HDRI Background

[stuartmitch]

Hi,

clearly my 12 years of school and 4 years of Uni were entirely wasted! I am trying to teach myself VFSU as many of my architectural staff are now using it, but there are a few things I just can't master. Hope someone can point me in the right direction.

One real problem I am having is with HDRI's for environmental lighting and background. I seem to be able to get the lighting reasonably good (need more experimenting) but I simply can not get the HDRI's to appear as background.

I was mucking around this morning with a very simple house and wanted to use it to see if I could crack the mystery of background images. The following are a few snippings that might help.















Hope these help. I am sure the answer is staring me in the face but I have been looking at this too long and just can't see it. Please don't worry about the model. It is just a very basic shape done quickly for playing with.

Cheers....Scotty

[indielyness]

Re: HDRI Background

Hey bud, you need to set the hdri to uvwgenEnvironment and spherical in the background map, that's it

And also, a tip to use is that you should use two different hrdi's for the background/sky.

The sky's purpose is illumination so you use a small version of the hdri (smaller image size), and for the background you use a high resolution.

This website offers free hdri's for download and they are incredible:
http://www.openfootage.net/?cat=15

you will see it says
Download Zip Archive uncompressed HDR resolution 10000*4000 Pixels for background (178MB)
Download Zip Archive uncompressed HDR resolution 2000*500 Pixels for lighting (6MB)

and that is what i was talking about before.

Good luck.

[arqestevez1]

Re: HDRI Background

Hi man. i guess you're an architect too...
the thing with hdri's is that in order to be seen, you need to turn off the phisical camera, cause that controls the exposure, and the point with hdri's is that you want your image to have certain mood from the hdri...
if you dont turn off the phisical camera, then you must change the hdri's multiplier up to 50 or something like that...
also notice that hdri images will stretch and fit as the whole vray's world, and no matter wether your close or far from your model, it will always look the same.
the bigger the hdri, the more detail you'll have...
i guess the problem with your model is that you have the phisical camera on and you have a very low value for the hdri multiplier. your hdri image is there at the background, but you just don't see it, cause it's either too dark, or it's too distorted cause you're using a simple image...
hdri's have a proportion so that they don't get distorted, just re scaled if they're to small.
as my friend here said, you will want to use one small image (just to get the illumination) for the gi, and one big image for the background, so that you can have some detail, but if you don't have detail... you don't need it, because in the end, you can just save with a *.png format, and with that, once you open your render in photoshop, background will be dismissed and you'll be able to use any image that you want.
i hope this can be helpfull.
cheers.

[stuartmitch]

Re: HDRI Background

Guys,

thank you so much for the prompt and detailed responses and thanks for making the advice simple to understand!

I have taken all the suggestions on board and seem to be getting good results. I have to say, I have participated in many forums through the years and this one seems to be among the best quality in terms of participants and and solutions provided.

VfSU is a little tricky to get the hang of and it is a little difficult when the manual is written for a previous release and, whilst a separate document has been released for the new version, we really need a complete manual for the current version. My main gripe is the full manual relates to a revised GUI layout.

This said, the results that you guys can achieve show just how good the product is. If only I had the time, and the creative ability, to catch up with you guys. I suspect there is more chance of my three year old daughter doing that though.

To answer your question, I am not an architect. I just employ a lot of them. I just want to bring myself up to a level that I can better appreciate what they are doing and the issues they are, or imagine they are, experiencing.

Many thanks again fore the help.

Cheers....Scotty