My HDRI sky collection

[brainspoon]

For everyone who is interested I have released my first collection of hdri sky and environment panoramas.

http://t3ds.com/m/622364
There are also free ones available.

I made them in pretty high resolution to be suitable for HD rendering and high quality reflections.

Hope you like them
Cheers

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Heya

1 question - how many F stops have u used for each HDRI - how deep is the HDRI scale.

Thanks, bye nice work - thanks.

[brainspoon]

It is differing. Most times I do 5 shots and each 2 stops apart, but when there is no time or I do not have all equipment with me I do a standard bracket of 3 shots each 2 stops apart.

Changed the link in the first post because I am moving my collection to a new hoster. They are much more artist friendly and give you a bigger piece of the cake.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

umh... bit low... would be nice if future hdrs would be 10-15 f stops apart.... thanks.

[brainspoon]

There is an error of understandig

When I take 5 shots and between each photo I take, for an hdr, is spaced 2 stops away from the shot before, my hdr covers a range of around 10 stops.

http://www.the3dstudio.com/product_d...filiate=622364
Take this as example. You can download it for free. This covers a range of 16,77 stops. You can read it out with Picturenaut.
For this I took 7 pictures for each panorama tile. Was batteling quite a lot of data, but it turned out really nice.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Yup I get it, I still mean take 10-15 pics for each part

Also while u at it try also doing backplates for cars + put a cube so its easy to match in max camera (if u have small camera try doing 4 shots and then stitch them to get 1 bigger backplate )

Thanks.

[brainspoon]

What a whishlist
15 shots would make over 30 shots coverage. That is even more then the 29 stops of the spheron camera.

Also this would be a great waste. Often a day scene does not even cover so much brightness variance. A typical scene is around 15-20 stops I believe. Only when you have a really bright sun and regions with dark shadows you might need more.

Another problem with taking so much photos is that you have to much change in the scene during taking the bracket. Especially clouds and trees are really annoying.

Is there a special type of locations that you like for cars?

[joconnell]

Just curious - what lens and camera are you shooting on? Do you use a nodal head too?

[brainspoon]

Have a 7D with a tokina 10-17mm and the nodal ninja 5 as pano head.

From time to time I make virtual panorama tours so that equipment helps a lot.

[joconnell]

Ah brilliant - I'm on a 600d and was looking at the same lens for it. I'm kind of surprised by the cost of the nodal ninjas for what seems like a fair simple object though!

[brainspoon]

Well there are many cheaper solutions. Had one before the nodal ninja, but if the new head is much more precise. You can nearly stitch with a template without point alignment.

Also you can use much heavier equipment with it.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

The end game HDRIs arent taken using a normal camera - but a bit more specivic equipment designed to take 360 in 1 shot if I'm not wrong... Then taking a 15 stops (15 pictures basically 7+/7- and 0. ) is quite painless + there is no stitching requite as far as I remember...

About locations. Night/day/morning/city/forest/sea/desert/all I guess...

Also if u shoot bacplates remember to put cube to match camera + take a note of how high the camera is above ground... very helpful...

Thanks,bye

[brainspoon]

If you shoot raw you can leave two stops between each picture. Then you would have too shoot only 7 images.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

U know any raw capable software that can stitch images ?

[brainspoon]

I believe ptgui can do that, but I would not recommend that.

My general workflow is to load all raw files into lightroom. Turn down any color processing. No contrast, no curves and so on. The result then are flat looking 16bit Tif files with pretty much information. Then I use photomatix to merge the tif files to exr.

After that I stitch the exr files in ptgui.