Hdri Editor

[Rosette Allaband]

Keyshotbuilt a similar, albeit simpler toolset on their own, but the best / most universally useful place for such an editor without a question is the host 3D application itself - that way it could be used by any renderer engine. Someone also built such a tool for Blender btw.

For the programming side it would mean that one needs to draw and transform circles and rectangles on a 2D canvas which represents an unwrapped environment sphere (could all happen with default Rhino-tools) These shapes need a 32 bit colour fill and editable gradients. For interactive preview fed to the renderer one likely needed a low resolution HDR (when content with the result the user would output a larger version of that image). This already would be very helpful.

A better version of the tool would allow driving the light dot position on the environment sphere by clicking a spot on the model. The light would then get placed normal to the pick point on the environment sphere. That way one would gain great control about highlights. Rhino actually has an old tool which does a similar thing with physical lights (edit light by looking).

I can clearly see the VRayHDRI material, which the tutorial tells you to select. The only problem is when I got to the exact same menu via the exact same method I get the following menu (I have highlighted my V-Ray materials menu in yellow):

Create a VRay Dome light. In the Dome light modify panel, click the Texture button and a V-Ray menu pops up but this time it includes the VRayHDRI option which didn't appear when you go in via the Material Editor.

There is a difference between a material and a map. Maps usually go into materials. In your first post you posted a picture of your material editor, apparently without a VrayHDRI. VrayHDRI is a map, so you are looking in the wrong section. However, on the bottomn of that picture is a tab with maps. If you expand that and go into vray maps, the VrayHDRI should be listed.

My problem is that the light of hdri cannot be seen at 3d studio max while rendering. Not only everything is pitch black, but the slot of the hdri in material editor is black ,too. Plus i realised that the hdri file ,inside my archives of hdris, when opened by max in order to be put in the environments and effects, it is just white , while it should say hdri, ( see picture below). I use corona render if matters

Hello Greg,

thanks for this great how-to tutorial. Excellent in-depth workflow.

I tried downloading your rawtherapee preset but the file is not available anymore. Can you please reupload it?

-content/uploads/2019/02/Gregs-HDRI-profile-for-RawTherapee.zip

Thanks

Hey, i just try to make a good looking HDRI. Im shootin with a Sony Alpha 7 ii and a samyang 14mm lens.

But every time im doing a hdri it looks simply bad. And i dont know why. Please help me ?

System is amazing for capturing real world Color & Lighting detail. I got stuck on jpgtohdr. I saw it was updated a couple of months ago. Running ptgui 12.13. Does not set the export settings, backup creation, or swap files. Any insight would be much appreciated.

Thanks for the quick reply!. I noticed that my camera position( nodal) was moved so that could explain alot. Allthough the HDRI had some misalignments it still is usable especially for backplate renders.

I was wondering if you know why my hdr, using the images you provided for download, is pretty dark? I followed the steps closely, even added the sun shot from the other tutorial. Your original CR2 files are 5 exposures with a 2EV spacing, but Inoticed that the brightest exposure looked like the proper exposure, but not 2EV over, like I would expect.

Whatever the case, after bringing in the two completed exr pano into Affinity Photo, the pano looked dark. I though perhaps it would work properly when bringing it into Blender and using it as an evironment texture, but the scene was quite dark as well. I did notice that the exr sun version I created did add nice directional light and made things a touch brighter, but the scene was still way underexposed in Blender.

I am making some significant changes to the external appearance of my house and I would like to get an accurate representation of what various materials and colour choices will look like so I can make the right choice.

In the attached file, I have imported a simple interior HDRI into a scene. It's pretty high res (as I thought these needed to be). For clarity, I have turned the background on to understand where the light is coming from. I have turned ambient light to zero. And disabled indirect lighting. I am finding that no matter what I do to try to control the amount of light coming out of the hdri image, the rendering appears to be the same. What am I doing wrong?

This has happened to me a few times. So far, the main reason seems to be that if I didn't use a REAL HDR image for the panoramic background, then I couldn't control the brightness, nor was the lighting accurate, it was sort of an average color lighting of all the various elements in the image. I have noticed even stranger results on occasion, like renders becoming incredibly green or yellow because not all HDR information was present in the source image file used for a background I created.

Example attached here of a confirmed working HDR image background with two brightness controls, I also used 2 separate render styles and bgs on this one for the comparison and added a light that I turned off in order to disable default lighting to make the difference very clear:

@JimW - do the recommendations by @Dave Donley over at this 'FREE HDRI Images' thread still hold true, in that you should use "low res HDR for environment lighting and the high res for visible background" ?

I would say that is still true, but that you would now HAVE to use the .HDR files for any of these if you wanted to use them for lighting. I downloaded a handful and most seemed to include two .HDR files, one with a 2k or 4k in the name, and one with ENV (environment) in the name. These still work fine for me here, but the JPEG ones which some users might assume were what they should use because Explorer or Preview showed the image contained within (not always true with HDR format unless you have an app that reads them installed) and showed a dummy icon for the HDRs.

If you were using them just for appearance or reflection and not lighting, pretty much any image will work as a pano background, but for Environment Lighting specifically there are more rules.

Not sure, I had looked into this before but hadn't found a quick way. Generally if there is an actual ".HDR" extension, it's fine, but if its just a PNG or JPEG its no good.

However, it IS possible to just rename a JPEG to HDR and then it would look fine but not light properly, honestly I often just test them in a render before i trust them. This was part of the reason I didn't push for that big pack of backgrounds Luis and I made to be default content, it needed to be double checked for things like this.

I would say that is still true, but that you would now HAVE to use the .HDR files for any of these if you wanted to use them for lighting. [...] These still work fine for me here, but the JPEG ones which some users might assume were what they should use because Explorer or Preview showed the image contained within [...].

If you were using them just for appearance or reflection and not lighting, pretty much any image will work as a pano background, but for Environment Lighting specifically there are more rules. The help file is a little vague.

Not to hijack this thread, but the page on Creating Panoramic Backgrounds in the Vw Help File should be more clear in stating that .JPG files are typically not HDRI files and cannot effectively used for HDRI-based Environment Lighting.

Not sure, I had looked into this before but hadn't found a quick way. Generally if there is an actual ".HDR" extension, it's fine, but if its just a PNG or JPEG its no good.

However, it IS possible to just rename a JPEG to HDR and then it would look fine but not light properly, honestly I often just test them in a render before i trust them. This was part of the reason I didn't push for that big pack of backgrounds Luis and I made to be default content, it needed to be double checked for things like this.

Actually, I think it needs to be split up even further than that. The IMAGE background will work just fine from anything, its only when the Environment Lighting is using a non-HDR that bad or confusing things start to happen. It references Lighting Options as another area that explains it, but its never spelled out. I'll reach out to tech pubs and see what we can do to make it clearer.

Honestly I've been wanting to do this with a lot of the Renderworks help materials, integrating new things I learned/rediscovered in my content creation work.

Your file was helpful, Jim! Doing some more testing, there was something odd about that HDRI file that I first experimented with. When I tested another HDRI image, it worked fine. As long as I know the process is sound, I can experiment with various environments to see how they affect my model.

If the image was just a panorama saved as 32 bit, you will be able to tell when you change the bit depth in photoshop, a dialog box will appear in which you can set the exposure and gamma. You should be able to see a wider range of exposures available with an image that still retains (useful) 32 bits of information.

Believe it or not, the original HDRI that I used for my sample would have met both of those criteria, but still didn't work in VW. That's fine; I wasn't super invested in using it. I am leaning towards Zoomer's explanation because, upon closer examination, the interior studio scene does have a DIY look-feel to it.

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