Vray HDR Blur

[n6]

What you are doing is working with half dynamic range format (16 bit).
True HDR or EXR should allways be 32bit that is the full dynamic range.

That said, you are right : you would have more lighting info with a 16 bit HDR than with a 8 bit jpg.

[jujubee]

When Chris mentioned the blur, I don't think he was saying that he applied the defocus to HDRs in Photoshop but just saying he would like to see something similar to it working within a HDR's values.

Photoshop CS2 is very limited in what it can do with HDR images. Pretty much any filters that can be applied needs to be applied in 16 bit or 8 bit as they had not rewritten many of their plugins to accomdate HDR or EXR. This switch in bit-rate removes the floating point information of such an image type.

[cpnichols]

Thank ylou Jujubee... jeez... Any real compositing package will support full float on their circle convolved blur. I was simply listing Photoshop since many of you don't use Nuke or Shake. Try it in HDR Shop

[DaForce]

ahh right... gotcha

Just in reading your original post it seems like you were getting at that PS Lens blur works really well with HDR's.

Thanks for clearing it up.

[cpnichols]

Ok let me rephrase it... I can see how it is confusing.

.....
It is a blurring method that mimics a defocus better. Photoshop CS2 has a fancy version of it called Lense Blur. THE METHOD (not photoshop since it doesn't do it in full float) Works really well with HDRIs since it blooms the highlights correctly instead of washing them out like a gaussian blur can do.

[DaForce]

Much better

Thanks

[studioDIM]

LMAO guys!
This post was WAY better than a K1 final (where the director after the first three secs of fighing starts framing pretty girls in the public, or thereabouts).

While being no black belt in any self-defence discipline, may i point out that the standard bitmap map in max should be able to use the full 32bit data, while blurring it?
It's a very very sucky mipmap (ie. squareish) blur, but it should work for GI probes and such with no issue.
There's also a plugin (i am not sure, but it may come with finalrender, or brazil, or be free... i don't use it) that's called BitmapHDR, rather than Bitmap, and supposedly works a tad better than the standard max bitmap (which once did some sort of weird conversion from /to 16 bit, not sure if it is the same in the newer versions).
I haven't tested it, though.

Way to go , anyway, for me is definitely hdrshop.
It's a bit cheaper than photoshop, and works a bit better with hdrs.
Photogenics seems powerful, i just hope i won't have grandchildren by the time i manage to do something at all with its interface.

Combustion, or fusion, too, can handle natively full float imagery, with a few more restrictions in combustion as to the file formats (hdrs have to be converted to tiffs, and in case back to hdr), but with no limitation whatsoever on paint, color correction and filters.
They can be used to even CC probes and make them warmer or colder at will, and it works really well.
Combustion also has a very quick, and clever constant time gaussian blur(same computational time whatever the blur amount, as opposed to the standard gaussian blur), for those jobs of massive blurring on big size images...
It can be MANY times faster than hdrshop doing a correct blur of, say, 150 pixels across.
Those of you who have combustion do give it a try

Lele

[andrewjohn81]

well, shoot. I was hoping to find an answer to this Much later.

I don't want to use the max bitmap. The interface stinks for environment maps. You don't have great control over the rotation and such.

What I was looking to do is cheat some. I've got a scene that has a vrayHDRI for it's environment map. I've got some cabinets that are very glossy and reflective, it's like a satin metal finish. That takes an insanely long time to render with the sampling rate needed. And using interpolate is no good because it blurs the heck out of the highlights on small rounds.
So I was thinking, since it Only really reflects the environment, why don't I just put the environment right in the diffuse (mixing with the color to give "reflective amount") and turn off raytrace? That should render much faster, and there's no samping issue.

But I can't blur the vrayHDRI and I don't know of a way to use the same hdri in max bitmap that will allow me to place the thing correctly. (PS, the hdri is mirrored ball, so in order to even really use it there wouldn't I have to use hdrshop to convert it to lat-long?)

So long story... I also want a tool to blur vrayHDRI. I'd actually like a vray map that would allow me to simply blur Any map. That would be ideal. What if you want to blur mix/composite of two hdri maps?

[instinct]

I know this isnt really what you are looking for. Just for your interest you might want to look into Surfaceblur (http://www.lastjedioutpost.ru/?l=en&p=ky_surfaceblur)

It's a Normalbased blur posteffect that can be used to face glossy effects.

Regards,
Thorsten

[jacksc02]

Why not just open the HDR up in photochop/fusion/nuke and blur it and resize it?

[jujubee]

Wow - blast from the past. I even forgot I started this thread 5 years ago.

Why not just open the HDR up in photochop/fusion/nuke and blur it and resize it?

Convenience.

[Pixelperfectg]

Sorry to dig up an older thread but I was just thinking how useful it would be to have a spherical harmonic / convolution blur option on the VRayHDRI map and saw this existing topic. I would find this type of option pretty useful as it would save me some time from having to leave 3ds Max and do this in picturenaut.
Ex:

[tashko.zashev]

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for suggesting this option.
It is added in our "to do" list.

[kagemaru]

+1 for this.

[MoonDoggie]

*blinks* Lele is back?

edit: I just checked the post date...I'm an idiot.