I know a yellow sun should make the objects appear yellow. I am trying to create a sunset scene, and I have used the blackbody temperature of 2500 for sunset color. Now this makes almost everything yellow.
Her is a node setup for a white concrete path that appears too yellow.
I tried playing with gamma and HSV and roughness, but it keeps appearing as yellow. How do I make the concrete path more white? I am using an image texture: https://www.textures.com/download/3dscans0028/126904?q=concrete
You can see the green grass also appears kinda yellow. The white metal pipe also appears yellow.
The strenth of the sun is mere 15.
Using cycles
Principled BSDF
Filmic Color Space
It works if I increase the strength of the sun to something like 1 or 2, but that makes my scene look too dim.
Try to add another lightsource to be the sky. Sky acts like huge reflector with different color tempature, now your image is like lightning in the planet without athmospehere. I recently used hdri image on the background with 0 saturation and sun lamp to create effect of sunset and it worked great.
2500K for a sunset’ish sun sounds about right, could even be a bit lower.
But the world needs to be in the 6500K (overcast) - 20000K (clear sky) range (source).
If you choose to work with these absolutes, you might as well work with absolute intensities (although last time I checked I found different site ending up with different values) and absolute sun size of about 0.005 (to represent ~ 0.5° angular diameter). That would be accurate on the moon, but here you then increase this to compensate for atmospheric conditions - just eyeball it until the shadow softness looks just about right.
That will completely wash out the render to probably pure superwhite everything. So change to filmic for a “better” saturation response (not everyone likes it), and reduce the exposure in color management. Try this at home using manual exposure on a real camera; go outside on a clear sunny day and shoot something while adjusting exposure until you get correct results. Using those exposures, go inside your house and take some pictures. Dark, huh?
You’re using the Principled shader, which is meant to be PBR - Physically Based Rendering. So the world should be physical too to get the most out of it.
But your render wouldn’t probably change that much yet. Because we don’t have a camera white balance adjustment in Cycles. Our eyes and brain corrects for this - a white board looks white both outside on an overcast day and inside in incandescent lighting. Even mixed lighting can be “difficult” to immediately pick up on unless you actively look for it. But a camera will show you the naked ugly truth. It’s so ugly that photographers will do anything to fight it. And here we are - the renderers - the guys who will do anything to get what the photographers want to go away. It’s a wonderful world
In comp you can use this divide trick to remove tint applied from a major light source. This affects everything. So if a yellow sun shifts bluer to become whiter, the blue sky also become even more blue.
Now, that’s a lot of “science” going on… For an outdoor shot where you don’t need to consider other lights, it’s probably best (certainly less work) to just desaturate the sun (more white) and saturate the sky (more blue) until it looks good.
I don’t know if this is physically correct or even remotely accurate, but I would try a color mix set to multiply between the HDRI and blackbody (set to 20000 or so). It certainly cooled down the colors of the (clipped) HDRI I tested on.
Again, using absolute intensities and color temperatures is not for getting the render correct, but to set it all up to have the correct differences between the sources. Then in post you shift the temperature to where you want it (typically a white or grey point to actually look white or grey). Most are happy just setting one lightsource slightly red and another slightly blue when dealing with mixed lighting.
With that in mind, I would go for a pretty white sun and just make the HDRI slightly more blue and call it a day. If you make sun redder for artistic reasons, just dial down the blueing of the HDRI.
Also, is the HDRI a suitable one? Might be nice to experiment with what you have already set up, could be other things that are messed up.
as CarlG said, it’s the white balance. blender uses D65 profile (which means white is considered as 6500K), and i don’t think it can be changed. so i think the best advice is not to use blackbody node for this.
You can also apply environment textures to lamps and such so you could technically use the same hdri for the light source as well and adjust there, you can also apply a color curves to it and play with the coloring to get it to your liking. There is so many ways to light a scene it really just comes down to getting the result you are looking for. Sometimes just the HDRI is enough but other times you may have multiple light sources still involved while using a HDRI.
Well, 5PM really differs around the world and which month Even though HDRIs are typically shot raw, I think color correction is sometimes applied to make it look “the best” even if it doesn’t reflect true offset from D65. You could also shoot a sunset far off its target if the white balance is messed up. Also, the color of the sun will also depend greatly on atmospheric conditions; hazy, ultraclear at high altitude, smog etc.
Is your HDRI clipped or unclipped? Do you have a link to it?
Ok so this is upper useful all you need to do is go to the render tab (it looks like a camera) and scroll to the bottom and the second option to the bottom will say COLOR MANAGEMENT open this and go to VIEW TRANSFORM it should say FILMIC switch this to STANDARD this will take away the full filter a replace it with the true colors of the render😁
Even though HDRIs are typically shot raw, I think color correction is sometimes applied to make it look “the best” even if it doesn’t reflect true offset from D65. You could also shoot a sunset far off its target if the white balance is messed up. Also, the color of the sun will also depend greatly on atmospheric conditions; hazy, ultraclear at high altitude, smog etc.