Skybox, shadows and highlights too strong

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  • When you use a Skybox, you can manage the light that the Skybox emits to the all project. But this light always is to much hard, the shadows are very strong and the highlights also. I tried to compensate it with the "Sun brightness", the Skybox brightness, the exposure and the Contrast. But It's impossible to get the image that I want, with the shadows and highlights lower. Or i get to much contrast, or the skybox is too dark. When I remove the Skybox image, then it's very easy to get a screenshot as I wanted, but with the skybox i can't.

  • I find this an overall problem too. For exterior shots, the sun is always too strong and there's not enough sky illumination in the rest of the model. The sun brightness slider doesn't seem to make much difference since it appears to bring down the sky brightness proportionally.

    • Official Post

    I'm gonna check it out myself, thank you both for the feedback. Is there maybe a chance you both could share a rendering in which you experience any of these mentioned issues? Just to have some good examples. Thank you!

  • I was looking at this the other day. Here's a test compared with a V-Ray render, I was trying to figure out what's different in the GI "look." Some scenes it's not too bad, but where it's full sun, the shadows just seem much darker in Enscape. Look especially at the porch beam just under the roof overhang.

  • You can "fix" this by increasing the sun brightness. Auto exposure will then make the shadows look darker in turn. The sun brightness depends on various things, so it's possible that different renderers have slightly different sun intensities.


    The sun brightness slider doesn't seem to make much difference since it appears to bring down the sky brightness proportionally.

    This should not be the case, especially not with a loaded HDRI skybox.

  • I'm gonna check it out myself, thank you both for the feedback. Is there maybe a chance you both could share a rendering in which you experience any of these mentioned issues? Just to have some good examples. Thank you!

    Hi,


    I make some pictures examples of my project.


    1. Picture with my skybox. The skybox looks good of brightness, but in the project the shadows and the highlights are too hard, too contrast. I know i can change the contrast of the pictures, but the result isn't the same...

    2. Picture with my skybox. I try to change "Brightness", "Sun brightness", and "skybox brightness" to try to get less contrast and less hard shadows and highlights. Finally I get a skybox too bright, and the shadows don't improve.

    3. I made the same picture with the "Forest Enscape Horizon". If I change "Brightness" and "Sun brightness", i could get a picture where the "forest horizon" is with a correct brightness, and the shadows and the highlights of the project are perfect, to see all the information.


    All the picutres are taken with "auto contrast"


    This happens to me in all projects that I have done with different skyboxes.


    I know that I could get a better picture If I make a postproduction image with Photoshop or something like this. But to make a postproduction with a video where is going inside the house, outside, with a lot light changes, is more difficult.


    Thanks!




  • One thing that seems to work fairly well is to increase the clouds density so the sky lighting is more diffuse. The main issue is then the sky is cloudy in the background. Here's a request for developers - can you have a sky that's cloudy in only one region of the sky (so you can have clouds behind you, but see blue sky in front of you.)

  • One thing that seems to work fairly well is to increase the clouds density so the sky lighting is more diffuse. The main issue is then the sky is cloudy in the background. Here's a request for developers - can you have a sky that's cloudy in only one region of the sky (so you can have clouds behind you, but see blue sky in front of you.)

    Tuning down sun intensity while having a low cloud density has the exact effect that you describe.


    pristol There is little "magic" going on in Enscape here, that we could tweak in order to reach your result. Given the intensity of the sun, HDRI environment and materials the lighting that's being calculated is physically defined and will look quite the same across most raytracers (approximation inaccuracies aside). Therefore, the only meaningful options you and we have is to tune the skybox and sun intensity in order to match the look you desire.

  • If we could have separate brightness for visible hdr vs lighting/gi hdr we would have a way to fix this when using hdr as well.


    There is even a photographic technique that produces a similar effect... using a polarizing filter. So it would still be considered a "photographic" phenomenon for the purists out there.


    On making comparisons with Vray.... Realtime rendering is simply different than nonrealtime, it seems illogical that we can expect similar results. The only logical comparisons right now seem to be realtime technologies such as Lumion, Unreal, Twinmotion, eevee, etc. Feel free to ask, to match non realtime but its not a "bug" or "problem" that Enscapes output doesnt look like Vrays.

    • Official Post

    All the picutres are taken with "auto contrast"


    I know that I could get a better picture If I make a postproduction image with Photoshop or something like this. But to make a postproduction with a video where is going inside the house, outside, with a lot light changes, is more difficult.

    If you feel that there's too much contrast in your images you should not activate auto contrast, but tweak the Shadows and Highlights values yourself. By reducing the Shadows value you can easily achieve the appearance of less dark shadows. We've added those particularly for such use cases - no Photoshop post work needed :)