Exterior PBR

[Lakeside-E]

Anyone have any luck with exterior PBR? 

 

I find it infinitely frustrating that light fixture settings that work for a standard view are like LED high beams when you switch to PBR mode. I get my fixtures dialed in for the exterior shots. Everything is looking great. HDR background looks good. The only detail I want to adjust is the light on the rest of the house because I feel there should be a bit more of a natural wash from how the sun should be in the background. Current settings for the environment is sun toggled "off"  

 

 

Que the sun and adjust the color, angle, and direction to my predetermined settings for this HDR. Intensity still looks like a welding arc without goggles so i adjust it down to .25LUX and it looks better except now my background is dark. Who knew the sun backlit the background, Not me until now. 

 

 

Turn off the sun and the background looks good, turn on the sun and the background is dark. Is there a way to make this not happen?

 

Why does the hdr light up depend on the sun illuminating it? I could maybe understand it if the sky portion of the hdr also caused cloud shadows and some color filtration of the sun on your scene but there does not appear to be any sort of affect by a background. 

Why does everything in PBR have to me like looking into a supernova with a magnifying glass when other views light data is set to where it looks good?

Why does bread land jelly side down?

 

Any help or insight is greatly appreciated. Thanks 

[DzinEye]

40 minutes ago, Lakeside-E said:

Any help or insight is greatly appreciated. Thanks 

I'll only say a few things because I'm not a PBR pro by any means but I'll offer what I know.  I think Graham is the PBR wizard, so perhaps he'll chime in, but you could also search under his name and pbr posts and you'll glean a lot of good info.  Backgrounds definitely do affect the light... at least on interior views they do.   I'll usually but not always have the sun dialed way down to around 1K lux then adjust brightness and/or exposure to get lighting adjusted just so.  Also though I have often found that I need to turn light set brightness way way down in certain situations.

[DzinEye]

Looks like you need to fill up the pool! ???

 

[Lakeside-E]

3 minutes ago, DzinEye said:

Looks like you need to fill up the pool! ???

 

Water bill got shut off... No, it is actually filled but apparently in PBR the properties of the water don't filter the light the same way I've had it happen in ray trace. Not sure why it is that way but one thing at a time.

[TheKitchenAbode]

I've not done a real night scene for some time. From what I can recall, when you have the sun toggled on and the sun has a level of intensity the sun will affect the background and the model. If you then just toggle the sun off the background is still effected but the sun will not light the model. If you then turn the sun intensity to zero the background will go completely dark. There is no way using the sun to just light the model without lighting the background at the same time, and there is no way to adjust how the light is split between the background and the model.

 

For you situation I would suggest the following Toggle the sun off and adjust it's intensity to get the background looking the way you desire, I think that's essentially what you had in your first pic. To light the model place a 3D light off in the distance and up in the air, say 100 ft., use a spot and angle it say 20 degrees, set the spread to say 180. For it's intensity you will need to do this by trial and error, as a guide 100 lumens is about the equivalent to 1 Lux. This spot is now act as the sun that will light your model. Play with the shadows on and the drop rate to fine tune. As this is a sunset scene you might wish to add a color to the spot, a yellow/orange tone might work well.

[robdyck]

To add to Graham's suggestion, I'd recommend a specific light set for that view. I create light sets and name them to coordinate with saved cameras. 

[Lakeside-E]

1 hour ago, TheKitchenAbode said:

I've not done a real night scene for some time. From what I can recall, when you have the sun toggled on and the sun has a level of intensity the sun will affect the background and the model. If you then just toggle the sun off the background is still effected but the sun will not light the model. If you then turn the sun intensity to zero the background will go completely dark. There is no way using the sun to just light the model without lighting the background at the same time, and there is no way to adjust how the light is split between the background and the model.

 

For you situation I would suggest the following Toggle the sun off and adjust it's intensity to get the background looking the way you desire, I think that's essentially what you had in your first pic. To light the model place a 3D light off in the distance and up in the air, say 100 ft., use a spot and angle it say 20 degrees, set the spread to say 180. For it's intensity you will need to do this by trial and error, as a guide 100 lumens is about the equivalent to 1 Lux. This spot is now act as the sun that will light your model. Play with the shadows on and the drop rate to fine tune. As this is a sunset scene you might wish to add a color to the spot, a yellow/orange tone might work well.

Thanks for the suggestion. I never considered using an artificial "sun for my artificial sun. It would take some playing with but i'll keep it in mind. 

 

1 hour ago, robdyck said:

To add to Graham's suggestion, I'd recommend a specific light set for that view. I create light sets and name them to coordinate with saved cameras. 

ive got light sets made but didnt consider using a set per saved camera. thats a great idea. I wish there was a way to group lights together or use multiple subsets in a light set so you didnt have so many fixtures to select...

 

Select lights in a room or region, save as a subset. in your camera specific light set you can select the individual subset as a whole or open a drop down menu to select from the individual lights in that subset. Light figtures can belong to more than one subset if you choose and turning one off or on will affect it across all subsets it is apart of per light set.