[balt]

Hi all,

based on the somewhat troublesome results with SSS I've got with sunlight I decided to follow the general recommendations to use HDRI's instead.

Not having had a lot of experience with them apart from the general scene surroundings, how would you go about creating an HDRI just meant as a sun light replacement? The Dosch files I use for scenes, while having a sun in them, never give me decent shadows. I've thus created a 1000x500 pixel map, all black except for a white blot where I want the sunlight to be in Photoshop and saved it out as a 32bpp HDR file. This seems to work somewhat, but I keep having to bump the brightness factor in the scene setting for that HDRI to the max factor of 1000 in order for something to really show and it's still too weak.

Is there a trick to creating an HDRI I'm missing? Does my sun need to be larger? It's currently about 30 pixels diameter. I can't seem to make it brighter than just white...? And Photoshop CS3 doesn't let me edit the 32bpp HDR, I can only edit it in 16bpp and convert to 32bpp then save.

Any hints and/or examples greatly appreciated!

Cheers

- Balt