joel ruiz c
Active member
I just discovered one very important thing about HDRIs. What is a bit frustrating about the manual is the lack of samples and barely any explanations about how things work.
I was downloading a few more HDRI's from HDRI Haven and I kept seeing how my renders didn't look like the sample renders in that page. Some of the sample renders have strong, sharp shadows and all I got in C3D were soft shadows. Colors were mostly consistent, but the quality of the light was always soft in C3D. I was rendering the sample scene pictured below with every map I had downloaded from that page, and all of them had soft lighting.
So I started playing with the parameters, going a bit crazy with the numbers to see what I got. That's when I discovered "Clamp".
All the manual says about it is:
So, to all newbies like me haha.. if you are wondering why you don't get all the lighting from an HDRI map.. it is that damned clamp value. Set it to 1000. Or 100,000. It BARELY affects render times with Falcon, and you get all the glorious light from your HDRI map
I need to start over and render all of my samples again, this time with a clamp value of 1000.
No other lights used in these samples. SPP set to 500, Clamp 1000, Intensity set to 2 in all of my samples, you can check them HERE.
I was downloading a few more HDRI's from HDRI Haven and I kept seeing how my renders didn't look like the sample renders in that page. Some of the sample renders have strong, sharp shadows and all I got in C3D were soft shadows. Colors were mostly consistent, but the quality of the light was always soft in C3D. I was rendering the sample scene pictured below with every map I had downloaded from that page, and all of them had soft lighting.
So I started playing with the parameters, going a bit crazy with the numbers to see what I got. That's when I discovered "Clamp".
All the manual says about it is:
- Clamp: Pixels in the HDRI with a very high intensity (for example in the sun) can cause serious noise in combination with ambient occlusion or radiosity renderings. The artifacts can be easily reduced by clamping the high intensities. Don't set the clamp value to low however, or you will lose all the benefits of using an HDRI.
So, to all newbies like me haha.. if you are wondering why you don't get all the lighting from an HDRI map.. it is that damned clamp value. Set it to 1000. Or 100,000. It BARELY affects render times with Falcon, and you get all the glorious light from your HDRI map
I need to start over and render all of my samples again, this time with a clamp value of 1000.
No other lights used in these samples. SPP set to 500, Clamp 1000, Intensity set to 2 in all of my samples, you can check them HERE.