I was on site yesterday and took photos for a model to be dropped into. Unfortunately, although bright and warm, it was a cloudy day, so I ended up with very (very very) diffuse shadows from the sun.
What is the best way to replicate this in Vray? I am using the vraysun/sky and so far have just ticked off the vraysun, so the vraysky is lighting my scene. This isn’t bad, but I guess I am losing the softness from the sunlight itself. By doing this, I have also had to drastically compensate the vraycamera settings as the scene renders very dark when the sun is switched off. I have also had to dramatically edit the white balance of the camera to prevent whites from rendering quite intense blue.
In a nutshell: What is the best method to achieve softer shadows from the vraysun (as though the sun is partially obscured by hazey cloud)?
glorybound - to be honest, we’ve played around with HDRIs on occasion, but I think they are very over rated and make little difference to a render. Reflections are a different matter, but we use the vraysky for those or manually add them in post anyway (HDRIs are not high enough res or controllable/varied enough). I take your point with your suggestion, but I am getting pretty good results with increasing the size of the vraysun.
You could probably do with getting in a little bit deeper, I cant see how an image that produces a realistic range of light can be overrated - it does exactly what it says on the tin.
I find the sky good for tests, but the second I want precise control over anything I find myself regularly switching back to HDRI.
You could probably do with getting in a little bit deeper
Not really sure how we could go deeper?
HDR (or EXR) imaging shows much more promise with rendered output in my opinion - tweaking exposure in post is a great idea! Why have one exposure when you can have 2000!!! Our work has a hell of a lot of post production work applied to it and the HDRI lighting is quite low down on our list of priorities.
Maybe things will change in the future, but at the moment, we don’t have time to create our own and the libraries we have seen/used just don’t cut it.
Tricky, the reason why changing the size changes the shadow is the sun.. and vray lights.. are Area lights, so incease their area increase their area shadow. Therefore.. softness.
Same way if you make a vraylight bigger the shadows are softer around the edges.
Actually, HDRI scene lighting is really the only way to go for photorealistic renderings.
Vray Physical sky is just that, only entirely procedural.
The real trick for me is to find the right HDRI map.
Incredibly, the old, good, free probes are still the only ones I can use and get the results I need.
I tested some “hires”, commercial maps, and they can’t hold a candle.
Sorry to steal the thread, but has anyone purchesed a HDRI maps collection that actually works?
I wouldnt reccomend using them to light a scene without support lights in, but as far as a nice, useable range of colour goes, theyre pretty decent. I dont think i’d ever be happy to use a HDRI without a vray light to help it though, too little control.
Tricky, the reason why changing the size changes the shadow is the sun.. and vray lights.. are Area lights, so incease their area increase their area shadow. Therefore.. softness.
I now realise this. I assumed that the vraysun behaved differently as it is a ‘physical’ light, based on actual physics of the sun, and therefore couldn’t be ‘tweaked’ in this way.
