Creating your own HDRi

marble

I happened across this YouTube Channel today. Someone has probably linked it before on this forum but, just in case, here is a sample of his tutorials. This one shows you how to create a simple HDRI for lighting a scene. I would never have thought of this method so I hope some of you find it helpful.

 

 

Silver Dolphin

Nice, I am looking at turning a spherecal render into a fake HDRI using free Nik plugin in latest version of GIMP. Don't like renting software.

marble

I don't have Photoshop either. I have Affinity Photo so I hope I can follow that procedure in Affinity (which does include HDR support).

takezo_3001

Silver Dolphin said:

Nice, I am looking at turning a spherecal render into a fake HDRI using free Nik plugin in latest version of GIMP. Don't like renting software.

That's why I got Afinity photo @ $50 vs useless rentware...

Silver Dolphin

Looks interesting I'll wait till it is on sale and get it. Let me know if it works to make fake HDRI's for Daz. I want the Iray spherical cam to make a tiff and then run it thu HDRI software to make lights and use in Daz as a cheap quick enviroment that is low on resources. I'm busy right now so I can't experiment with GIMP and free Nik HDRI solution but I will give it a try because free is always nice.

Fishtales

The NIK filter makes a photographic HDRI which takes a couple of images with different exposures and Tone Maps them into the final image. That isn't the same as a HDRI for lighting which uses different algorithms and uses the luminosity in the image to combine them into an .hdr or .exr format image which are different from .jpg, .tiff or .png formats.