hdri sky...

[rfellers]

anyone know of any good, high quality hdri skies taken from a treeless field? I am trying to put together an animation and the ones from Dosch are pretty poor. They give me all sorts of crazy colored errors. I've tried some old examples from sachform that work well, but there is a lot of extra entourage included in those (buildings, mountains, trees, etc.) Any other options out there?

Ryan

[plastic_]

as far as i'm concerned, they are all crap.
what i did recently, is making my own opacity mapped tree horizon map, very easy to do with any horizon photo, mapped on a cylinder stripe.
the old marlin skies are very nice and sharper than any hdri...IMO since a sky is always BRIGHT, and the sun is INSANELY BRIGHT (so it requires an extra point light anyway) it doesn't make very much sense to hdri those parts.
and you can build your own ground/landscape...
for exteriors a spherical environment landscape is worthless anyway, unless it's a very specific situation.
if you don't need much clouds and variation, the vray sky is also cool.

[kimgar]

anyone had any success with saving a hdr from a dreamscape panorama?
i kind of like the idea of having a dark ominous sky light the scene accordingly...like this:

http://www.3dm3.com/forum/articles.p...ticle&artid=63

as for your treeless field, maybe you could comp in some fields in a sky hdr with photoshop?

[instinct]

Saving HDRs from Dreamscape works...might be worth a shot for you

[kimgar]

ah, that IS good news - finally DS might be worth its money.
i can't really put my finger on it, but all projects involving DS has not turned out very good money wise so far....

[instinct]

DS did a pretty good job for me so far. We bought it bundled with Afterburn and i dig em both

Thorsten

[kimgar]

yep, it produces some nice results, but hours spent on a project when DS is involved increases drastically - but i guess it is just a matter of practice and finding out what works and what doesn't.

at the moment i am struggling with a combo of DS, videopost and backburner. local renders are fine, but net renders gives me black frames, arhh, it's things like this that make a project look real bad on the budget

[cpnichols]

I use the Dosch High res one and the Sachform ones, and they work pretty well. The only ones that are not as good are the Sachform vol 1 only because it was their first volume. By volume 2 they got a lot better. If you use them in combination with a CG light for the sun as I did on my DVD they work great. The key will be making sure you are working in the correct color space and that your HDR is also in the correct color space. I often had to CC the HDRs by 2.2 or 0.4545 depening. Otherwise things will look dark and staturated (correct by 2.2) or bright and flat (correct by 0.4545).

BTW, I hear the regular Dosch sky ones are pretty crappy, but the high res ones are awesome, all shot with the Spheron... 26 stops baby!

[gilpo]

Yeah, we have the Dosch sky collection and I'm not impressed. They've worked ok for use in lighting but are useless for rendering as the background.

[jonnybefree]

i've try'd it last week to make my one HDRI within Vue.
works really fine imo.

[rfellers]

I don't have DS so that is not really an option right now. I did place an order for the Dosch High res and the the Spring Sachform collection to try them out. I'm trying to work out this new Sun/Sky system into an easy workflow. I'm using the Vray Physical Camera and have gotten some good results in everything but the sky and/or reflections of the sky. I am only using the hdri for reflections and for the background environment. I am using the VraySky and VraySun to light the scene. I understand how to adjust the exposure of the scene using f-stops and shutter speed of the Physical camera. Once I find a good one, any advise on incorporating the hdri? Right now I just increase the hdri multiplier up to 50, 100, even 500 to get the it to expose correctly with the rest of the scene. Is this the right way to do this or is it a gamma problem as cpnichols suggests? cpnichols - do you use the ColorCorrect material map to adjust the gamma or do you fix it in an external program?

BTW... cpnichols - great tutorial dvds. I have both of them and learned a ton. Thanks for getting me interested in this gamma discussion. I still don't always totally understand how and why it works, but I know enough to know that it is extremely important and usually with enough trial and error I can get the results I am looking for. Do you plan on putting out any more tutorials?

[cpnichols]

I don't have DS so that is not really an option right now. I did place an order for the Dosch High res and the the Spring Sachform collection to try them out. I'm trying to work out this new Sun/Sky system into an easy workflow. I'm using the Vray Physical Camera and have gotten some good results in everything but the sky and/or reflections of the sky. I am only using the hdri for reflections and for the background environment. I am using the VraySky and VraySun to light the scene. I understand how to adjust the exposure of the scene using f-stops and shutter speed of the Physical camera. Once I find a good one, any advise on incorporating the hdri? Right now I just increase the hdri multiplier up to 50, 100, even 500 to get the it to expose correctly with the rest of the scene. Is this the right way to do this or is it a gamma problem as cpnichols suggests? cpnichols - do you use the ColorCorrect material map to adjust the gamma or do you fix it in an external program?

BTW... cpnichols - great tutorial dvds. I have both of them and learned a ton. Thanks for getting me interested in this gamma discussion. I still don't always totally understand how and why it works, but I know enough to know that it is extremely important and usually with enough trial and error I can get the results I am looking for. Do you plan on putting out any more tutorials?

Yeap... the multiplier on the HDR is totally normal (or can be). A good benchmark if you want is to render it with only the HDR sky, see how bright it is, and increase or decrease the multiplier on the HDR until it looks about the same. Then you will know that your HDR is in the right range. That way your sun and sky (or HDRI) will be in the right range. Persoanlly I still like using the VrayLight as sphere for the sun. Maybe it is old habits and I still like to control the size and color better...

As far as controling the Gamma of the HDR. I don't like to use the one in the VrayHDR reader. Not sure it is right... bring it into photoshop cs2 or hdrshop and correct it there.

More DVDs? Yeah... I hope so... lots of new stuff to cover.

[rfellers]

Good to hear about the dvds.

Thanks again for all the advise.

Ryan