Pantherin75 opened this issue on Feb 18, 2025 ยท 31 posts
ChromeStar posted Thu, 20 February 2025 at 8:30 PM
Pantherin75 posted at 4:37 AM Wed, 19 February 2025 - #4493776
Weirdly, when it came to the render settings, I was kind of missing the old presets because I was used to fiddling with them to get things just right. That said, I gave Optix and others a go and became immediately suspicious along the lines of "It's blurry... I'm sure it's blurrier... This can't be right...There's a grain on the nose, or is that my monitor?
You can of course tweak them.
Didn't like the denoiser before and probably won't use it much now either.
You can overdo it, especially if there is a lot of noise to begin with, but personally I find that using some gives good results.
Single biggest issue with HDRIs has been the scaling to be honest. Background houses and stuff looks enormous and off every time, so that I have fixated on Puresky HDRIs becaue other ones look bad.
Changing the camera's focal length will shift things closer or further away.
Pantherin75 posted at 3:46 PM Wed, 19 February 2025 - #4493790
Will have to give the Mondello Beach startup scene another go, as it didn't do anything for me when I tried it out.
I am still trying to figure out what irks me about many renders I do with HDRIs and EZDome. The renders that I liked were small scale ones using a simple wall and floor + pbr textures combination and generally predominantly area lights. This is an example of one that irritates but I cannot put my finger on what bothers me. It's an EZDome setup with no sun and a Daz Studio freebie from Xmas.
I feel like the lighting might be too uniform. That could be a result of this particular HDRI. You could also add lights. If you have area lights, maybe you are filling in too much. Less can be more. Try adding them only from one side. Or cheat and just add a little spotlight on the character from a single angle, set to inverse square to keep it from illuminating too much else.
Personally I would also add DoF which helps cover up a lack of detail in the HDRI (as well as looking more realistic) and I tend to add a tiny bit of contrast in PostFx.
This particular scene also has a very limited color palette, which could be an appropriate artistic choice depending on what you are doing, but it makes it feel more muted overall.
Just my two cents on that.