succesfully so how can you get clean images? These are rendered using the Vray Dome Light. any help or advice greatly appreciated.

[jacksc02]

sv there is a thread around covering this. i think the thread is called hdaaarrrrgghhh or something like that

[kimgar]

hm, that is weird, i've used the same probes and had the same problems, but blurring the hdr solved it for me.

you can have a look at this post:

http://www.chaosgroup.com/forum/phpB...588&highlight=

[sv]

blurring the hdr out will loose all sort of detail in the shadows; is this the only option if i want to use a HDR for lighting? Surely not....

[ene.xis]

hi SV
can u tell me were can i find the Paul Debevec's time lapse HDR's?
would love to try that out...

[sv]

http://gl.ict.usc.edu/skyprobes/

but please if anyone can produce nice sharp shadows from these HDR's without getting splotches everywhere can you please just let me know how you achieved this? No other HDR i have found can produce this realistic shadow definition and light falloff that i want to re-create in the images.

[ene.xis]

thanks!

will try....soon

[jacksc02]

sv - what version of vray are you using?

[sv]

a later one which does include the dome light - the scene is lit only by one Vray Light, Dome type, with the HDR mapped to it as a texture.

[jacksc02]

if you want sv send me your scene and the hdr map and i will have a look