Separate environment maps for reflections and lighting

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Storen
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Separate environment maps for reflections and lighting

Post by Storen »

Is it possible to use two different environment maps - one for lighting (HDRI) and one for reflections (JPG)?
The same file (HDR image) seldom works well for both.

Alternatively is it possible to limit the LuxCore environment to affect only the reflections and use only lights for the scene lighting?

If not, could you suggest some alternative solutions?
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Dade
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Re: Separate environment maps for reflections and lighting

Post by Dade »

You could use a large texture map sphere for reflection and made it shadow transparent to infinite light, it may work :idea:
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Storen
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Re: Separate environment maps for reflections and lighting

Post by Storen »

Dade, thank you very much for the prompt response!

Using a map sphere sounds like a really good idea. I am new to LuxCore. Could you please explain how to turn off the sphere shadow and make it transparent to infinite light? The only option in the Object properties I see is "visible to camera".

Do you know if there any plans to support multiple reflection maps in the future, or the LuxCore development team prefers to keep it as it is for simplicity?
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B.Y.O.B.
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Re: Separate environment maps for reflections and lighting

Post by B.Y.O.B. »

You will need the latest build from https://github.com/LuxCoreRender/BlendL ... tag/latest
Then add a new material to a sphere and change the shadow color from the default black to white in the material output node.
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Storen
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Re: Separate environment maps for reflections and lighting

Post by Storen »

Thank you B.Y.O.B.! That worked.

There is another problem - the scene reflections are very dark because the map-sphere is lit only by the bounced light.
I tried compensating this with the material "emission", however, this messes up my scene lighting.

Is there a way to render the map-sphere texture without any shading?
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Dade
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Re: Separate environment maps for reflections and lighting

Post by Dade »

Storen wrote: Tue Jan 14, 2020 1:41 pm There is another problem - the scene reflections are very dark because the map-sphere is lit only by the bounced light.
I tried compensating this with the material "emission", however, this messes up my scene lighting.

Is there a way to render the map-sphere texture without any shading?
You could try to enable sphere emission (some quite low value) and to disable sphere emission direct light sampling (aka DLS). This way should have little impact on scene lights and rendering speed.
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Storen
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Re: Separate environment maps for reflections and lighting

Post by Storen »

Awesome, thanks much!
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