Environment Quality - Low Resolution - Sphere environment is 'washed'.

[bmcmahanH72UD]

I've been having this issue for a while now. The quality of every HDR  sphere environment is so poor, it's unusable.

It's the same problem whether it's the stock VRED sphere environments, or custom.

It's not just that the environment looks bad, the lighting is and reflections are poor too.

I've had to resort to using just the standard studio, which requires a lot of post production photoshop work.

After trying to troubleshoot and checking the forums, I still have not found an answer.

Can anyone help?

[seiferp · Accepted solution]

Where does the environments come from? Have you tried one of our Assets or those https://polyhaven.com/hdris ? I think your Environments simply do not have enough FStops.

[bmcmahanH72UD]

Thank you for your reply.

The images you see are the stock VRED HDR environments that have been around forever.

There was never a problem until I updated to VRED 2020.

I brought in a couple HDRI's from your link. They are definitely better, but something still seems off.

Is there a setting I'm missing? Why aren't the images coming in full color and resolution?

The image below is the HDRI in VRED. Below that is the HDRI in Photoshop.

As you can see, the color is more vibrant and the resolution is higher.

[michael_nikelsky · Accepted solution]

The first images you posted look a  lot like the old dosch design hdri packages which have a very, very poor dynamic range, making them barely better than LDRs. The first image in particular however looks like it is indeed an LDR image and not HDR image, therefore it uses a wrong gamma.

The lesser saturation compared to photoshop is simply due the choice of tonemapping you have applied. Photoshop doesn´t do any tonemapping, that´s why the sun is this big white glowing thing in the sky. The closest match to that would be to use the Reinhard RGB tonemapper with everything set to 1. 

The resolution ist higher though, you are just not using the correct mapping in the environment material to project the texture onto the geometry. You see that the texture is stretched a lot in your rendering so you probably need to adjust the position settings of your environment

[bmcmahanH72UD]

Thank you for your advice.

Because VRED does not store the old environments anymore, I am pulling them from another file so there could be something wrong with that. The image is a .hdr, but there could be a problem with how we pulled them from the older version. I will try to modify the scene and environment based on your advice, and post a screenshot.

So far though, the results are heading in the right direction.