Thanks for the nice comments.
Let me explain the reason for this thread:
When someone says something can't be done, I normally try to find out for my self if that's true,
but when I learned that Enhance external brightness had no effect when textured skies were used, I never even bothered to check if that really was the case.
Sunshine is nice, but cloudy days and hazy evenings are not so bad either, at least not when it comes to photographing or making illustrations.
In order to make nice renderings of evening shots or shots of cloudy days without any directional shadows, I have until now lighted my scenes with a grid of white lights at 100% ,
placed some 15-20 meters above the surface, and I have used my standard settings which I have found to work best,
like this:
****
I have been nursing a two-year-old with an autumn-cold for a couple of days, and have distracted her from the discomfort of her cold
by having her sit with me while I have been playing with SH3D. At the same time I have told her about why the leaves are getting yellow and fall to the ground – and we have talked about vampires (!)
And very inspired and on purpose for halloween!
Exactly
And then I made a discovery.
Using my standard settings, I made a test rendering to decide if the lighting was sufficient.
I got a result that was too dark.
I have no idea what made me tick the Enhance external brightness button.
To my astonishment, the image rendered like this:
As it turns out, enhancing the external brightness works perfectly with textured skies,
in fact it works better than with non-textured skies.
Rendered @ midnight with a non-textured sky, using the same settings:
Same settings, sky textured with a red gradient:
Now, this is interesting.
It seems to me that the enhancement is based upon the reflections coming from the sky,
and that the shadows are created based on the time of day.
For me, this is a very useful and uplifting discovery.
What would be nice, though, is to have some more control over the brightness
– a slider maybe, or some pre-programmed steps with different intensities.
Cec
