New plugin : HDR light Domes

Philemo_Carrara

RuudL said:

Any chance of a macOS version or are you still having issues with your Mac?  Need some help?

Yes, the issue is solved. I just had just forgotten this and I put it back on my todo list.

RuudL

Much appreciated.

Btw if you are interested in a "API Reference", i suggest that you pay a visit to the Carrara SDK Dev forum. The reference has lots of ways of looking up information. Try clicking on "Class Members"

artworks3d_cf6b079083

Hello everyone,

i'm a newbie here so please forgive me for asking stupid questions... I first started using RayDream back around 1995 or 96, then stuck with it through Carrara up until about 2010 or so. After a LONG break, I decided to play around with it again. I only have Carrara 6 Pro and it was a feat getting it to run smoothly on a new iMac running High Sierra OS (but it does work). I've long since lost my account/install info and none of my DCG plugins are to be found, so HERE'S my stupid question: how the heck do you load plugins to Carrara 6? I can't recall for the life of me. Thanks for your patience...

3drendero

Threadjacking, but the info for C6 is on the DCG website: https://carraracafe.com/dcg-plugins-going-open-source/

BrianP21361

On a Mac, right click the Carrara icon in the Applications/DAZ3D/Carrara Folder and select Show Package Contents. Open the MacOS folder. Plugins go in the Extensions folder. Most plugins need three files. The .dat, .mcx and .txt files. I hope that helps. 

artworks3d_cf6b079083

Awesome, thanks for the information! I appreciate the help. I'll be back

RuudL

I'm testing the Mac version of HDRLightDome and I found that the result depends on the format of outputfile. In this case png versus jpg. It has probably to do with the alpha channel, but i'm not sure. The hdr background image is lost in the png outputfile. The cloud formation is not part of the hdr. It's from the Cloud 9 package by DimensionTheory.

Can anyone replicate this on windows? That will help me to detemine whether it is a mac issue or not.

png (left) and jpg (r)

Persona Non Grata

You can export a 'transparent' png in windows (by ticking the appropriate box[es]) and that will remove the HDRI background...

 

But exporting a non-transparent png hasn't presented any difficulties for me in using this plug-in on Windows. All my posts above are png images with HDRI backgrounds showing. Make sure you can export a png without alpha mask incorporated.

RuudL

Thank you!

Unticking the Render Alpha Channel box made the difference. So it's not a Mac issue, but my lack of knowles of this part of the GUI.

RuudL

@Philemo_Carrara  I've send you a PM regarding the release of the mac version of HDRLightDome.

Mistara

i'm ready.  seems a natural companion to the pbr plug in.

 

Sci Fi Funk

@Philemo_Carrara I've only just seen this thread as I was away from 3D for a couple of years but a big THANK YOU - this really is brilliant news and I shall be trying it out as soon as real life gives me a (3d) break again.

Brilliant! Thanks again.

Mistara

Most Welcome 

Carrara X,  These friendly plugins add new carrara animation inspirations.

 

 

 

 

Mistara

lightdome should be able to load a 8k hdri ?

thinkin bout getting the new orestes set.  https://www.daz3d.com/orestes-iray-hdri-environments--lost-grotto

means trying to learn how to make wet carrara hair.

Philemo_Carrara

@RuudL

I've completely missed that. I come back to you soon

RuudL said:

@Philemo_Carrara  I've send you a PM regarding the release of the mac version of HDRLightDome.

Philemo_Carrara

Just to compare, a set of images from my test bench

First image is the classical way for a sunny exterior scene. One distant light roughly from de direction of the sun + sky light

Second image is with minimal light dome and sky light

Third image is with light dome with default setting and no sky light

 

Philemo_Carrara

Another test with an interior scene

the default setting is good enough for sunny exterior scene, where it gives a good compromise between speed of render and result, but not for interior scene.

I'll be playing with two settings :

• Hard light threshold : simple version : the higher it is, the more lights will produce shadow.
• Brightness multiplier :increase the power of the light produced by the dome.

Ideally, Hard light threshold should always be set to max. But, as it can increase render time dramatically, you may play with it to set it to the minimum acceptable.

As a rule of thumb, if there are one of a few hard lights in the HDRI, you can set it low. If light is very evenly distributed (as in this one), you'll find profitable to increase it.

Both are linked. If most of the lights produce shadows, self shadowing will darken the result. Brightness must be increased to compensate

The HDRI is abandoned_hall_01 from hdrihaven.com (16k version)

First image is sky light only (for reference)

Second image is with the default setting (not convincing at all)

Third image is with the threshold slider pushed to the max (200%). Its better, but too dark

Fourth image is the same, but with brightness multiplier set to 200%. It's still a bit too dark

Fifth image is with brightness multiplier set to 250. Looks good to me now

RuudL

Philemo_Carrara said:

@RuudL

I've completely missed that. I come back to you soon

A few days ago I removed the PM and the github repository. So you better ignore that post. I've been working on the crash with volumetric clouds. I just had to know what caused it. I found that the DirectionFilter3() is failing. I fixed it by setting the 8th argument ( boolean renderVolumePrimitives ) to False. Currently I'm working on additional experimental options on the GUI.

