Hi all,
I am trying to use IBL on my car i am experimenting a bit with different lightinig techniques. I was wondering how can you produce black areas with IBL it seem the image is coming out washed out. I set GI with adaptive sky map and use an HDRI as a SKyMap with skydome projection. i did use it as a light probe. But keeps producing the same image.I did use a spot light with GI as secondary to help with the reflections and refractions.  Any help will be very welcome.
Thanks,
Edgard.

The sky map will be my background, i just made it light probe in C4D. i could have done in photoshop but the main thing is to getting those dark and white areas noticeable. I didnt play with the Glossy settings maybe the solution is there.

Your map has some brighter colors at the bottom, so the model is being lit from underneath.
So just put in an ubershape floor.

The map in the preview also looks more like a spherical map than “Skydome”. You may want to try Spherical.

If the map is still too bright- lower the “bias” value in the HDRI options dialog. This will darken the image overall, but keep the illumination from the main light sources in the image.

If you need the render without a floor, you could use Photoshopp to paint the bottom half of the image black. 

Hope that helps

Dave

The secondary rays (or the secondary light… use one or the other not both) only help the image by illuminating what is reflected or refracted.  In this image, as you have no surroundings, it only works on the fenders reflecting in the body and grill.  So you may not need them.  Unless you add a ground plane.  That would also keep your car from glowing below.

Dave’s advice seems right to me.  If you want dark areas from your IBL lighting, you would need an IBL which is not lighting your project from all sides.

The glossy setting would help this a lot, reflecting back IBL image.  I think Ian did a video tutorial on this…

Hopefully you post the final,

Yon

Ok i have played with the HDRI on the SKyMap Bias getting at levels as low as 0.8 , so i got the image a bit darker . Set a Ubershape floor with a bit of reflection and noise on the specular channel. ç
So my first image has 10 secondary rays, illuminated by my HDRI.
and the second images uses the spot light as secondary rays with GI secondary rays at 0.

These is just a preview of my lighting setup i still have to add more to the environment and model a bridge with columns,etc
Thanks Dave and Yon.
I just need to tweak my HDRI a bot more. I don’t want to go through photoshop to get the image looking right . If is not looking right here than i need to work harder.

You might also experiment with putting the glass in a GI exclusion set.  Glass really eats up time to render, and mainly it just reflects, so you don’t need to light it.  The jeep has come a long way since you first posted it in a different thread

I posted a tutorial on IBL and glass a bit back (with some help from Dave, Ian and the Igors), it might help you as well.
http://www.eitechnologygroup.com/forums/viewthread/486/

I forget if this is right, but I think if you duplicate the ground plane and set it to use shadow mode only you’ll get the IBL shadow on top of your background image.

Keep up the good work,
Yon