What is a good size for the sphere image? I am downloading some images and they are 8000 X 4000 And seems like over kill or is it? Just curious if I can resize them and still get good results?  Thanks

I believe the sphere is somewhere around 700 meters in diameter.
This would tend to spread out the information in the image more sparsely than what you see in an item of clothing.

I use some 10,000 by 5,000 HDRI that take up 150 Mb on disk.  HDR requires more space because of contained lighting information.

 

That depends on whether you're just going to use them for lighting and reflections, or are you also going to see it behind your subject. And even then, it depends on what focal length you intend to shoot with, and whether or not you want the background blurry.

I use a lot of pretty low-res images for indirect light. But when I intend to see the sphere, even if just some clouds, I prefer 8000 to 10000 pixels wide.

Thanks for the information, I will keep them at the larger size, as some of them I will use as the background, they render pretty nice at the larger size. 

Just out of interest, if the image is purely for the benefit of IDL calculations and maybe more blurred reflections, is there any benefit to using a lower res image, relative to te IDL processing overheads?

e.g. would there be any benefit, in certain scenes, to using two identical envsphere props. One with a lower res copy of your spherical panorama, set to be visible in ray tracing but invisible to camera... and the second with the hi res copy of the image, set to only be visible in camera?

Cheers

Attached Link: What Now?

The thing about using lower-resolution images is that they don't take as long to render if you're using Vue to create them.  I find that if I make a low-res spherical image for the environment sphere (just for lighting) and then a higher resolution flat image to use as a background in Poser, it takes less rendering time.

However, if you want to use depth of field, a background photo has to be manipulated to produce the effect.  The attached image, for example, uses a high resolution HDR image on BB's environment sphere.  I played around with Poser's depth of field setting to get the background slightly out of focus.  Rendering that background took DAYS in Vue, but I like the results.

Yup... I've just recently finished waiting about five, maybe six days for a spherical panorama of the Louvre in Paris to render out in Vue! So many days I lost track...

Rendered it at 12000 by 6000 pixels.

One big model of the Louvre in it... but otherwise, quite a simple sky etc... a few trees... and still took that long! But, worth the wait I think... it's just a case of getting on with other stuff meantime.

I've now developed the workflow where I render out a lo res copy in Vue first and use that on the envsphere whilst I compose my scene in Poser... and whilst waiting for the hi res panorama to complete.

I guess my question was whether IDL would be any faster if I made a lo res copy, just for IDL lighting, and then just used the full size as "visible in camera" for backdrop. I guessed it would be, a bit...

However, to be honest, for the example above, I've now set up my Poser scene and am rendering that at a dimension of 5120 pixels by 2560, and the IDL pass (with IC set at 50) is still pretty fast really, relative to how long the panorama took to render in Vue, certainly.

Raytraced reflections, even blurred ones, do probably benefit I guess from the hi res on the envsphere...

...depends on your composition and what reflections are needed in it, I suppose

The funny thing is I've taken to doing mostly little demos and I made a background prop and don't show the EnvSphere anymore. It's just lighting and reflections, but not background. Now I have the freedom to use any image I want, even if it would look crappy behind.

I think combining a rectangular photo for background is great for a still shot.

But if you wanted to follow a flying airplane or something, you gotta have the full sphere.

Yup... I guess if I just needed blurrier reflections... or reflections of more distant landscape / sky, then a (e.g.) 2048 pixel wide spherical panorama might suffice in a lot of situations, I guess.

Then I could just have a big, slightly convex stage backdrop behind the scene and render something with a standard Vue camera for mounting on that.

I don't actually think I'd save a lot of Poser render time doing the above. At least if using the IC settings I currently am.

But it would be a lot quicker to render the spherical panorama and backdrop content in Vue that way.

For the scene I've just been doing I'm thinking more like a day, as opposed to six.