Wednesday 23 November 2011

Initial HDRI Studio Tests

These are three HDRI tests I took earlier this evening with a garden "gazing sphere" I bought off amazon and a SLR camera which I could only borrow for a few hours. So what is it I'm trying to achieve? By creating a set of High Dynamic Range Images (HDRI's) for the sites in Edinburgh I can then create panoramas of the lighting of the sites which can be used in Maya using Mental Ray's Image Based Lighting (IBL) effect. This means that the images are what is driving the light and reflections of the scene making any 3D objects placed within it integrate better with the live action plate. Regardless of the outcome which seems too dark at present, it was very fun and I look forward to going through to Waverley in the next week once I've perfected the technique to get some final ones.

So here we have the studio corridor, the studio itself and the external studio roof. The first set of circular image are the Photoshop HDR's used by combining 5 photographs of different levels of darkness together, the panorama is the two images merged in Nuke and the final is a 3D red sphere in Maya where I have tried to used the HDRI's as Image Based Lighting. Long way to go but a start...




4 comments:

  1. How big is your sphere and how much was it?

    ReplyDelete
  2. it is 20cm diameter [8 inches roughly apparently] and was £5.99 + postage from a garden centre shop on amazon [bargain]. One review said it was good for HDR's and another said she loved how she could now see her cat approaching the back door. Love dual purpose objects! Im going to go to one of the workshops in uni to get some sort of attachment drilled in so that I can stick it on a tripod and not just balance it on a plastic cup [height of technological advancements] I think everyone should get one and may have found my new hobby!

    ReplyDelete
  3. I've got one I bought in Au Naturale/Internaçional which is about 8cm in diameter (and is like, solid metal - heavy thing). It could be useful for HDRi lighting but might start to fall short for reflection maps and definitely not great for panoramas (see http://mark-365.blogspot.com/2011/09/clearing-out-cupboard.html and http://www.markhaldane.com/365/20110903/). I'm thinking of upgrading...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hmm..cool, mine is stainless steel and really light but a silly thing to carry around, only really bought it for HDRi's but I can try out some panoramas etc for you!

    ReplyDelete