Still playing around with HRDI and have a few more questions for you experts: 1) Has anyone been able to create an environment/scene in Vue (trees, terrains and the like) and use the HRDI to illuminate it without dragging in cyclorama or some other prop? I've downloaded a number of .hdr files to try it. If it can be done, I haven't figured out how. 2) In Vue 4, you could edit the shadows to make them lighter (not black) by selecting the sun and then (from the drop down menu on the right), select "edit shadows". When I try that in Vue 5 with any atmosphere setting the picture gets very dark and cannot be restored without re-inserting the atmosphere. What am I missing here? 3) Somewhere in one of the posts, someone mentioned "post processing". Where the heck is it?

3, click your camera, 1, should work?

You can render Vue's water or terrain with trees using HDR- but you won't have the standard Vue atmosphere with clouds, etc- so you will need to substitute a photo as a backdrop for your sky.

You can also edit the shadows in any of the lights and reduce the shadows down as low as you like.

To get the Post-Processing panel-Right Click on the camera and in that panel-select: Edit Object.

Ok....that's what I thought. Just out of curiousity, what .hdr file and settings did you use for that scene? When I try to set it up, it seems to "wash out" terrain materials and trees. Found the Post-Processing panel! Thanks :) On the shadows, it's probably easiest for me to show you what I'm doing and then you can tell me what I'm doing wrong. Image one: Here's where I'm going to edit the shadows for the sun:

Here's what happens when I set them to 69%

Here's at 37%....no difference.

And when I try to restor to 100%.....this is what happens...nothing! Is there some other place to do this editing in Vue 5?

After selecting Enivornment Mapping as my Atmosphere, I loaded the HDR light probe file "St. Peters".

The major adjustments for your HDRI scene are:

1.Sky Dome Lighting Gain. This is like a Camera aperature which allows more or less light in your Global Scene. Usually you have to adjust it UP. But if it looks "washed-out" then you need to adjust it DOWN.

2.Overall Skylight Color. This is the SECOND most important adjustment that controls "Color Temperature"- or basically the color tone of your Global Light- Warm, Cool, Sunset, etc. For POSER SKIN a subtle dark brown is a good color as it matches the general lighting used in POSER. (Poser defaults to a general Warm-Brown lighting setup.) Lighter color values will ALSO make the light source BRIGHTER. Consider that a Grey-Cloudy sky makes things DARKER, while a small amount of high altitude wispy cirrus clouds will make the atmosphere BRIGHTER- usually with a stronger bluish tone. So- that is what color temperature is about...

1. ROTATE your scene. By selecting the entire scene you can ROTATE it until the particular lighting you like hits your model they way you like. This is more tricky as every HDRI file is different and the main light comes from any number of places- or is very diffused- depending upon the HDRI file you load. (The St. Peters HDR has generally even light and highlights so this is less of a problem as compared to some other HDR files which have more directional sources of light.)

2. One final adjustment you can make is on your MATERIAL settings- are your objects reflecting too MUCH light back,
   making them really BRIGHT? Then darken their object color,
   (Colors-Color Correction-Overall Colors) or tweak their lighting characteristics in the EFFECTS panel of the Advanced Materials Editor (Diffuse, Ambient, Luminous).
   Poser has basically the same controls in Pro-Pack in its materials editor...

I read all your previous posts on this Veritas and have done everything just as you noted. If the sky dome gain is set high enough to effectively light any objects, the terrains on the ground nearest the camera are washed out. I've also done the color correction you noted and rotated the crap out of things :) I have not tried the material settings. I'm using (for now) the ones that came with the demo. Any ideas on that shadow issue?

If we are still talking about HDR lighting- then the sun has NO EFFECT at all, as it isn't an active light in this case (IBL=Image Based Lighting).

With HDR lighting you CAN, of course, add other lights, like spots, point lights, etc. The Batman image has several lights in it, while the main lighting is still coming from the HDR file...

BTW- with the Bat-Mobile-- I had to really TONE DOWN the material brightness of the car- as initially it was nearly WHITE from the HDR and overhead spotlight. So its diffuse and ambient characteristics- plus the car's base color, was reduced to near TOTAL BLACK in several ways to make it look right...

One other IMPORTANT TIP about using HDR--- I would generally STEER-CLEAR of trying to light BIG out door scenes with it. You get MUCH FASTER HDR render times using enclosed scenes that are image-mapped, rather than procedural stuff. HDR just works much faster that way. If you want to use lots of terrain, trees, etc- I would stay with Global Ambience or Global Illumination settings with Vue's regular atmospheres (and NOT an HDR file.) In many Hollywood effects scenes- and all those car commercials on TV with 3D cars- they utilize HDR in ENCLOSED sets. Even those "outdoor" scenes are actually image-mapped interior sets. You CAN of course MAT an HDR rendered car into a REAL outdoor scene- but that's a different area of Post-Processing BEYOND what Vue is doing.

Thanks for the tips here. I agree with you on the outdoor scenes. The HRDI works much faster if you don't try and do the procedural stuff. I was able to get rid of the wash out look though.....I just had to solve the problem! :) It was a combination of the material brightness and the .hdr files I was using. Some of those half-size ones work better. On the issue of shadows: No....I'm not just talking about HRDI. The shadow edit doesn't seem to work in any atmospheric setting. If you look at posts 4-7 above, you'll see the setting I'm trying to adjust and what's happening. It has to be something simple I'm missing....or it's just a bug. In Vue 4, you can reduce the intensity of the shadow for the sun and any other light by using this edit function, just like you can in Poser.

Before the patch, the shadow editor worked fine. If you look at the Registered User Forum on the e-on software site, you will see that after the 5.02 patch has been added, the shadow editor ceased to work properly. When used, the skies turn dark. e-on tech support has been notified of this problem. Paula

Thank you Paula!!!! Then it is a bug!! I'm a registered Vue 4 user, but have been working with the Vue 5 Trial version which I just downloaded. The shadow editing control is very useful, just as it is in Poser, because it helps to moderate the heavy black shadows that get created by some light schemes. That really needs to be fixed before I purchase. I create environments....the old fashioned way. In Poser I have to use the "pictures and props" to simulate environments, but, with the exception of interior scenes,I don't want to have to do that in Vue. The other global environment settings,as Veritas mentioned, work really well (global environment/ambience)as an alternative to HRDI for those scenics. There may be times when I want to render an image for web or other marketing work that does not involve a scenic environment and focuses instead on an object. In those cases the HRDI and Text features will be very useful. I could even see rendering portraits or individual characters that were set up in Poser to get some very dramatic effects (like the ones Veritas has posted around the site).

I received a message from e-on tech support in answer to my post that the shadow bug will be fixed in the next beta 5.02 update which should be out very soon. Paula

Thanks Paula! That's good news :)