Lighting an Interior Daytime Scene - Photographic Rendering with V-Ray for SketchUp - page 74

Of course, we still have a number of issues that would need to be dealt with here,
not least of which is the high level of noise still present in the scene. At some point
we are going to have to work with V-Ray's sampling controls to clean things up con-
siderably here.
Adding a High Dynamic Range Image to the mix
We are also still lacking any color variation in our sky model due to the fact that we
are once again only working with a solid color in the dome lights controls. There is,
however, one more option available to us that can help add a little bit of color vari-
ation back into this shot, one that just happens to work exceptionally well with the
dome light: the use of a High Dynamic Range Image ( HDRI ) in the dome lights tex-
ture map slot.
Note
HDRI is a multi-exposure format (typically created in floating point) that is used to
reproduce a much higher luminosity range than would be possible using stand-
ard non-float or 8 bit image file formats. HDR images give artists the ability to
more accurately reproduce the range of intensity levels found in typical real-world
environments.
To demonstrate how this works, I am going to make use of the fantastic IBL spherical
map resources that can be found at http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/archive.html . The
specific archive or set of maps that I will be working with are entitled Etnies Skate-
park , so if you want to follow along with me over the next steps, feel free to download
and make use of this same free HDRI archive.