VRay and HDRi

[mikkelbech]

Here's a clay render of Michael Feuerroth, he's using 3dsmax and says he's using only HDRi and no VRay sun. I can't get anywhere near that with only HDRi in C4D using VRay. Is the implementations of VRay so different or am I doing something completely wrong?

 

I can get close-ish with HDRi AND VRay Sun, but with only HDRi, I can't get anything but extremely soft shadows and no sun "beams" through the windows

 

[Nicolai Bongard]

It depends on the hdr map what you can get out of it. But if you have not allready tried it; try to lower the gamma from 1 to 0.75 or something, and it should boost the strength of the sun compared to the rest of your sky.

[Stephen Thomas]

Getting defined lighting/shadows from an HDRI depends a lot on the dynamic range contained in it. However if yours have either a fairly low dynamic range or just aren't the right conditions to give sharp shadows i.e. cloudy sky, you can still mix it with direct light source. Nobody is going to give you brownie points for using only the HDRI.

 

To make this easier you could try the sIBL loader script from hdrlabs.com, which automatically adds a direct light source taking position and colour from brightest part of the HDRI and also loads in all your maps and creates a sun linked to a sphere for easy manipulation in your scene.

 

http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/archive.html