Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=1958959

I REALLY like HDRI- it renders much faster than Radiosity! This 1024 x 768 file only took about 6 minutes. The HDR file is St Peter's Light Probe- and it is the ONLY source of lighting. (The Trice is a free Vue 4 VOB file).

On the link is my first Vue 5 Vicky HDRI...

Outstanding! Could you please provide the link for that ST. peters probe??? TIA

Great work. If you can provide link to St Peters Light Proble can you give explanation how you use it. I have never used hdr and curious how it is used to get the effects you are getting. I would like to find a small tutorial on hdr and how others use it in vue. TIA. iloco

Attached Link: http://www.debevec.org/Probes/

It's the third one down- St. Peter's Basilica, Rome 1500 1500 another nice looking one is- (but have not yet tried)... Galileo's Tomb, Santa Croce, Florence 1000 1000 1. Since these are HDR files you will need to go into the Atmosphere Editor panel and select: Environment Mapping 2. Then select: Effects 3. Then press the TINY right arrow icon, which is where you load the HDR file. You'll see that Vue 5 already offers some HDR files, (but I liked the looks of the others better), so then navigate to where your new downloaded HDR files are and pick the St. Peters one. 4. Once loaded you should adjust (In the Light dialog panel) the Sky Dome Lighting Gain-- usually UP quite a bit. You can see the effect real-time in your little render preview window- so just keep boosting it up until the lighting looks right on your test model... The VUE 5 provided HDR's might be great too- so I'm not knocking them. In fact they might be already tweaked for Vue 5 renders- so try them if the others seem to give you problems.

Sorry but see you have psoted what I was asking for. We must been psoting at same time. Tahnks for the information.

Hey, great lighting, that does look good...

Thanks Veritas for the link and tips. Here is my result.

great renders both of them, now thats a freaky sci.fi horror thing going on there sacada :)

Here's my Retro 1930's Movie style Elephant- done with the HDRI lighting (Image Based Lighting) and using the cool new Vue 5 Post-Processing feature to give the image an old film look...

Thanks Veritas!!!!! The reality this adds to pics is amazing :)

Here's the Sponza scene done in HDRI with the St. Peter's Light Probe (HDR file). I rendered this in 22 minutes at 1200 x 1600! It has the look of a volumetric scene, but as you can see the HDRI lighting does a very good simulation of that effect- with an incredibly faster render time. Unfortunately- these image posts- like this one- are very COMPRESSED and do not show the much more beautiful soft gray scale and shadow detail that I can see on the original Vue 5 render. So you are NOT seeing the quality here... As you can probably tell by now- I am TOTALLY sold on the HDRI (Image Base Lighting) concept. I'm probably going to be doing most of my Vue images with it in the future- because of the beautiful lighting effects and FAST render times. BUT- all HDR files are NOT the same! The St. Peter's Light Probe is one of the BEST I think because it is extremely well made. Other HDR files do not render as well, in my opinion.

Attached Link: http://www.lightworks-user.com/hdri_starter_collection/realtexture.htm

You can get some very nice FREE HDRI Light Probe files here, plus you can learn more about what HDRI is and how it is used in Commercial applications like movie-making, advertising, product design, etc.

Very cool stuff, I've been very excited about seeing some Vue5 HDRI stuff since I'm waiting for Vue Pro. Thanks for sharing.

As an animator I will be very curious to see how well it works out when animated, and in various animation situations. However, more importantly, I hope Eon has their act together and has many of the long-existing animation flaws and bugs worked out BEFORE they start worrying about such "new" items.

The post effects stuff is cool, but I think most animators, etc. would just do that in post. It's like a lot of video cameras have built-in "Effects" (most of them super-cheesy), but you never use them because you can't UNDO the change but you can ALWAYS add it in post. Same goes for rendering.

I noticed in the HDRI images very well projected shadows on the ground (being part of the background image.)
My Question: Is Vue 5 now capable of compositing? Placing 3d objects onto a background image with correctly placed shadows?

I'm a bit confused about the HDRI probe lights. I'm awaiting my new copy of Vue 5, so hopefully, these will make more sense when I get it. Are these light probes anything like half-dome HDRI set-ups in Bryce? I use a grouping of lights to create radiosity and soft shadows in my images. Also, I'm on a Mac. Will the .hdr files work for me? I'm downloading the St. Peter's HDRI as we speak. Thanks, Denny

I am also confused with hdr files. Could someone do a small tutorial of how they are to used in Vue 5. How can a person light an outdoor scene and not have a hdr blured background showing as in above images. :)

I was wondering about that myself. But I figured if worse came to worse, I could just export an alpha-channel of the animation (which should not include the background image) and then just composite it with a seperate render of the environment.

"Are these light probes anything like half-dome HDRI set-ups in Bryce?"

Bryce can't use .hdr files currently. In Bryce, HDRI is faked (like you suggested) by applying an image file to a "sky dome", but this meathod is not true HDRI, and it's not capable of reproducing high dynamic range (bright specular and darker darks to put it simply). The results can look convincing, but not quite like the real deal.

GI in Bryce is also faked by using a dome of lights (sometimes as many as 200 radials) to give overall ambient light and produce a softer shadow effect, but again, it's not actually running any calculations, and true GI is not just a bunch of lights, but true calculated global illumination. Without getting into specific differences, suffice to say the result is actually better that 'faking it' most of the time. However, it's not always faster.

In Vue 5, as well as other applications that can produce real GI calculations, you won't need to add groups of lights to get the effect. In fact, you probably won't need to add any (unless you want to). Message edited on: 10/10/2004 21:31