Hey guys! Just jumping in here r.e. the HDRI discussion.
Something that you can do is to set the 'Dome and Scene' to Finite Sphere, than play around with the scalars and dome radius thingie that appear when you do this. I was doing this just this morning. A few of the Daz HDRI scene products already put these to use.
It's not perfect either, but this way you can scale up/down the sphere a bit.
The other thing that you can do is to do the render in two passes, one with just the character in the lighting environment (dome off), casting the ground shadow on a transparent background, then render the HDRI scene separately using various camera focus/length tricks and merge the character + background in Photoshop.
Another trick is to put an object (say a plane primitive or a handy rock or a car or something) underneath the character, to make the 'HDRI ground' less prominent in the foreground, but that doesn't directly apply to the discussion here. Not DoD related but this is a handy example of this:
The HDRI is essntially just a skydome at his point though, but you get the idea. This is a great way to get around the 'fuzzy ground' issue that comes up when working with HDRIs.
Some HDRIs are just scaled better and are more useful than others though. The Fairy HDRI environments come immediately to mind, but that's a situation where you want the background elements to look very oversized.
Here's an example of where the HDRI was just 'spot on', hence not much adjustment needed...
Not much to say here really other than to keep expanding your HDRI library and experiment with them. They are 'lazy' but oh so useful sometimes! HDRI haven (now
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) is an awesome resource! The HDRI in the image above image is a 'paid' resource though.
Anyways, I just wanted to mention the finite sphere scalars/adjusters thing. Since I don't like to post in fanart threads without sharing a relevant pic, here's an oldie that I posted before that came out pretty well...
Getting the lightning bolt to look decent took a few passes (bloom, etc.) and a bit of layering in post work, but I think it was worth the effort. HDRI in the background of course, but no fun scaling tricks here, as it's an aerial image with fuzzy clouds and such, so much more forgiving.
