Found a old HDRi on my Hard drive. Lighting is bad, but the most I tried to get out of it. Is the tree shadows. Trees have lights passing through the branches and leaves. But I do not get the proper shadow.
Anyone found a trick to overcome this. I even made a trans map, and that doesn’t help, or I am doing a lot wrong.
samples;
I tried to load up HDRi compressed, file to big.
This is not an error but a fundamental character, you could say drawback, of HDRI environment maps. They don’t have any actual geometry; if it helps, picture it as a huge, completely seamless surrounding screen that projects images very brightly, but are actually smooth surfaces.
They can’t project shadows any more than you would have branch shadows on your arm from standing in front of a movie of a forest.
Edit: They can project diffuse shadows like a bright screen, but not the detailed shadows you’re looking for. This may be possible with clever use of materials and transparency mapping of the same HDRI on a second projected surface that masks dark objects which cast shadows.
To get a kind of branch shadow effect you can add trees to your image, then turn them off in Object Properties → Visibility → Ray Visibility → Camera (I think). However, these won’t match up with the ones in the HDRI
