Blur HDRI shadows
So I come across a very annoying thing everytime i apply an environment texture, the color and lighting is perfect, but the shadows are too strong/hard. If I want to soften the shadows, I have to import the HDRI to Photoshop and blur the image, and save again. If the blurring is not enough, or too much, then I have to repeat the process until I get the desired effect.
This would be a lot simpler if there was a node in the world settings that would blur the HDRI shadows, making the softness of the shadows much easier to control inside blender, without having to modify the original .exr file.
Maybe there's a better way to do this, like creating a value that would simulate the Sun's angle.
If you downvote, please explain why.
13 Comments
I would assume you're limited by the nature of lighting derived from a HDRI. Cycles can't blur shadows on its own, since it doesn't really have a concept for that. "Shadows" are derived from the absence of light via a source, such as a sun or point light. If you want a sun with blurred shadow edges, you need to increase its angle, which will alter the light it outputs to be more scattered.
A HDRI is based on an image, and the shadows will be diffused depending on the content of that image. If you want to blur the shadow edges, you should blur their source since hard shadows are created by small bright light sources. It sounds like you're using HDRIs with very strong points of brightness, so you'll have to settle with reducing them in an image editor or simply blurring the HDRI altogether (if it doesn't need to be shown in the render). This could be done with a node graph if needed.
That, or just pick another HDRI without concentrated points of brightness. It doesn't seem like this is an issue that can be resolved via an added feature, although a "Blur HDRI" slider for Cycles would be quite useful. Maybe try proposing that instead?
Agree. Plus, the many requests about having some form of blur node in shaders would also be a viable solution.
In the meantime, it's quite simple to mimcik a blur - although imperfect but very functional most of the time.
youtube.com/watch
blender.stackexchange.com/questions/9394/how-to-blur-a-texture-node-in-cycles-material
downvote reason: the basic idea here has been proposed many, many, many times. find one of those proposals and upvote one of those rather than adding yet another (which completely dilutes interest in a feature). A single proposal with 100+ upvotes is going to go a lot further toward getting a dev to take on the project than 50 proposals with 2 upvotes each.
Hey, why do you say "many, many, many times"? I searched the community and the only result addressing blurriness is one post from 2 years ago which isn't very clear to begin with, and i actually think he just means to have the hdri look blurred in the preview mode, not actually affect the lighting and shadows of the scene blender.community/c/rightclickselect/mBdbbc/
If you could point me out those many posts that address this lack of feature, i will gladly remove this post and support the existing ones. Otherwise, I would ask you if you could remove the downvote. Thank you.
by the way, what i want specifically is to have softer hdri shadows, it does not have to necessarily be a blur node, that's just a suggestion that could work, maybe a developer knows a better way of softening the shadows. I'm open to other methods.
i'm not going to go through and list each one that's there in the search results because honestly if there's even ONE, you should just upvote that one rather than create a new one- regardless of how 'old' it is (how can a proposal be old, it's either done or it's not, right?). That said here are a handful on the first page of the search results:
blender.community/c/rightclickselect/468V/
blender.community/c/rightclickselect/qTgbbc/
blender.community/c/rightclickselect/TMgbbc/
blender.community/c/rightclickselect/4Lfbbc/
blender.community/c/rightclickselect/WDfbbc/
blender.community/c/rightclickselect/6Dfbbc/
blender.community/c/rightclickselect/k0fbbc/
you get the idea
I've actually gone through them all. This is not what i'm asking for. I'm asking for hdri shadow blur, which is not addressed in none of the posts you shared.
Ok, my bad for suggesting a solution that has already been discussed on those posts, but what really matters is the end goal: soft shadows.
edit: I just edited the post so it is clearer and not to get confused with those posts. If you support this idea, can you please upvote? thanks
Well what you basiaclly is suggesting is a blur node, except that it should work on a sphere and not on a flat image. Personally I actually do want the same, a 3D blur node, would be really nice to have yes!
You are asking for a blur node.
An alternative solution for the rest of what you said is to use oldschool HDRI's that did not capture the sun at a strength level any higher than the rest of the environment. Then you add your own sun lamp and adjust the angle value to get soft shadows.
I agree with the comments that adding this feature would essentially make HDRi-based lighting not be scientifically accurate. But I also recognize that sometimes artists must behave more like artists and less like scientists. Tweaking things to get the result you want is a natural behavior. However, Blender already provides plenty of tools and workflows to blur that HDR image in different ways.
Side note: the OP might want to check out the Gaffer add-on. While it doesn't have a tool to blur the HDR images, it does provide some other useful sliders to make things easy: blendermarket.com/products/gaffer-light-manager
Downvote because I don't think you understand how light and shadow work.
Yes, I do. Just maybe not how it is coded since i'm not a programmer. As I said in the post, if you blur the image of the hdri itself, the shadows will get softer, I tried this using photoshop, i get the desired sun position and light tones plus the soft shadow. The point here is to remove the photoshop step, and try doing it all in blender. Maybe a side tool/plugin that blurs the hdris and saves them as a new image, but using the original one as the source.
It will have to be an addon because the devs keep refusing to do a blur node in the shader system.
There are ways to sort of blur things with a node group. Have you tried that on your HDRIs?