My Vue Scene HDRIs look Horrible in DAZ...
DrowElfMorwen
Posts: 538
This is a question that involves both DAZ and Vue... but probably better geared toward those who know how to make good HDRIs with Vue.
I've encountered many HDRIs in the past made in Vue and they look fine to use as backgrounds for DAZ's Iray render. I used Vue (2015) this morning to export a sky only, as an HDR, and imported it to DAZ. It looked very nice, not too bright, high quality. Like other HDRs I've seen. I made sure to mark on the export to "preserve full sky lighting range" ...
However, if I render the same file, the entire scene together (it is a sky with mountains and ocean) and chose HDR, I do not get nearly the same results, and I even rendered a 7200 x 3600 image. There is no option, that I can see or find, to preserve the full sky lighting range. Trying to use THAT image in DAZ doesn't work nice at all, everything is low quality looking and way too bright in the sky, but I need the mountains and ocean in the image, too. Can someone please tell me how to save my whole render as a nice, high quality, preserved-lighting HDR? I can't figure it out at all and it would be such a life saver. I got Vue so I could build full scene backgrounds to import into DAZ and use them there... and the results so far are not good. I'm just hoping I'm missing something!
(I also posted this question on the Cornucopia Forums, but no reply, so I'm hoping someone here can help!)
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Comments
What format are you exporting in? I thought Vue offred .exr (I have a fairly recent version of Complete, but not currently installed).
Vue does have .exr but I don't know why that matters. Can you elaborate? Would this fix my problem? I didn't know DAZ could import .exr.
Sorry, but I looked and it seems only Vue Infinite and xStream offer .exr format exporting :( I have Complete, so I do not have it ... am I all out of options then?
I'm not sure, you certainly need some kind of HDR export of your render to make a usable light dome from a single pass - the other option is to make several identical renders with different exposures and combine them in an external HDR creation app. I don't have a link to hand but there is a thread discussing the multiple renders combined approach.
But Vue DOES make HDRs, that's why I'm getting so confused. I am making an HDRI,. so why is it not creating the lighting it should be? To answer my own question, the only thing I can think of is that, if I render the entire scene, because there doesn't seem to be an option to preserve the "high range lighting" as there is when I am exporting ONLY the sky, maybe this lighting information is getting lost... but haven't some HDRIs in the DAZ store been made with Vue? Or is it that only the skies have been this way, and not full background scenes?
Also, why use .exr format? Can you explain it, please?
What format is the image you end up with?
So, I did an experiment, sort of... First, I have three images I was working with.
1) Sky only, exported specially under the "Export Sky" option; here, you can check a box to "preserve full sky lighting range" ; Format is HDR
2) Entire scene, 7200 x 3600, rendered. HDR
3) Entire scene, 7200 x 3600, rendered. Png format. However, I used Paint Shop Pro (like Photoshop) to decrease the GAMMA ONLY by about half.
Results:
1) Very nice sky, but again, it's the sky only, and renders with nice lighting.
2) Put into the Environment tab, where HDRs usually go. The dome/ background is WAY too bright. Loss of fine detail in background image. Lighting onto scene is comparitively too dark.... lowering the Environment brightness OR the Intensity made the scene too dark, but the background dome/HDR looked much better.
3) Using the gamma-darkened .png image in the Envrinment slot seems to have done the trick decently. I have no idea why it works better than the HDR, but it does. The background looks crisp, the color and brightness is nice, and the scene renders with the same lighting as with option #1 (Exported HDR sky only).
All this said, I'm still not completely satisfied. I'd also be very interested in others' results with Vue, too.
Have you learned anything more about this problem? I'm curious.... I was also thinking about getting Vue to make HDRIs.
The main problem with HDRIs made with Vue is that they do not really support the whole HDRI range well. I never got good results out of Vue that produce nice shadow and directed light. You can get good results with Bryce, but you have to render images with several different exposures and put them together in an HDRI program afterwards.
a .exr file is a proper HDRi file and will contain all the lighting information. If it saving it as anything else it is loosing that information.
People often mistake HDRi files (which contaln all the lighting information) and HDR images which are really just tone-mapped images that look nice (and can be saved as any file format like .jpg or .png etc because they DON'T contain lighting information).
Even if you use an .exr file, you won't get any dynamic that has not been in the render before. Vue does not do real 32bit rendering.