Useful brightness chart

yinliang9

Apologies if this has been addressed before, but I don't do a ton of forum browsing so I'd have missed it. :|

In my endless quest to better light my scenes, I came across this website. http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color4.html

There's a ton of scientific jargon about lighting in here, but for those like myself who are extremely uninformed about how light works, the most interesting thing to look at is the Luminance Benchmarks chart a short scroll down into the file. It's given in cd / m², which is Iray's default luminance unit, so it looks to be very useful in creating lights that match real world brightness. Combine with exposure settings to draw in more or less light depending on the brightness, and you have yourself realistic light! ... At least I hope that's how it works. A couple quick tests have looked pretty good at least.

For those like myself who have forgotten your old math lessons, reminder: The values are given in powers, and powers are how many times you multiply a number by itself. For example, a lightning flash's luminance value is 7 x (10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10), or ten multiplied by itself ten times; a whopping 70,000,000,000 cd / m²!

A second quick tip in case someone isn't aware, you can easily come up with the numerical value matching the formula for each listing with Google's calculator by using the ^ operator. "^" is like saying "to the power of", so to get the luminance value for the sun at its zentih off this chart, you'd search the formula in Google: 3.2 * (10^9).

Hope this helps someone!

Redz

Very useful resource, thank you :)