My Board

Well looking at a lot of realistic 3D renders, they all state that they are using HDRI lighting in their render. I thought I'd give it a shot and I'm amazed at how real this looks.. The reflections, the lighting, the shadowing..wow!

For those of you who do not know what HDRI is...
[quote name='Google']High Dynamic Range Image

A 2D image stored in a file format with a greater range of luminance values than a standard bitmap image. HDR images are often used as environment maps in image-based lighting techniques to create subtle, real-world lighting effects.[/quote]
Well there ya go..now ya know what it is. Here it is:

[img]http://www.killanet.net/uploads/Realistic_Lighting.jpg[/img]

Render Time: 2 Minutes

wow /ohmy.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':o' /> looks very nice =D /cookie!.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='(jay)' />

0.o that looks really neat, must have taken a while to render though /blum.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':P' />

<r>Well time for my 2 cents.

A hdri render won't take very long as a standard radiosity render. This is if you set your settings correct. I use the following settings to get these results.

Strength : 250%
Accuracy : 70%
Diffuse : 1
Samples : 100
min : 20
mx : 200

and here's the result.To get faster renders you can decrease the strengt to 30 %.

The diffuse depth is on 1 here but you can place it on 3 as well.

Several good HDRI tutorials are these

http://www.splutterfish.com/sf/contrib/tut...ents/index.html

http://hdri.3dweave.com/

http://www.rain.org/~msavard/hdri/Articles/UsingHDRIs.html

and off course

http://www.google.com <img src='http://www.killanet.net/forum3/public/s ... igwink.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';)' /></r>

It was a 2 minute render *adds that to his post*