HDRI mapping & blending

[tinmanjuggernaut]

I am working on environment hdri lighting in order to match a scene. Incidentally, how blender requires us to see the environment channel is so lame. For others, click the world icon, then the texture icon and you can adjust the environment channel to load an HDRI - no sphere necessary, then make sure GI is on.

Anyway, I know how the other scene is built, with two instances of the same hdri map. One rotated vertically so the lights act as a kicker light (back light), the other decreased and front to be used as a fill light.

Attempting to create this in vray/blender brought up two issues:

1) Vertical rotation of hdri maps are not implemented yet.

Working around the above, I figured I can play with the other mappings and blend two layers together. However:

2) Blending two texture layers on the environment channel isn't working either. I wanted to add the channels together to give me more lights, but they don't blend, one overwrites the other.

Is there a work around for one of these?

Thanks!
Cory

[FB3000]

Re: HDRI mapping & blending

Hi,
Im working on similar case (putting 3d into 360 panoramas and using jpg's in he enviroment to lighten the scene.
#2 if you're trying to mix env textures only to make the enviroment lightning stronger - just make your Gi primary engine stronger in Render Tab>Global illumination.

[tinmanjuggernaut]

Re: HDRI mapping & blending

Thanks. I can also increase background above 1. However either of those will only make the current HDRI lights brighter. By blending HDRIs will allow me to add overall luminance via increased light sources (without having to edit our own HDRIs).

Cory

[FB3000]

Re: HDRI mapping & blending

the difference is that if U increase background >2 it will darken the texture (it will be noticable on renders), increasing GI affects only intesity of light not texture itself.
If I correctly understand what You want to achieve it can be interresting technique. If making it as a enviroment is a problem -
maybe making straight material with two blending textures will help You, then asigning it to the sphere added around the scene and camera in the middle.
as a additional profit You can rotate the sphere with texture as You like. Probably this sphere/material can be used as a mesh light? And then you can also make it invisible on renders and have what You like in the enviroment background.

[bdancer]

Re: HDRI mapping & blending

All of your requests are currently in progress =)

[tinmanjuggernaut]

Re: HDRI mapping & blending

@FB3000 Ah, now I see how it modifies the texture. Let's not say darken, but rather background changes the luminance of the texture, visible on camera, where GI adjusts only the effect of the light. Thanks for the sphere idea. For now I'm putting the hdri on a sphere so I can rotate it around. Right now I'm figuring out how to blend two instances of the same hdri and rotate them different ways at different luminosities. Maybe I'll blend two spheres with alpha.

@Bdancer thanks! The spheres will get me pretty close on the lights, but doing it in the environment channel is better.

Guys what I'm working on is creating a blender version of the vray-materials.de sample scene. Our materials thread has materials that don't work in 2.5 (at least not for me), and Victor's model is a bit off of their sample. I want to get the lighting setup so when they open up maya, blender and other material in there database we'll already have a start of consistent materials. Also when I'm converting their 3ds materials, I want the same lighting so I can be sure the material looks right. I'm almost done. I'll post it in the texture thread.

Cory

[FB3000]

Re: HDRI mapping & blending

I was thinking about making the same thing - but problem 4me was how to check if objects in blender are in the same scale as in fe. 3ds max. Its maybe not important for basic presets but i it can be importatnt for sss things etc. Also second thing - some buttons have other value limitations than in 3ds.
So this is cool idea - post the material scene and i will try re-render some my matrerial tests.

I also thought about something that i miss in blender - matlib and material files stored in the way fe. vb render pressets work.
It could be quicker to work and share if materials could be saved as a file and autoloaded to lib from folder everytime we start blender.
Just some thoughts for the far future. I posted some example here: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=397&start=40