Converting hdri to vray lights...

[evanerichards]

Is there any plugin or script that will take the light information from an hdri and convert it into vray lights so that you can delete your HDRI/light dome but still retain close to the same lighting? I feel like I've seen a script that would do something like that but I don't remember what it was called.

Please advise.

Thanks!

[aweidenhammer]

I don't know of any automated scripts, but what I would do is:
1. in photoshop, decide which lights were important, crop them, and save them as small hdri images.
2. in maya, create vray rect lights that imitated your cropped regions, and assign the hdri images to them. You can line them up pretty close if you keep your domelight in there till you're aligned.
3. optionally, create a groundplane and project the dome image onto that.

render and enjoy?

[evanerichards]

Thanks. Those are good suggestions. I think they have done similar things on some recent movies (Smurfs, Real Steal).

The only reason I wondered if there were scripts to do it was because I found a plugin for lightwave called "Light Bitch" which does just that. It looks awesome. Too bad I don't use lightwave.

[instinct]

There's a HDR Shop to convert an HDRI to an optimized dome of lights using debevec's median cut.

Regards,
Thorsten

[paulDryzen]

Or you can just connect the same hdri which is connected into your render globals to the rect light, so the rect light will boost the intensity of the hdri in its area. Pretty cheap trick but works fine for me.

Paul

[bigbossfr]

Or you can just connect the same hdri which is connected into your render globals to the rect light, so the rect light will boost the intensity of the hdri in its area. Pretty cheap trick but works fine for me.

Paul

Yes,
I use this technique. I create a jpg of my hdri, set my jpg in the bachground environment to see my image in the viewport (to be fast).
After, a create some VRay rect light and place lights on "thje good place" of my background image.
When all is fine, i delete my background image, project my hdri in spherical mode to all lights in "texture" color attribute.

[Morbid Angel]

there was a plugin for hdr shop, that did the same thing, it exported directional lights as a mel script to be rebuilt in maya.