What we can get from OpenEXR - some examples

Since yafray gives us possibility to save renderings in OpenEXR format we can do much better and easier postprocessing.
Below is example scene rendered in yafray.
http://grzybu.com/images/3d/exr.jpg
There is only one light source and pathlight.
Lighting power setup gives quite good light in shadows but lights are burned.
With png we can’t do much more with this - we can only lower light power, but then we will lose details in shadows.
Pictures 2-6 are from one exr file.
With exr we don’t need to be so carefully with light setup. We can allays change exposure after rendering and we can save a lot of time for making exact light setup and rendering.
Setting exposure with exr files look like making photos :slight_smile:
As bonus we have alpha channel and zbuffer in one file.

Hmm, Interesting! Thank you! I was thinking that Open EXR was like another HDRI format and would provide high dynamic ranges for lighting one’s scene! Hmm, new horizons! :Z
Murphy

Is there possibility to render an *.exr via Blender?

New horizons indeed! Especially for rendering in passes. I couldn’t edit the separate passes a lot, because color information would be lost (jaggies, ugly histogram etc.).
Please tell us how you did this. How can you render to OpenEXR and what editor do you use to edit them afterwards?

I can’t wait until Blender’s Internal supports this format.

edit:/ Did you use this?
http://www.openexr.com/photoshop_plugin.html

To render to exr you have to add: output_type=“exr” in render section of xml file.
Also to get zbuffer you have to add exr_flags=“zbuf” to the same section.
Now you only need to change YBtest.tga to YBtest.exr filename.
For editing exr files I’m using cinepaint and pfstools (http://www.mpi-sb.mpg.de/resources/pfstools/index.html).
I’m using only open source software :wink:

what kind of video card do you need to support exr? I have an old 4600 Nvidia Ti, would that work?

Exr isn’t related to video card. It should work even on old 4 MB cards :wink:

grzybu:

Many thanks, I was just looking into OpenEXR and wondering what the benefits were.

Do you still have to edit the xml with yafray 0.0.8 if you choose to build with OpenEXR support?

I’ve just made an ebuild of 0.0.8 for my Gentoo boxes and have always wondered what Cinepaint had to offer. Now I’ll try it out.

thanks