hborre posted at 8:49PM Mon, 22 June 2020 - #4392803

I have fashioned high-quality LDRs into HDRIs using free 3rd party software and used them in EZ-Dome. They are not the same but they do give me acceptable results.

What software is that?

Get your hands-on HDRShop software. It is free for non-commercial use. You basically register the software online and get an unlock license code from the site. Load whatever image you are interested in converting and create an HDR. You can also adjust exposure values. Another piece of software to get if you are serious in creating sIBL is sIBLEdit. With this one, you can create reflective maps and thumbnails from HDRI and package them into an sIBL for direct use in EZ-Dome. Even though Snarly mentions that HDRIs are enough for EZ-Dome, I like to have a little creativeness and control in brightness and contrast.

Thank you, sounds promising.

The problem with the available HDR images online is, not surprisingly, they're all contemporary. Not a good match if you want to do a Cretaceous dinosaur scene, or a SF scene set on a distant planet.

I would like to try making images with Vue and using them instead.

Hmm. Looks like HDRShop is no longer a thing. The website is gone. (Though the creator, Paul Debevec, still links to it on his personal website.)

There are posts complaining that the free version was removed, but that was years ago. It appears even the pay version is no longer available.

I managed to find a download link.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8koCsdBHJPFSGJIb2sxdS1CMDA/edit

It's direct to Google Drive.

Thanks, but...is that legal? Is there an alternate that's still being supported? I don't mind paying for software.

HDRLabs has a list, but a lot of them seem to be for HDR photography images. (I own a lot of them already, for my other hobby, photography.) I thought this was a different kind of HDR?

Considering the circumstances of its lack of availability, the link was posted at a forum and a request made in that forum for a link. To be honest, it appears that all development has been abandoned and I haven't heard of any protest to the program being shared since it was free, to begin with. On the other hand, I did come across a youtube tutorial post integrating DAZStudio panorama render for creating HDRI in Photoshop. Again, it's basically taking LDR Images, 1-stop over/underexposures, and converting to HDR. A trick to use an environmental HDR for both background and lighting to render a scene much more quickly. I was impressed. I wish Poser had a 360 panorama camera for something like that.

Common mistake I see with HDRI and dome use is that the artist doesn't know how to get enough light out of the HDRI or JPG and then tries to compensate with extra point/spot/inf lights. That just makes the image look strange so the figures and props look they were photographed somewhere else and pasted onto a random background. Total lighting mismatch that makes my head explode. Here are four lighting examples with the same subject all using the Envirosphere and HDR images. A uses an indoor image that has zero direct light "in the center" of the HDRI. In other words no direct light should fall upon your subject. This one I set ambient level to 1 as the HDRI had enough level in it. I did have to rotate the dome so that the bright spot in the map was shining on the right side of her face. B the uses an overcast, outdoor HDRI. Again no direct light even though it is outdoors and daytime you don't want any harsh shadows. The dome ambient had to be set at 2.5 to get enough light onto the figure. C is typical outdoor daytime with sunlight. The way that Poser works with the dome is that it won't cast shadows or highlights unless you unclamp direct samples in the render settings. If this is done you'll get a pretty noisy image unless you use 100+ samples and I don't have the time to wait around for that. To get around that I'm using the dome for indirect light (leaving the clamping set to 10) and adding 1 infinite light. Again you might be tempted to add more lights to the scene because the figure is too dark. DON'T. Just crank up the ambient on the dome till the background looks natural for a sunny day and then crank up the “sun” to around 200. It'll be different for each situation and HDRI. If I'm trying to light the inside of a room with sunlight I might crank the inf light to 600 or more. In the last image, D, I left the nighttime image ambient set to 1 (way too dark for the figure) but added 1 large area light and blended it's color in to match the rest of the HDRI. It's also placed where a light in the HDRI is shining from so as to look as natural as I could get it.

