I finally managed to let an IBL render finish to completion and now I realize that I shouldn't have done that.  From now on I will want all my renders to be IBL even though this took 2 days to complete.  There is just that much difference.  I am loading a small version of the scene here.  [Click here to see it larger in my gallery.](http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2434206)  I am also going to try and put a gif file in the post following this one to illustrate the difference between IBL and sunlight.

Here is the gif animation showing the difference between regular sunlight and IBL.

striking...guess you've moved into the 2 day render mode now eh?

Thanks Bobby and I think I am going to try and render in IBL more now.

well worth the time based on your comparison for sure

Did you mean to exclude shadows?

Thanks guys. Chris the shadow intensity is set low and the soft shadow control is set high.

Hi UVDan. Nice first attempt. I was the same, once I'd used IBL I did'nt want to go back to Bryce's standard lighting mode.

It is worth it when you get the hang of it, the results are much better.

Just stick to it, you will be pleased with the results.

Here's my Gallery images all done in Bryce 7 Pro with IBL and some using HDRI's as backdrops.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/browse.php?username=StuartB

 

 

 

 

Thanks, I will check those out.

I'm very glad to see that you have discovered the magic of indirect lighting. Indeed, you will never turn back!!!! The idea that the only lighting a scene needs is the default sun and some glow from material ambience is so very flawed in most cases. So few of us come to understand just how many "lights" we really need to make a scene look its best.  Also, desire to keep renders fast leads to terrible lighting choices made for the wrong reasons. If you want better looking scenes, get used to longer render times!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The IBL example you show above is exactly the point. Yes, rendering takes longer with more advanced lighting, but the results are much more professional.

IBL is nothing magical. IBL is nothing but a dome built of virtual radial lights. So in theory, even in Bryce 5, one could construct a Dome of radial lights and its behavior would be almost identical to IBL in B6 and B7. Yes, the dome you build may have 50 radials in it, but that's okay. Most of us are trained and fearful of using more than 1 or 2 lights so we overlook the real job completely. Amazing, no?

The only difference between IBL and a standard light dome is that the colors of the virtual radials in an IBL will each be different colors and intensities and these colors tend to match real life colors much more than typical. The colors are derived from an image map. Colors are much richer. This is due to the high dynamic range of IBL compared to the low dynamic range of most lights. IBL is excellent at capturing a real world situation and recreating it in CG. However, rarely do we really need a fully high dynamic range HDR image. In fact, for faking indirect skylight, light domes do a better job 99% of the time because they keep it simple and dont require an image to derive colors. Skylight tends to be blue tinted only, a waste of the true potential of an IBL. More on that later.

What always gets under my skin is the realization that most Bryce users produce flatter looking renders for years because they abuse and overuse the ambience slider in the material lab. Trying to keep renders fast, the originators of Bryce used to apply a 19.6% ambience to all default textures. This had the bad side effect of "training" users to always use ambience as the base for indirect lighting, which is very unfortunate. Ambience, is a powerful tool, essential even, but on it's own it will not produce truly realistic images because it cannot produce shading. This is true in any software. This is why Ambience Occlusion was invented, to allow uniform ambient to be subtracted when models are close to one another creating a less uniform and realistic result. I digress. We dont have Ambient Occlusion in Bryce a such, just flat ambience. Because ambience is so easy to use and rely upon, most Bryce users dont ever explore more advanced and accurate lighting methods such as IBL and True Ambience until several years into their Bryce careers. For this reason I started referring to ambience as "evil." Evil, in that it stunts artistic growth if we dont force ourselves to look beyond it.

Why does the IBL render look so much better? Here's why:

1. Light from the sky comes in from above in sort of a semi-spherical manner. Representing this requires multiple point lights arranged around an area all working together. Each radial will be very dim in brightness, but when all the virtual lights are added together they produce a nice indirect light effect with naturally softened shadows. All these extra radials firing at different angles expose geometry that would otherwise be hidden if the only light you were using was the default sun. These virtual radials of the IBL dome spray light rays and shadow rays toward your target model making it look much more 3 dimensional and realistic.

2.  As mentioned above briefly, one does not need to use IBL to create the look of indrect light coming in from many directions, the same can be rigged manually with real radials drawn onto a sphere and enlarged to the mazimum size allowed. Bryce 7 isnt doing anything new.

1. There are 7 new light types in Bryce 7, many of them designed for the specific task of indirect lighting in different situations. The Dome Lights and 3D Fill lights are comprised of networks of virtual radial lights firing in all directions and are equivalent to IBL in overall function but with the benefit that they can be made to any size and can be "fit" inside interiors as needed. Also, virtual radials just like real radials will cast shadows. Why do I keep referring to shadows?

2. Shadows are more imprtant than the lighting itself. Yep, sounds crazy but true. Most of us spend our time pre-occupied with highlights, we tend to think shadows are meaningless. WRONG!!! Shadows, are the most important thing because the shadows are what carve out the geometric shape of a mesh making it appear 3d and not flat and 2d like a billboard. How we "correct" for the darkness of shadows is how we really make an image look realistic. There are better and worse methods as discussed above.

 

Best of luck!

Thanks for the info!