Hi Everyone,
I just got few HDRI Images and when I put them in the back ground it seems that the images are too big as compared to the model e.g rather than getting a complete building, in the background on render, I am getting just the lower portion of it  ,so is there anyway to scale the image down so that you can see more of the building in the back ground?
Thanks!

Hi Powerjet,

Make the lightprobe very small in PS for lighting and use an inverted polygon sphere and wrap the probe on the inside of that, it gives greater control over size and much better reflections.

Hope this helps.
Chris

Hi Chris

I use HDRI a lot and am not at all familiar with the approach you mention ...

Could you explain a little more about what is meant by "Make the lightprobe very small in PS (photoshop?)" and "use an inverted polygon sphere and wrap the probe on the inside of that."

Any tips welcome as I recognise the situation described by the poster of the original query.

Cheers
Richard

Chris, I tried your solution some time ago, and if the HDP is mapped on asphere, and the scene inside the sphere, there is no lighting. As for inverting the sphere, how the heck do you do this in Vue?

Hi,

Richard and Bruno

If you take the lightprobe into Photoshop (CS2 onwards I believe) or any software that can manipulate HDRIs (http://www.hdrlabs.com), you can make the light probe smaller! say 128 pixels deep by whatever the width works out to be. Then apply that to the illumination channel in Vue.

This has the advantages of working the maths out quicker, you can apply guassian blur to even- out the white balance and correct and enhance some of the element of the probe itself as it won't be seen and the system overheads are lower (see http://www.hdrlabs.com for some excellent tips and free progs for manipulating HDRIs).

Remove the infinite ground plane and replace with a simple plane and size it for the scene with a mat that matches the ground plane of the HDRI. Or you can use your imported models that have a similar look and feel  in combination with the simple plane (my prefered method), or you can use an eco system etc etc. (see my gallery).

Then you need a sphere with the polygons inverted (so the face normals of the polygon face in-wards to the scene) (I can let you have one if you don't have a modelling program, If I remember correctly Poser can invert polys). Apply the HDRI as you would any other texture map to an object in vues material editor.

Adjust the sphere for size (this will depend on the resolution of the original HDRI).

Make sure you turn off anti alias, indirect lighting, cast shadows, receive shadows, in the advanced mat editor for the sphere.

Adjust the lumious control in the effects editor tab to get the brightness/contrast required.

If it's an indoor scene use AO, if it's an out door scene use AO or GR.

That should be everything I think! off the top of my head as such.

Hope this helps.

Chris

Sounds similar to the way of "faking" it in Cinema 4D as well. I never though of doing this in Vue though. An interesting tip to try for sure thanks guys.

-Paul

Very useful trick! Thank you

Mazak

Oh, Thanks for inverting tip, this can be done in Vue I think by baking a Vue sphere to polygons, and invert normals in the object editor.
But I'm not sure making the map smaller in pixels will change its scale in the environment tab. But I'll try. But 128 pixels only might reduce the light spectrum of the map, no?

Thanks a lot for solving this issue and teaching me!Great!

Hi all,

**Trepz;

Yes' I learnt from such forums as the Cinema, Lightwave and so on..

bruno021;

The data inside an HDRI will be un-altered by the resizing, it's just like an EPS with a tiff preview, the tiff part is so you can see what it looks like, the actual drawing bit is mathmatically held within the PS part.
Same as an HDRI, the picture itself is only there for us humans, the computer knows how to interpret the mathmatical side, in an HDRI case, the different exposures.

Cheers
Chris**

Although EPS files are widely used for vector graphics and illustrations, their use may require conversion to a compatible format. And the online converter https://pdfflex.com/jpg-to-eps can help you solve this problem, so you don't have to download any software. And I can say that my JPG files were accurately and efficiently converted to EPS format.