Hi,
A bit complicated topic.
I run to a little problem lighting an environment. Because to get proper lighting I need to really crank up the instesity of HDR, which then blow out curtains which are a mix of transparent, diffuse, and translucent.
Any solutions for that type of scenario? Apart from render layers.
Regards,
Kamil.
This shouldn’t happen so long as the shaders have physically plausible values. (although don’t forget, sheer white curtains over a bright window can look REALLY bright). Make sure that your diffuse and translucent shaders (esp translucent) use RGB values below 0.8 or so, and do not use an add shader to combine diffuse + translucent. Use mix instead, a photon cannot both transmit and reflect.
How are you cranking it up? What kind of HDR are we talking about here? If outdoor HDR with a sun you can’t crank up the full HDR, you have to crank up the area around the sun only. You can do this with some math nodes, or alternatively live with the not fully bright HDR and add a sun lamp that kind of matches the position of the sun in the HDR (this is the best solution if you have already settled on which HDR to use, the former method is best when you still need to experiment on which HDR to use).