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Any way to use HDRI for INSIDE lighting?

mikethe3dguymikethe3dguy Posts: 515
in Technical Help (nuts n bolts)

I'll explain why I'm asking.

The scenes I create are pretty texture-intensive and can also be polygon intensive. This results in my having to nearly always split my renders into two (or sometimes even three) parts, and then stitch them together in post. Otherwise the scene is too much for my GPUs - DS will just crash. Usually this means I'll render the environment and then afterward render the figures and some spotlights with the environment objects turned off. In many cases the second render includes parts of the environment such as chairs and a table if parts of a character are behind or cast shadows on them. My problem is with shadows that figures and items in render #2 cast on objects in render #1. Usually I can arrange this so that it's only the environment floor I need to cast shadows on. That used to be easy - I would turn on the ground plane and get a nice render of the figures and foreground objects and their shadows on a transparent background. But unfortunately the lights I use (spotlights, point lights, emissives) don't cast shadows on the ground plane in Iray. There's the "Iray Matte" function you can enable on a primitive plane and use that instead of the ground plane, but the shadows cast on it using those lights is so faint as to be unusable.

If my lighting source was HDRI my problem would be solved, since HDRI casts perfect shadows on the DS ground plane. But the vast majority of my scenes take place inside enclosed architectural environments - thus my use of spots and emissives.

Does anyone see a solution to this? I do everything I can to crank up compression of texture files in Iray and keep polygon count down to get to the point where I can render a scene in one pass, but I still can only do that occasionally.

Thanks

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