Hi everybody!

After searching for hours I give up and beg for help: how can I use an evironment map in skindigo?

What I've done until now:
1.) loaded hdr and transformed it into exr
2.) created material (texture) in su and linked it to the exr
3.) choosed evironment map in skindigo, choosed the right material, hooked "Add sun"
4.) exported igs and rendered.

Result: evering ist black! No Light!

What's wrong? I dont't know!

Please help.

Torben

Check your camera settings first of all.

Ha, I made it! It was that easy! The (light-)layer was "off"!

Torben

i was able to use environment maps in the first beta that had them as materials (3.0.15?) but with the newer betas, i couldn't get them to work.. all my renders were completely black even if i maxed out the EV/gain/iso..

i tried applying the environment material to a surface in sketchup in which case, the surface would then illuminate in the render so i figured i had the dots connected somewhat properly..

tried the environment map again with the lumens set to 50,000 which was still rendering black but after maxing out all the gain settings, i started to get a hint of light in the render.. tried again with 100,000 lumen and then 500,000 lumen but still wasn't able to get usable light..

eventually switched to lux instead of lumen as the emission scale in which case, the default number of 1750 gave me usable light from the get go..

took about an hour &a half to get this figured out but i'm satisfied now

i'm not quite sure if there's something wrong with my .exr files which are causing them to emit such a low amount of light or if using the lumen scale is just the wrong way to go about it (or if i'm doing something else wrong which is probably the case ) but just posting this incase someone else is have problems getting light from an exr.

Hi,

I'm having a similar problem as this, yet no matter how much I change either the environment map power, the tonemapping settings or swap environment map itself, it still renders with a black sky and bright sun.

This happens whenever I add a 'fake' sun to environment maps - is there a setting I'm missing?

Thanks

Jen

Set your tone mapping to camera rather than Reinhard. Reinhard will try to average the image brightness which doesn't work so well when you have a super bright object like the sun in the frame.

Hi ENSLAVER,

I have it set to camera already (I rarely use Reinhard) and it still doesn't work

Wether it has been painted into the environment map or is a geometry, the emitting power of the fake sun is too strong. Change it's emission scale or layer value, the discrepancy is eclipsing the sky.

Thanks! It works now, although I couldn't change the emission scale in skindigo it seemed (I don't think there is a place you can change it). I had to change it in the environment settings, but the values seem very OTT - is this the right way of doing it?

Ah I see, you are doing it the normal way ^^

Tell you this: the Indigo sun should be the reference for the environment strength and thus for the tonemapping settings; it is of a calibrated power. Use a weight of 1.0 to start with.

Environment maps in turn can ship with arbitrary power levels; this make them the adjustable part. You do this by changing the emission scale value for the environment material's base emission. It is just below the 'Layer' setting.

Ratios of 1 million or more are to be expected indeed, it's just better to scale the emission prior to the weights.

Thanks, I didn't know there was another way!

After a lot of playing around with the environment map settings and with the emission power of the environment map layer itself, I've settled on a weight of 8000 for the environment map and a base emission of 75000 lux. The sun weight is still set at 0.00001, but it seems to give the right balance. Thanks for your help!

Okay then, after all it's an empirical process for most of us. You will find that totally different values may be needed with an environment map from a different source.