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I know this is an old topic...but is there any way to get a smooth moonlight effect without getting too much noise?
I put a huge emitter something like 200m far from the scene, but i needed to set the wattage to 10000000 (a 0 more, a 0 less...) and i got visible noise even at SL 19,25

Here's the image, i've had to reduce noise in Photoshop, and it is still grainy...

I'm creating a night sky with moon HDR from within Vue 6 to see if lighting a scene that way would work. I'll post a test render in a bit.

Well, here's what I got. I set the background intensity to 1, reflection and refraction to 3, and illumination to 35 - and I still think it's still too dark. This was rendered to SL-15 which is pretty clean. There was still a bit of noise at SL-14 - and this is a very simple scene.

I did this just a few days ago ... moonlight? ..sort of ? I wasn't trying to get a moonlight, ..but your thread made me think maybe it could pass ... dunno.

Far less noise than using an emitter anyway, michael! (and far better than my solution...). I guess HDR is the right choice, and the pic from ivox tells the same (nice pic...loooks like drops of universes...it gives me a newage feel). But there are still 2 things that do not work: the shadows are too soft and i wondered where the warm yellowish light comes from...maybe a hidden emitter? I think that a lot of people will be really grateful if you'll find a solution!

Mattia, ... my image was just an experiment converting a fairly high resolution image of the galaxy into an mxi, ..then using it as a full HDR environment to see what kind of effect it might have. Now,.. for the sharpness of shadows, ... a little more experimentation with a properly placed/color emitter should work --- probably with -ml to get the proper balance between environment and emitter.

btw: That image is a 10 minute render dual 2.8 machine, ... it cleared very fast. Now, ..I'm a bit curious as to how fast the same lighting might work on a more complex scene ... in previous experiments, ..true HDR's were painstakingly slow ...., but there's no real science to my testing.

ivox3 wrote:I did this just a few days ago ... moonlight? ..sort of ? I wasn't trying to get a moonlight, ..but your thread made me think maybe it could pass ... dunno.

That's a beautiful image.

Really beautiful image Chris.
What was the rez of the mxi/hdr?
I've found larger is better for clearing noise.
3000x1500 to 4000x2000 seems helpful.

thx Larry..

uhhh, ... let's see, ..the original image was 4877 x 3515 compliments of the Hubble telescope !