Douglas forest and lighting tests

[pixelpusher636]

I think it works this time.....

Looks fantastic!! Are you saying you are lighting your scene via an HDR image?

[pixelpusher636]

"Light exposure" 0.125 => EV -3
"Light exposure" 0.25 => EV -2
"Light exposure" 0.5 => EV -1
"Light exposure" 1 => EV 0
"Light exposure" 2 => EV +1
"Light exposure" 4 => EV +2
"Light exposure" 8 => EV +3

and so on.

However, if you work with EXRs then you only need to render once, and bypass all that stuff.

I know all work and no play makes Matt a dull boy; but I'm (we're ?) on pins and needles for Terragen Sky and the TG Mac release.

[Dune]

Are you saying you are lighting your scene via an HDR image?

No, it's just plain default, but I used the Photoshop (CS6) adjustments-HDR-lighting to lighten the darks up. Bent the lower curve down a bit or it would be too light, and didn't use the 20+ saturation.

[sjefen]

I'm just on my phone, so not so easy to see, but are there any translucency on your leaf shaders?

Anyway, to me that first image looks good. Like I would have wanted it, but this is just me. I would just recover the shadows a little bit in post.

I hope it's ok I did a try with your image?



- Terje

[Dune]

Sure, that's okay. I think tastes differ, and monitors differ (it's much lighter on my working monitor than on my older internet monitor), but your version looks okay to me too. But the first image is a bit too dark IMO, I'd like to be able to see more definition in the shadows.
There is some translucency, but not too much (0.2 I believe) as I think needles are rather thick and don't let much light through. But I may have to cheat a bit there too.

[sjefen]

One more thing you could try is to rise the soft clip effect. It will give you a flatter image, but then again you could adjust it in post. I often set this to 2. Sometimes even 3. It helps out when you want to protect both the highlights and also the darks.

[Dune]

Good of you to remember me. Thanks! Heard of that before, tried it once or twice, and forgot about it again.