place a light on a hdri?

[themaxxer]

hello all

is there a way to place a light e.g. vraysun on the brightest spot of a hdri?
how do you guys make that?

I know there was a plugin from a guy from vienna, which made something similar.

thanks for helping

best regards
themaxxer

[pengo]

http://www.hdrlabs.com/cgi-bin/forum..._with_maps.zip
exactly this one
http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/
Hope it helps
bye

[peterguthrie]

wasn't there some other script or discussion of a possible script to do this? I'm sure I remember talk of automatically finding the brightest part of a hdr....

[tryharder]

"sIBL GUI" with "sIBL edit" work quite well and create all the other maps for IBL and is able to bring those maps right into 3ds Max ... Vray and Mentalray ... thats superb

... but if there is another script that just can find the position of the "sun" that would also be interesting

... better to have two solutions but none

[Da_elf]

i usually do it manually by putting a camera with target in scene. rotating the camera using the target while looking in the view and line the target up with the brightest part that i can see in my viewport. Then i just align the sun to the target and the sun target to the camera

[zoranm]

I use "place highlight" command for that

zoran

[jujubee]

sIBL is the best way to go about this.

Otherwise, if you want sharper shadows in your HDR you can place a painted pixel manually on a HDR with something like Photoshop. However, this practice is not recommended for a number of reasons - mainly because of the lack of controls. This is part of the reason why sIBL was developed in order to give a user more control.

I've heard of some VFX studios completely removing any direct light source (such as a sun) within the actual HDRs then manually replacing them within a 3d app.

I posted a similar question about a month ago in the off-topic section.

[sduck]

Jujubee-Using sIBL, how do you convert the HDRI UV sun position to XYZ sun location?

[tryharder]

you use sIBL gui to export to 3Ds Max !

[sduck]

Thanks tryharder. I can not get the script to work in 2008, 2009, or 2010 flavors of Max running on 64bit. I just get script error and it does not recognize the sibl file. Any ideas?

I do see where you can export the vray sun. Soooo close.

[tryharder]

i use Max 2010 Design 64 BIT on XP 64 BIT

works fine here

the script in max startup scripts

you have to close max and reopen and leave it open for sIBL GUI to interact with

[sduck]

Figured out the problem. I was trying to use sIBEL-Edit and sIBL Loader. I was not incorporating sIBL-GUI in the pipeline. All works now. Aligned very nicely.

[jujubee]

sIBL is pretty slick isn't it? I wish there also was an independent way to go about that but so far that's the best option. It really needs to be updated for Vray/Max - all volunteer scripters on that project...

[pengo]

Maybe I'm wrong in usage but i found that using simple vrayhdri with a sun in it and tweaking (lowering it to something like 0.7 but depends on maps) the gamma value of the vrayhdri map u can get light from sun in map wihout use a direct light or vraysun addictional light.
Of course use vrayhdrmap with domelight
Let me know how u find this usage
Please don't tell it to noone

[jujubee]

Well, I personally think sIBL is the most efficient method of using a HDR hands-down with an independent light source. If you want to see some examples, head over to my website www.hdrsource.com where I just released close to 120 sIBL HDRs and several libraries. - tell me if they look bad.

And of course, you can always just head over to the sIBL website for more information:
www.smartibl.com

@Maxxer - I think the guy from "Virtual Vienna" is Dschaga on this forum - also one of the founders and coders of sIBL.