Separate intensity multipliers for dome light top/bottom

[Morbid Angel]

Would be handy to have this option, often we end up tweaking the hdrs or whatever else to better fit the lighting and end up darkening them on the bottom or brightening them on the top. We end up either splitting the dome light into two or splitting the hdr, either way would be great to have the ability to control this from single dome light channel top/bottom multiplier!

[joconnell]

Same - I often end up using a ground plane in place of the full dome and adjusting the brightness and hue of the ground plane to bounce the correct amount back up. Would be interested to hear more about how you normally work Dmitry.

[vlado]

Why not use the VRayCompTex to multiply the HDR with a spherical gradient map?

Best regards,
Vlado

[joconnell]

Very fair point Vlado. What'd also help a lot would be having a region colour picker for the VFB - so that we could sample an area of pixels to get the average hsv difference between where we are and where we want to be, on top of the current per pixel colour sampler. Just a ui thing but a really handy one. And ideally for max first, not those smelly maya newbies :P

[Morbid Angel]

Why not use the VRayCompTex to multiply the HDR with a spherical gradient map?

Best regards,
Vlado

Well this is what I do now, not exactly this but this introduces extra step, now you must add a layer to the hdr and adjust that layer separately. I mean its not a crazy wish and would just be handy to have it!

joconnell, what I actually ended up doing is have a light rig with two domes, one is rotated 180 deg on x, when you rotate dome light using only half sphere then its rotation acts as a mask for hdr, so bottom dome light emits less light then the top light. Also in my tests I found that having two domes is actually less grainy then having one full dome...

[vlado]

I mean its not a crazy wish and would just be handy to have it!

Hehe yes; I'm just wary of adding new options, in case people accuse me again that they need a PhD to use V-Ray

Best regards,
Vlado

[joconnell]

Edit - Double post

[Morbid Angel]

in case people accuse me again that they need a PhD to use V-Ray

Don't take it personally

[joconnell]

Hmm - maybe it makes sense in some ways - rather than the values above and below blending over each other with the hemispherical samples along the horizon, it's using less values? Less accurate but easier to clean up type of thing?

This type of thing makes a lot of sense though - I found with a lot of the stuff I was dealing with we didn't have a majorly strong directional light so it was largely a soft value from the top and another from below. If there was a sun light I preferred to take that out from the HDR and use my own vray light instead for easier shadow control.

Must give the hdr trick a go!

Just curious - how did you arrive at your 2/16 dmc settings? Do you ever deviate or are all the places you're working for heavily equipped enough to deal with it?

[Morbid Angel]

H

Just curious - how did you arrive at your 2/16 dmc settings? Do you ever deviate or are all the places you're working for heavily equipped enough to deal with it?

We were working on a film where we had some strong flickering on the cars and it was quite piculiar, the entire image was fine but along the glancing angles of the cars roofs we had notable flicking and no matter how low the sampling threshold was or how many shader subdivs we gave it the flickering did not go away. After many tests I found that reflection needs high sampling value, our original settings were something like 2/8 but 8 was just not enough. So we tried 16 and that worked right away. The reason for 2-3 min sampling is for very fine lines, thin lines etc, those need to be sampled more to get them correct/flickerless. Lastly and depending on each project I do end up adjusting the color threshold of the dmc sampler usually varies between 1 and 0.004, just recently I did a render where there were many cables overlapping each other crisscrossed like a web and during the camera move they flickered a lot due to being thin. Setting the min dmc to 4 and max to 16 with color thresh of 0.004 did the trick (also heavy filtering) as the far cables became less then 1 pixel and then no amount of sampling would fix that.

For the render power, usually facilities that I work for have lots of computing power, we deal with standard 2k renders, and animated sequences, so running thousands of frames of 2ks with crazy action in them requires that much power. Unfortunately the settings I have don't / can't really work for every one, if you are rendering a still you don't need it to be flicker free...and maybe less is better not for me

[joconnell]

I'm in a similar world now - all 2k stuff for anamorphic 35mm. Thankfully it sounds like I'm dealing with simpler stuff than you in terms of fine detail. In terms of the heavy filtering - do you mean you're increasing the radius of the aa filter a lot to smooth out your tiny cables? Sounds like final destination 5 stuff with those bridge cables!

[Morbid Angel]

yeah thats exactly what it was...For our last project I also had a pretty much worse case scenario for rendering, thin vertical/horizontal lines close together going at a distance, and slow camera move made them flicker no matter what sampling. High filtering saved the day I think it was like area of 3 or 5 something crazy, made it way softer but fixed the issue.