VRay SouthAfrican Tour - SP5 Sharp shadows with HDRI and clock rendering

[Morne]

Hi

Last week during Chaosgroup South African tour, they showed a SP5 feature on a high detail clock rendering only lit by 1 HDRI. Normally you would get lot of noise and blurry shadows. The Chaos guy however showed a feature to eliminate the noise and get sharp shadows. I'm looking for that setting but can't seem to find it. Some help please.

[vlado]

I guess this was the dome light with a texture. The noise goes away by increasing the subdivs for the light. As for the shadows, their sharpness depends entirely on the HDR map that is used.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morne]

I think it was something else. The guy was saying this feature is exclusive to vray and no other renderer can do this (thinking about it now, it may have been a vray RT feature)

[Morne]

any clues?

[pnel77]

Didn't he just lowered the gamma of the Hdri to something like 0,5? That will give you sharper shadows and like Vlado said - increase those subdivs...

[instinct]

Or use HDRIs with correct dynamic range from the beginning :P With a Proper HDR you canget VERY sharp shadows...and multiple of them for that matter. The adaptive sampling of the domelight does a pretty damn nice job at distributing rays by importance.

Regards,
Thorsten

[add101]

was an interesting lecture/demo

in terms of sharpness i remeber seeing that if HDRI has a lower multiplier or more contrast it creates sharper shadows.
something on size of light source affecting shadow sharpness on end of this page : http://www.aversis.be/tutorials/vray...range-hdri.htm

another hdri tutorial : http://www.peterguthrie.net/blog/category/tutorial/