Increase Brightness of HDRI?

[Ryan-M]

59 minutes ago, Renerabbitt said:

We’d want the backdrop (whether it's a static image or a non-light-emitting surface) to be visible to camera rays and specular/reflection rays, but not affect direct illumination or global illumination (GI). Separately, we'd want to assign either an HDRI or a solid environment color strictly for driving diffuse lighting and GI.

Technically speaking, every ray is a reflection ray that contributes to GI.  Specular reflection is as much a part of GI as Diffuse reflection.  Do you mean specular rays traced from zero-roughness surfaces?  What about shiny metal with a low but non-zero roughness?  What about through rough translucent materials?  There isn't a clear line between when you'd want to apply the HDRI and when you'd want to apply the color.

 

I'm not necessarily opposed to figuring something out, I just think it's a bit vague and will either produce results that not everyone is content with or will involve arbitrary thresholds or goofiness that cause materials to respond dramatically differently when they shouldn't.

[kwhitt]

@Ryan-M

 

I’ve been experimenting with Chief’s PBR rendering engine for the last few months attempting to push it to its limits.  Attached are images I produced for a master bath and PBR is quite capable with some postproduction work in Photoshop; however, there a few things missing that would really improve the realism:

 

·         The ability to change the phong angle of all components within a symbol.  This is very important as many of the renderings I see contain objects with far too much smoothing causing artifacts during rendering.

 

·         The ability to control the cubic material mapping of objects in all three axes.  Bitmaps can only be rotated on the Y axis which causes problems especially when applying tile materials to showers where the grout lines don’t sync.  You can see this on countertops too where the texture on the front vertical edge does not align with the horizontal surface.  If we could revolve/rotate the mapping in all three axes, this could be resolved.

 

·         The addition of pre-defined area lights so that it’s possible to accomplish many of the tricks used in interior photography.  It can be done now by creating a flat plane and assigning an emissive material but it’s time consuming to move around in the scene.  The area light would come in two forms – rectangular and disc-shaped.  The rectangular lights would emulate studio light boxes and the discs would be used for ceiling lights with controls for fall-off.

 

·         The addition of a shader that mimics the rounding of corners for objects in the scene.  Understandably so, Chief’s walls have sharp corners and having the ability to round them using a special bump map shader at time of render would add substantially to the realism and it would keep the file size down without all the added geometry.  Models imported into Chief would not have to be as detailed and heavy with this feature.

 

·         The addition of penumbra to spotlights and point lights.  There is no fall-off between shadow and light within the cone which is a dead giveaway.  The addition of IES lights would also solve this problem.

 

·         The addition of anisotropy to simulate brushed metals realistically.  Chief does allow separate roughness values for U and V, but I am unable to see where it makes any difference in my experiments.  If only applicable to models with UV’s, there should be a cubic mapping option; however, this will only be useful if we are able to rotate around all three axes as mentioned above.

 

·         The ability to specify the IOR of dielectric materials.  There is no way to differentiate between plastics, latex paint, and many other materials.  Everything comes out looking like plastic with varying sheens.

 

·         The addition of sub-surface scattering (SSS) to stimulate plastics such as Lucite and other acrylics, marble, and milk, etc.

 

·         The addition of postproduction filters in Chief.  At the very least, we should have the ability to control contrast or even better, a curves function such as that in Photoshop.  Without this capability the images are flat and lifeless.  It would also be nice to have more tone mapping options to prevent whites from blowing out a scene.  I like ACES but it is a bit too strong, and it would be nice if we could limit its impact with a slider.

 

·         The ability to control door swing angle and opening status with Layer Sets.  This would be a huge timesaver as I’m constantly opening and closing doors for different camera views.

 

·         The ability to control light attributes such as intensity and color via Light Sets.  It is now only possible to specify whether a light is on or off.  This can be a lot to keep track of – having to assign a Layer Set to each camera view that controls which of the lights are on and visible and at what intensity for each camera view.  It’s somewhat doable now but a lot of work and clumsy.

 

·         The ability to control the extent of denoising with a slider and the radius of the correction.  Often denoising is too much making the results blurry.  Furthermore, small resolution images require a smaller denoising radius as the pixels are so few.

