Hi there, it´s difficult always to find matching IBL photos. Maybe it´s a dumb question but...usually you do the IBL stuff by taking a photo of a real chrome sphere.

Isn´t it the same if i would set up my poser scene and put a chrome sphere into it too and taking pictures from it like in the real world? Then adding it as a light to my scene? Or am i think too difficult?

https://sites.google.com/site/bagginsbill/free-stuff/genibl---ibl-generator

The link I gave above goes to a Poser 6-era IBL generator. A sphere sort-of works but doesn't directly produce the right encoding of the world. My GenIBL prop does.

However, we no longer bother with IBL, which was a cheat - a way to get "environmental" lighting into the rendering equation. Today, we just get it for free. Whatever is around your subject will light your subject.

Most people use my EnvSphere to get the environment into the equation. These images differ in what image was loaded on the EnvSphere.

impressive for sure, but that´s the point. is it the right method to make a poser scene in the right light, then add a sphere to it, make photos of it in poser (like in reality with camera) then use THAT for envSphere?

I usually use Baggin's Bills environment sphere and put an HDRI from HRDI Haven on it to light the scene. I don't know which version of Poser do you use, but in most cases that works better for me that using some (IMHO outdated) IBL light.

If you use Poser 11 and Superfly, IBLs won't work correctly anyway in most cases. And even FireFly's indirect lighting work with the env sphere.

Maybe you don´t understand. it´s not about the ibl light. it´s about the ibl itself. for example if i use a ibl of a beach but the scene is inside a room. so u can´t use that...so i wanna make an ibl photo of that room so i can use it in that scene...you understand? i hope so :D

...so the question is...how to make a ibl photo (ibl light) of my own room?

Both IDL and PBR require the surroundings to be modeled, either as a real geometry model or as a pattern on a sphere. The charm of IBL is that you can light the figure in an otherwise empty scene, render over transparent background and have them ready 'cut out' to be collated into the environment.

The process of making a high range IBL is quite tedious and technical. It consists of making multiple pictures with different exposure times, and filter and merge them based on the light value, taking from each shot only the areas with light values between say .25 and .75, and add them in the collage with corrected light values depending on the exposure, so the .25 to .75 part of a 4 times under-exposed shot would be mapped back to exposure 1.0 to 3.0. There were some tools that could do it for you.

Today the quick and dirty is to use a (phone) camera with an HDR option. It does a similar thing, compress the central lightness and add detail in the blacked-out and washed-out areas. Result however is just a .jpg with light values between 0 and 1.You will have to tell Poser to scale. Where not entirely correct results may do for your artistic purposes. Of course clip the image square around the sphere.

First of all, your concern with IBL is misplaced as it were, because IBL as a format is called "angular map" and the environment sphere as a format is called "equirectangular". To make one you have made both because you can convert from one to the other using tools. However, IBL as a source of lighting vs. Env Sphere as a source of lighting, well there is no comparison. Env Sphere wins hands down.

Now that we've got that bit out of the way and you now know to stop asking for IBL, and you want to know how to photograph a room with many photos and then distort and stitch those together into an equirectangular photo, google "how to make equirectangular photo". You will also probably encounter the 3rd format, "cube map", in such explorations. Ignore those as you can't use cube maps directly in poser without additional work.

There are too many options to answer in a forum post. There are literally whole books devoted to this genre of photography.

Some tools that come immediately to mind: photoshop, ptgui, hugin

Another thing to understand is that the exact lighting from inside a room is not easily discerned by a human looking at the effects of that lighting on a subject. It may be that you can just pick one of thousands of existing interiors and get lighting that is good enough to use with your background photo, which does NOT have to be on a sphere but rather can just be a rectangle.

Have a look here at https://www.flickr.com/search/?text=equirectangular%20indoor

Lots of info here at https://havecamerawilltravel.com/photographer/panorama-stitching-best-apps/

Bagginsbill, I have your Env Sphere but am unsure about which node in the Material Room to plug the .hdr file into. Is it the Diffuse Color node, or....? I’m using Poser 11 Pro. Many thanks for your help with this!

You should plug it the texture node into the Ambient Color input and set Specular and Diffuse to 0. The Ambient Value controls the brightness.

Bantha, thank you very much for that tip! Much appreciated

Some more background info on creating hdri here.