Something I forgot to say about the daytime shots with sunlight. You need to match the direction of your infinite light (sun) with the sun in the HDRI. If you don't it will look strange and the shadows won't match the background. switch to another camera view and point that camera directly at the sun in the HDRI. Make sure that the sun in in the very center of your view. Then rotate your infinite light so that it's in the direct center BEHIND the light control sphere pointing at you. Now when you switch back to your main camera the sunlight will be coming from the right direction and the shadows will look correct.

@ ghostship2: Which dome did you use for your HDRI?

Another thing I might add, the default infinite light color is white. To get a more accurate light based on your scene, take a sample color of your lightest area on the HDRI, and change its intensity. It will match the background better.

Envirosphere. Yes I match colors if it needs it. Typical daylight works fine with white or off-white, sunsets use appropriate color and level.

When working with environmental lighting images are there any changes I need to make to the render settings to get the grain out of the final renders? I'm CLOSE to finding something that will work for my needs but the graininess is not acceptable!

Also, found a work around that mostly works for blurry maps, I just changed the U & V Scale to around 0.25000 and that seems to bring things better in focus and not so huge and blurry! If there is another way to accomplish this please let me know.

the graininess depends on the dynamic range of the HDRI. If you look at the sphere renders that accompany the HDRI's at HDRIHaven you will note that the ones that produce sharp shadows will be the more dynamic and produce more noise wen rendered. If you just use a JPG you'll have even less grain and can cut your total samples down for a quick render. This image uses a small jpg of a room and an area light placed where the window is to get some highlights back in the render. It only used 40 samples (1600). So HDRI's of overcast daylight, low dynamic range HDRI's and low res jpg's produce the least noise.

Hmmm, I'm not completely following here. What I meant is the character in the render is grainy. The rest of the image seems fine!

More pixel sampling will clear that up. I sometimes push 40 to 50 pixels, maybe more at the expense of time. I have found that an additional light source sometimes clears that up.

RAMWolff posted at 11:55AM Tue, 23 June 2020 - #4392880

Hmmm, I'm not completely following here. What I meant is the character in the render is grainy. The rest of the image seems fine!

the background will be clean because it is the light source and not an object bouncing light back.

So I upped the pixel samples to 25 and got this image based background set as the environmental light. I did have to downsize the U and V samples to 0.25000 to get things crisp but boy don't move the camera up or down too much, you see where it's been really narrowed by this! LOL

Quite pleased with the outcome! One niggle and I've read that this is no possible using Superfly is there is no built in shadow catcher so poor L'Homme is floating!

Hey Rich, if you're using the most recent version of EZDome, you should check out page 5 of the User Guide. SuperFly doesn't have a shadow catcher like FireFly does, but Snarly mentions that it can be done by adding a ground plane in order to see the shadows.

That said, I haven't use the shadow catcher option in quite a while, but I had tried it, and it worked.

Nice render Rich. My only negative observation is the area under the left armpit and torso. That area shouldn't be that lit. That should be occluded shadowing. You see the same thing happening at his navel and the right, inside elbow, strong self-illumination. This is no fault of yours, the settings are just not right.

I don't know if you are using an additional light source (infinite light?) to bring out more detail, but I had a similar problem with this image below:

You will notice the brighter area between the left arm and torso, self-illumination. I introduced an infinite light for more contrast but that seems to be a mistake. The next render is without any additional lighting, just lighting from the HRDI.

Notice the difference, normal occlusion in the second render.

Light blocking and reflection can be useful for avoiding adding lights. Placing tall cubes around the subject and a flat plane underneath out of camera shot will allow the HDRI lighting level to be increased slightly but retain contrast, these blocking primitives need to an appropriate shader for the surroundings as it will be reflected back onto the subject. Adding a primitive with a lighter colour can act like a fill in flash. This approach is more useful for outdoor renders where 90% of illumination is reflected lighted from a single source. The effectiveness of this approach varies depending on the HDRI map.

Interesting concept and definitely worth trying.

