Mec4D opened this issue on Feb 26, 2016 ยท 28 posts
bagginsbill posted Sun, 28 February 2016 at 9:09 AM
By way of demonstration, I loaded a "High" dynamic range image (I use the quotes sarcastically here). This image does have some luminance above 1 where the sun is, but the value is not anywhere as high as the real sun is, relative to the nearby sky. I used a few math nodes to isolate the sun spot and multiply its value by 32. (5 more stops)
The render is far from clean (and I'll let it run quite a while to see where it ends up) but the shadows are well defined even though I have NO light sources in the scene, just the HDRI (with my sun spot booster).
This is a demo, not a practical use case. I normally just use an infinite light, which converges much faster (minutes vs. hours).
Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)