How can I turn my room renderings into HDR environment?

l_riefkohl_ferrer_1923365ed0

I would like to learn how to create my own HDR environments from my room renderings to add my figures later and speed up the rendrering process. Can anybody point me to a good tutorial about that?

Former DAZ Customer

Essentially, you need to do exactly the same thing as making a photographic panorama HDR.  That is, make several (5 or 7, say) exposures 1.5 or 2 stops apart.  Then use Ps, GIMP, PTGui, etc to merge them into a single HDR image. 

Here's a tutorial for PTGui:

-gordon

j cade

Gordon Runkle said:

Essentially, you need to do exactly the same thing as making a photographic panorama HDR.  That is, make several (5 or 7, say) exposures 1.5 or 2 stops apart.  Then use Ps, GIMP, PTGui, etc to merge them into a single HDR image. 

 

-gordon

Provided you're using Iray and the latest version of DS you don't need to do pretty much any of this any more you can render a panoramic exr straight out of the program just

• add a camera
  • select the camera
  • make sure its x and z rotations are set to 0
  • in the parameters tab set the "lens distortion" to sperical
• in the render settings tab
  • set the dimentions to any sie you want with a 2 to 1 ratio
  • under advanced (along the top)
    • enable canvases and add one. make sure the type is set to beauty.
• thats pretty much it render and save your scene it in addition to the tonemapped image that usually gets saved there should now also be a folder with an exr. This is your hdr environment.

 

 

l_riefkohl_ferrer_1923365ed0

j cade said:

Gordon Runkle said:

Essentially, you need to do exactly the same thing as making a photographic panorama HDR.  That is, make several (5 or 7, say) exposures 1.5 or 2 stops apart.  Then use Ps, GIMP, PTGui, etc to merge them into a single HDR image. 

 

-gordon

Provided you're using Iray and the latest version of DS you don't need to do pretty much any of this any more you can render a panoramic exr straight out of the program just

• add a camera
  • select the camera
  • make sure its x and z rotations are set to 0
  • in the parameters tab set the "lens distortion" to sperical
• in the render settings tab
  • set the dimentions to any sie you want with a 2 to 1 ratio
  • under advanced (along the top)
    • enable canvases and add one. make sure the type is set to beauty.
• thats pretty much it render and save your scene it in addition to the tonemapped image that usually gets saved there should now also be a folder with an exr. This is your hdr environment.

 

 

I tried what you said, but I rendered a black image. What did I do wrong? Also I would like to know how can I load the environment once I render it correctly. Thanks in advance.

l_riefkohl_ferrer_1923365ed0

Nevermind, I figured it out myself. I just forgot to set the camera to the one which I set the parameters. I'm rendering the scene now, but it needs some tweaking. I'll post the results after I get it to work correctly. Thanks in advance. This is a really nice and useful tip.

l_riefkohl_ferrer_1923365ed0

I finished rendering and the environment works good, but it looks a little blurry. Any ideas about how to avoid the bluriness?

Richard Haseltine

What resolutuiion did you use?

barbult

j cade said:

Gordon Runkle said:

Essentially, you need to do exactly the same thing as making a photographic panorama HDR.  That is, make several (5 or 7, say) exposures 1.5 or 2 stops apart.  Then use Ps, GIMP, PTGui, etc to merge them into a single HDR image. 

 

-gordon

Provided you're using Iray and the latest version of DS you don't need to do pretty much any of this any more you can render a panoramic exr straight out of the program just

• add a camera
  • select the camera
  • make sure its x and z rotations are set to 0
  • in the parameters tab set the "lens distortion" to sperical
• in the render settings tab
  • set the dimentions to any sie you want with a 2 to 1 ratio
  • under advanced (along the top)
    • enable canvases and add one. make sure the type is set to beauty.
• thats pretty much it render and save your scene it in addition to the tonemapped image that usually gets saved there should now also be a folder with an exr. This is your hdr environment.

 

 

This all seemed to work as you described, but when I create a new scene and load the EXR file into the Render Settings Environment, it is way too bright. I had to set Tone Mapping Exposure Value to 27 (instead of default 13) to get the dome to look correct. What did I do wrong in creating my Canvas?

l_riefkohl_ferrer_1923365ed0

Richard Haseltine said:

What resolutuiion did you use?

I used 4320 X 2160 resolution. I tried using 8640 x 4320 resolution and that improved the bluriness a little bit but that resolution will take hours in my system to render. Had to stop it with about 500 iterations and even that took about half an hour to render, ovbiously is grainy with 500 iterations. Any tips to speed up rendering at that resolution. I also had the same problem as barbult with the brightness of the environment and had to increase Exposure Value to get it right.