Hi guys, I would like to share something I "accidentally" discover after losing a few hairs trying to use HDRI in Poser 12, I'm not sure if all nodes are available like this in P11, but I hope the workflow might be helpful to someone anyway:

I have been using the setup described by Ghostship2 (thank you for that!!!) here https://www.posersoftware.com/article/536/poser-basics-how-to-use-hdr-lighting and then I found a way to make the HDRI respond to the camera rotation, so depending on how you wanna work you don't have to manually type in the rotation (or promote it to a custom dial).

See the image, a "cycles/input/camera:view_vector" sends to "cycles/converter/vector_math", which then multiplies it by "0.0, 1.0, 0.0" (so you keep only the Y rot). In the article, this is described as "To rotate your HDRI, use the middle (Y) value to rotate its orientation. This will be important if you want to change the direction of sunlight on your figures."

Now experiment rendering two images using different camera rotations, if setup correctly the background will follow the camera.

Well, forget what I said, just realized that's totally redundant (laughs). Anyway, learning a new node is always good.

connect a CombineXYZ node to the Vector2 plugin to save yourself having to type in all the numbers.

Edit: Then forget what I replied.

evargas, this is way cool! Thanks.

Yes interesting at least, it worked in a way, and probably makes no difference in render time. As I said someone might found a use for it. But I wish I didn't have a tendency to over complicate things in the first place! =D

I store it as a material preset, so I just double click to apply it, and now with hborre tips I added the manual control with a single value (see image). The extra "value" node is more of organization thing, if you like to colapse/compound the others for example..

And you may do the same for the second parameter of the location:

Default value:

Using this:

It shifts down the HDR bitmap:

Whoa, Y-Phil, that's way cool, too!

Is there a way to increase the brightness of the environment in the background node (without adding an extra light, just using the hdr lighting)? I can use the Ground object with an emission value and make Ground not visible in camera. That lightens the objects in the scene but not the background pic. But it's like adding another light. I just wondered if the Cast Light can be made brighter in the background node for Superfly P12 renders. Just curious. Can't figure out what to select in Cycles.

Try the Brightness/Contrast node.  That might do the trick.  Also, check the Gamma of the image node, a true HDRI needs to have that set to 1, not 2.2 like a texture map.

Thanks, hborre. I actually tried that earlier but I didn't know where to connect it. After your post, I looked again and DUH! I could put it between the root node and the hdr tex (I checked; gamma is 1).

It works fine, except I hadn't realized how much the background pic would be lightened, too. I guess another light or using Ground emissions is best, for the most part (depends on the hdr pic). But thanks for the answer!

HDRI background will not be affected by additional lighting because that background is casting illumination on its own.  Technically, HDRI is supposed to provide an environmental light, not act as a background image as well.  From what I've read in some published texts, you need to make your modifications in an external program like Photoshop that can handle 32-bit HDRI or Picturenaut (free software).  Not only can you darken or lighten those files, but you can also selectively edit areas for better presentation.

That's a nice idea! I actually can make changes in my Corel PSP. Says it will change the color and tone but I'd need to do some testing to see if the illumination is affected.

Make sure that you can work at 32-bits for HDRI.

It's an add'l app designed to edit HDR files and it comes with PSP. It says this (below), so I guess it makes 32-bit changes.

Unlike the human eye, digital camera sensors (or film in traditional cameras), can only capture a limited dynamic range when photographing scenes with both very bright and very dark areas, such as an interior with a large window. HDR processing creates a 32-bit image which has twice as much information, and therefore many more steps between tones, than an ordinary JPG. This HDR image is then evenly exposed, resolving details in the darkest areas, without losing definition in the brightest areas. And when pushed beyond the “corrective” boundaries, HDR can produce an unreal, plastic, or even “hyper-real” tone, and as such has become a creative technique in itself. Typically, an HDR file needs to be converted back to a 16-bit image format for final output.

hborre posted at 3:31 PM Sat, 23 April 2022 - #4437624

Try the Brightness/Contrast node.  That might do the trick.  Also, check the Gamma of the image node, a true HDRI needs to have that set to 1, not 2.2 like a texture map.

Rather confusing topic, GC that is, as we well know.

...nevermind.

Found the info here

https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=55828