So to be more realistic, the sim needed to render using bigger numbers. Note how wide the range of numbers are: daytime images are made up of things in the “thousands” of nts, but with a wide range of variation, while night ones might be single digits. (That last one is why your mother told you not to stare at the sun.) Flood lights on buildings at night – 2 nts.Here’s a Wikipedia chart listing the luminance of a wide variety of stuff. We measure luminance in candela per meter squared (cd/m^2) or “nits” (nt). This worked great in its time, but with today’s modern graphics cards we can do much better.Ī traditional low dynamic range (LDR) renderer has colors in a range from 0 to 255, but if we want to model the real world, we’re going to need some much bigger numbers. The sky was as blue as the art director decided, and then created with Photoshop. These images were drawn as realistically as possible, but they were low dynamic range (LDR) because that’s all the monitor could handle.

In other words, we render the world as it is.Ī decade ago, the image of the world you saw through your simulator was essentially built out of pre-made images drawn in Photoshop by artists. Simply put, a photometric renderer is one that tries to create realism by using actual real world light levels (specified in real physical units) in its internal calculations.

Corona renderer filmic shadows