Distance of v-ray sun

[^Lele^]

The dome light will give you infinitely better results, either stored with the IRMap or in direct mode.
Search the forums for some hefty amount of material and samples about it.

[glorybound]

dome light

should I do this with a v-ray sun/cam or just v-ray cam? maybe with a max camera and direct light?

[joconnell]

If you use a hdri as a light source and a vray sky / sun you're kind of making contradictory lighting - the hdri image itself probably has a dominant light direction or source in it so you might get an effect where you have two different "suns" - might be best off having a vray sky / sun as your lighting setup and then using a hdri in the reflection / refraction override so you get lots of range in the reflections from your environment.

As lele mentioned if you're only using a hdri to provide your lighting and reflections then the dome light will do a far more efficient job of sampling the hdri - you'll get cleaner results than if you use it in the environment slot or the vray gi slot in the render dialog.

[glorybound]

HDRI

So my only source of light would be the hdri dome light?

[dlparisi]

By the way: I really respect all the LWF guys. They know what they are talking about in the theoretical realm. The problem I find is that we are still stuck with output devices that can't perform for LWF, and therefore its a big circle.

You should probably avoid taking pictures of anything as well then since this is what LWF is trying to achieve! IMO, LWF has very little to do with how the final image is viewed, but everyhting to do with how the final image is computed. Yes, a lot of the people here keep the image in linear space throughout the entire process from max to nuke, etc but in the end they still end up outputing a final image that is not strictly linear whether it be film, TV or print. The key to understanding LWF is it changes how light gets distributed throughout a scene and whether I view it in linear space or with a burned in gamma of 2.2 doesn't change how that light got bounced around. If you want to avoid using the vray cameras just set the vray sun multiplier to around .01 and shoot away with a standard max camera (the results are nearly identical).

[DaForce]

Re: HDRI

So my only source of light would be the hdri dome light?

Correct.
As most HDR's will have a sun in them which will product a strong light anyway. If you put in sun and sky then your basically doubling up.

Also grab this HDR is really nice. And BIG
http://www.chaosgroup.com/forum/phpB...hlight=360+hdr

[bennyboy]

Here is a light setup that is quite could. Assuming that the scene is in cwf:

Direct (with target)
rgb = 255,246,235
xyz= 824'8.363",-510'3.512",567'1.808" (System Units = feet)
Multi. = 1.1

Target
xyz = 55'3.378",78'9.062",6'1.514"


HDRI (we use grayscale and we bought our selection from Dosche)
Mult. = .3-.4
Horiz Rot = 110

We've had some good success with these settings.
Again, I'm not here to step on anyone's tows. I think we just don't want to hassle with all the trouble of lwf without enough pay off. But sometimes I wish we did.
I think it's all about what kind of business you are. If you need exact color matching capability then lwf is going to take a lot of time.
By the way, we think that the hdri and direct light relationship should add up to around 1.5 (give or take a few notches).