New plugin : HDR light Domes

New plugin : HDR light Domes

by | Jun 5, 2019 | Carrara Plugins, Feature, News

Philemo introduced a new plug-in!

Carrara has 2 kinds of lighting, direct and indirect.

  • Direct lighting comprise all kind of lights (directional, sun, bulb, spot, anything glows, shape lights…).
  • Indirect lighting are ambient, sky light and indirect light.

The main difference between direct and indirect is that all the features of the lighting model (highlight, shadows, SSS, translucency) are used only with direct lighting. Indirect lighting considers all materials as mate, with no SSS, shadowless. If your materials follow this description, then no problem. Otherwise, renders using indirect lights often seem dull and whitish.

The goal is to add a true environment lighting in Carrara, as seen in all modern renderers.

To come back to this plugin, the idea is to create a dome of direct lights (here directional lights) with value extracted from an HDRI map. This is supposed to give the best of both world.

 

A side by side comparison of rendering a shiny object using sky light and dome light

Sky light

Dome light

How to use it

First, there must be an HDR Background set for the scene

The command to create is in menu EDIT/Philemo/HDR Light Dome.

It open a window with 5 parameters:

  • Brightness multiplier. It’s similar to the sky light intensity slider in the render room. It’s related to the shadow you’ll use (hard light threshold slider a bit below). The more shadow, the more brightness you need
  • Shadow intensity. Same as in lights.
  • Hard light threshold. It’s the threshold below which a light will be considered a hard light (ie cast shadow). A 5% value leave only the sun as hard light in a bright sky. A 200% value has all the lights as hard light.
  • Sky only : Will generate a half dome and no light from the ground.
  • Subdivision level : drives the number of lights generated by a power of 2. 5 is 32 lights, 6 is 64, 7 is 128, 8 is 256…

Optimal is often found with 256 lights, 200% threshold. It may be a bit long to render, more if you have transmaps, so you can lower some setting. That’s why the default is 50% threshold

Of course, when rendering, sky light option should be unselected.

The plugin is available here

It’s Windows only (I have some issues with my Mac, I hope to solve soon).

More info you can find at https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/331301/new-plugin-hdr-light-domes#latest

“Paint with Shadows” – An exercise in Global Illumination

by | May 3, 2014 | Tutorials

A lengthy explanation, as usual, this GI/IL Test Bed is a tutorial regarding setting up a scene for exploring the idea of ‘Painting with Shadows’ simply to gain positive experience that is sure to make lighting design more fluid and natural. You’ll be able to quickly and accurately test the results of a full lighting arrangement using only one light, while Carrara’s Global Illumination system takes care of the rest.

The idea of this is to gain experience in light angles and their resulting shadows, so that you build in your own mind a set of results that you like, and that work well for various situations, as well as to have fun with Carrara’s powerful raytrace engine.

Three Point Lighting Tutorial for 3d Animators

by | Apr 29, 2014 | Tutorials

Three point lighting can transform your remders! Suddenly flat dull pictures take on a 3d quality of their own. The basic principle is this, shine a keylight onto the subject and a fill light to the side, plus a backlight to the side and rear. Now the magic happends when the three lights overlap on the subject.

However I take things much further in this tutorial. How about using three point lighting on individual objects to make them stand out in a scene. If you make the lighting so tight that It doesnt spill over onto the ground below or other objects you have massive control over your subject.

Fast Night Time Lighting for 3D Animation

by | Apr 29, 2014 | Tutorials


The basic idea is to use moonlight with 4 distant lights each with their own colour shading and intensity, in order to simulate the slow to render indirect lighting that is available under global illumination. I go into how contrasting additional lights with this lighting can help the whole scene look like night time.

The video is geared towards surviving youtubes encoding for darker lights. Of course using some kind of gamma correction is useful, but how about fixing the scene at source? Gamma correction can light up everything, here you can select what is to stand out.

Finally I mix a three point lighting idea with this set up to show how you can cheat and help individual objects stand out in the darkness.