Brute force Test Very slow :(

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

yes thats pretty much it Piotrus, the curve is a little more filmic rather than the traditional s-curve, sometimes i play a little with contrast and bring a little color to the blacks so they dont look grayscale if you knwo what i mean

[piotrus3333]

just drop your black point on a curve a bit lower. the point of PBR shaders is no more guessing game like "maybe 5 would look better". the rest is postproduction.

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

Cool will try that cheers!

[Richard7666]

Mandate number 1 of the "new" method is a settings reset, and *without changing a thing* setting the LC up as instructed.
So do that first, make sure you don't calculate an AO on top of a BF render that way (that was put there a decade ago to hide the mess of the IRMap, it's not only useless, but detrimental to render with BF/LC), stay in LWF (again, Optimised Defaults!), and recalibrate your shaders and lights to match the real world counterparts at best you can: look up light fixture specs, and copy them on your lights,find read albedo tables for material classes (you won't for specific ones!) and try and aim for a diffuse+reflection in the shaders to be in that ballpark, often a *lot* lower than people realise (f.e. most glasses have 7-12% max total reflectivity.).

When you say most glass only has 7% to 12% reflectivity, are you talking about, on a scale of 0 (black) to 255 (white), that the colour in the Reflection slot should be about 40 or so, aka a dark grey?

[^Lele^]

yes, and regardless of fresnel.

[BBB3]

yes, and regardless of fresnel.

That's super surprising to me. I've always used 255 in reflectivity for glass (and IOR of +/-1.5) and obtained realistic results that way. I was also under the impression that a physical workflow required 255 reflectivity in all cases, with glossiness/roughness and IOR being used to modulate not just the blurriness but the intensity of the reflection.

[piotrus3333]

it would be total refl, diffuse and spec.

[piotrus3333]

and a lot of light would just go through