 

I really hope Chief plans to expand the capabilities of their PBR engine as it has so much potential.  Raytracing takes far too long, and the results aren’t nearly as nice as PBR.  It would also be nice to avoid having to export entire projects to other rendering engines as you lose the parametric functions which work so well in Chief.  If the developers could deliver on this, I could dispose of my other software.

[Renerabbitt]

27 minutes ago, Ryan-M said:

Technically speaking, every ray is a reflection ray that contributes to GI.  Specular reflection is as much a part of GI as Diffuse reflection.  Do you mean specular rays traced from zero-roughness surfaces?  What about shiny metal with a low but non-zero roughness?  What about through rough translucent materials?  There isn't a clear line between when you'd want to apply the HDRI and when you'd want to apply the color.

 

I'm not necessarily opposed to figuring something out, I just think it's a bit vague and will either produce results that not everyone is content with or will involve arbitrary thresholds or goofiness that cause materials to respond dramatically differently when they shouldn't.

Thanks Ry, I see what you're getting at, but I think we're slightly talking past each other.

What we’re asking for isn’t about splitting ray types by material roughness or applying different behavior based on specularity. It's simpler:

We want to be able to assign a completely separate environment — a secondary HDRI or a flat color — that is used exclusively for global illumination and lighting calculations. Meanwhile, a different background HDRI or backplate would be visible to the camera and visible in reflections, but it would not contribute any illumination at all (no diffuse, no specular, no GI energy).

No thresholds, no material-based switching — just two environment inputs: one for "lighting only" and one for "visible/reflections only."

This setup is fairly common in production rendering workflows (think ray switch shaders or environment overrides in Arnold, V-Ray, etc.), and it gives us a lot more control without introducing inconsistencies in how materials behave.

Am I getting this right? does that make sense?(fully think I am unqualified for this convo :))

[Renerabbitt]

41 minutes ago, kwhitt said:

·         The ability to change the phong angle of all components within a symbol.  This is very important as many of the renderings I see contain objects with far too much smoothing causing artifacts during rendering.

Kwhitt, chief stated that adding to suggestions help the log on suggestions so I'm tagging along on your post
Adding to this. In kwhitts example rendering, notice that the smoothing angle is too high on the doors he used. A kindve adjacent plus one for being able to select groups of objects and have a group based symbol smoothing editor would be nice
 

 

41 minutes ago, kwhitt said:

The ability to control the cubic material mapping of objects in all three axes.  Bitmaps can only be rotated on the Y axis which causes problems especially when applying tile materials to showers where the grout lines don’t sync.  You can see this on countertops too where the texture on the front vertical edge does not align with the horizontal surface.  If we could revolve/rotate the mapping in all three axes, this could be resolved.

Add all of the possible UV projection based material edits including average of surface normals please. BTW this is an OOTB Chief Cabinet...all kinds of problems:

 

Quote

ceiling lights with controls for fall-off.

Yes please and also let us input ies profiles

 

 

41 minutes ago, kwhitt said:

anisotropy

 Tune into the webinar next week

41 minutes ago, kwhitt said:

The ability to specify the IOR of dielectric materials.  There is no way to differentiate between plastics, latex paint, and many other materials.  Everything comes out looking like plastic with varying sheens.

You can kind've fake this with the current mixed materials in some cases..Add a general material with a transparency map and change the Ior then add a clear coat that can be rough or glossy etc. not quite the same but wanted to mention it. +1

41 minutes ago, kwhitt said:

a curves function such as that in Photoshop

Yes please. I have a post production camera raw filter that touches clarity and texture and dehaze and de-tunes aces a bit and ramps up sharpness and color noise reduction as well as a slight curves adjustment. Would be nice to have all of this. 

 

41 minutes ago, kwhitt said:

The ability to control door swing angle and opening status with Layer Sets.  This would be a huge timesaver as I’m constantly opening and closing doors for different camera views.

Cool idea
 

41 minutes ago, kwhitt said:

Layer Set

We have light sets I think is what you mean? I didnt understand your request here. We can change light sets on the fly in edit view or store a light set with a saved camera. 
I think it would be nifty if we could automatically switch light sets by room when the 3d is rebuilt


Wanna make this into a suggestion post?