Dartanbeck

First of all, thanks Philemo! I've had this installed for some time now - time to get off me arse and give this a go!!!

Next, in reading through this (wonderful) thread, and enjoying Selinita's incredible experiments, results and instructions, I made a mental note to revisit this question:

Mystiarra said:

my mind still boggled on the idl revelation.  idl makes sss settings not work?

in poser there is ibl lights.  is it another term for hdri, are they the same thing?

I'm no longer a Poser user, but I'm really quite certain that, like Carrara IBL is NOT the same as HDRI as a light source.

 

Image Based Lighting is actually more similar to how this plugin (I think?) works - and Carrara has it too, called "Environment Lighting", where we use an image to have our software generate a lighting solution according to the brightness and color of the map being used.

 

Again, I'm not sure what Poser uses for this, but Carrara uses Anything Glows lights. Here's the workflow for that:

 

Create a sphere (or whatever) and give it a texture map (or not? any shader willl produce results)

With the above object selected in the instances tray, go Edit > Environment Lighting and set the (very few) parameters to your liking

According to your inputs in the dialog, Carrara will create a number of Anything Glows lights according to the color averages that it finds from the shader for the given location of each placed AG light, and set each lights brightness according to the data it retrieves from the shader as well.

 

HDRI lighting is taking advantage of what an HDR image is - a high density map stored in float 32, which can track data far beyond the normal RGB scale that other image extensions are held to. 

 

A quick example of the above float 32 statement: RGB scale goes from 0 (black) to 256 (white), whereas float 32 simply records whatever value the chip absorbs, even if it's so incredibly bright (or dark) that it blows out (or puddles in black) a normal RGB scale. In other words, while white is still in the same location on the graph, float 32 can keep on recording higher values that are effectively beyond white, for example. The same goes for the opposite side of the graph - float 32 can record values that are lower that pure black.

 

This comes into play when white-balancing an image. 

 

When we try to 'fix' and image that has been blown out by bright lights, a normal RGB range image won't have any data lower than 0 or higher than 256, where the HDRI image will still have all of the values - the full range stored in its data, so the photographer can use corrections to truly bring the image back into the RGB range before storing it again to a more usable format, like jpg, png, tiff, etc.,

 

The 3D rendering industry saw how they could take advantage of all of this float 32 information to actually cast light into a digital scene, by allowing any value brighter than white to truly cast directional light. Add to this that they already knew how to use the enviroment to cause indirect lighting, HDRI based illumination immediately started showing much better lighting results than simply lighting the scene with an image.

 

At least that's how my layman's brain absorbed all of this back when PhilW was running his Linear Workflow thread, and I started digging a bit.

Mistara

Philemo_Carrara said:

I know I've already written about it, but there is this HDRI Haven site https://hdrihaven.com/hdris/ with more than 300 high quality hrdi backgrounds with 5 resolution, up to 16k.

 

thank you for the resource link  

Mistara

the o reilly tutorials talks a lot about gamma correction.  does it have any effect when using hdr light dome?

what are the recommended render settings?  should i tick on sky, idl?  thanks.

i'm still in shock over the idl revelation. lol

 

i should delete the carrara default light?

Philemo_Carrara

Yes, it does, because HDRi background usually needs to be gamma corrected.

Recommended  settings are 2.2 on Windows, 1.8 on Mac.

Mystiarra said:

the o reilly tutorials talks a lot about gamma correction.  does it have any effect when using hdr light dome?

what are the recommended render settings?  should i tick on sky, idl?  thanks.

i'm still in shock over the idl revelation. lol

Mistara

Thanks!

 

Mistara

any suggestions for lighting interior of a death star?

i found some pbr shaders that would be good for space station walls.
tho some of them the rough pg is a plane white tile.  ??

Mistara

32k hdr images?  are they insane??  lol

Headwax

nice series of image Philemo

Mistara

manually copying thumbnail from .car file to cbr.

i started saving my hdr presets. hdr save icon.
save to a folder to misc tab, when it asks for type, select background.

by default tray shows a star in the tray.

to generate the thumbnail, save scene with preview, uncompressed.
open file with notepad or wordpac.  search for "PREV"

• copy everything between:

Prev {
TVPr {

bunch of ascii

}
}

• open the cbr file of the hdr preset you saved
  under:

brow {
kind back
prvw 0
comm ""
}

paste in what you just copied from the .car file. 

to apply a background preset, drag thumbnail on top of background in efffects tab.

i'm sure this is the hard way, theres prolly a song about the hard way.

Mistara

i been up all night playing with this.

test driving these  
https://www.daz3d.com/fantasy-ibl-rock-arch-beach-hdri
Bryce, Carrara & Daz Studio Iray HDRI (no link to store)
https://www.daz3d.com/daz-studio-iray-hdr-outdoor-environments
https://www.daz3d.com/fantasy-ibl-rock-arch-beach-hdri

learned not all  hdri are equal.  even the 16k ones may render fairy lights.  unexplained white speckles

 

 

 

Mistara

its like potato chips, cant stop

Mistara

Hi

i bought the Platinum Pack Two.  is EXR files.  is there anything can convert?

THanks