Ziphouse(s)

[sumario]

Hi Peter, the lighting is amazing, the color range and the shadows are superb, I love the wood, the water and the pebbles.....I got 2 questions for you:
1) what kind of gear do you use for the hdr? do you make the pano by hand? or do you use a 180º pano head?
2) how do you combine the vraysun with the hdr?

anyway impressive lighting and shadows, super realistic.....

[stevesideas]

Great quality all round. I love your lighting. Its amazing how much detail is in your renders and the colouration seems really spot on ! Well done...again

[powerandrubber]

I bought your sun clouds HDRI and love it. Good tip on using it on a vray dome light and importing it as a RGB instead of a RGBA to conserve memory in the readme file. I've also found that it's possible to crop off the top half of the EXR (just above half to cut off the ground horizion) and adjust the V offset to 1.0 and check "mirror" instead of "tile" to further reduce memory demand. Essentially you're only using the top half of the EXR anyway. I also had to rotate the halved EXR 180 degrees in a photo editor to get it right side up in the render because of the mirror but might be possible to achieve this another way in the material editor. Even doing this I have to downsize the EXR almost 50% to render in a heavy scene. To get a sharp background (for higher res rendering) I check "invisible" on the vray dome light and use the JPG version in the environment slot. (I halved and rotated the JPG the same way and used the same V offset settings as the EXR to conserve more memory. (Reflections are still HDR since they come from the dome light)