This is reflected in the file sizes:

For this skydome for example

the exr file size is 160mb, the hdr version is 50mb

That said, I have decided to start including a .hdr version in the products I am selling on 3docean. I’m still updating all the files, but check back soon and if you have bought one of them you can re-download a new version for free.

Why hdr? Unfortunately some applications don’t support exr, so until they do you can use hdr (albeit in the knowledge that your colours might not be quite as lovely*)

* not scientifically tested!

At the time I remember being happy with my work but not completely sure how ‘real’ the images looked. As it turns out, the red carpet and flowers are even more intensely coloured in reality! Take a look at the full set of Dave’s photos here, below are a selection for comparison. When I saw Dave’s photos I felt I had to go back and render a couple of extra views, so the 2 below were done to try and match his compositions.

render:

photo:

render:

photo:

For me, the interesting things to notice were the relative intensities of the highlights (how the Canon 5D dealt with them compared to vray), the colour of the lighting behind the grilles (goes towards yellow in reality despite being red) and that I was pretty lucky in getting the flower petal material looking about right.

Not a new technique, you can find good tutorials by Bertand Benoit and Philippe Steels here and here, but it remains the best way to create displacement maps for repetitive things like roof tiles, metal panels and in this case expanded metal mesh. The great thing about doing a material like this with displacement rather than a straight opacity map is that it looks different depending on the viewing angle, which adds to the realism.

I made a quick model of expanded metal that looks something like this:

then did a quick top-down render and saved the zdepth element as a 16 bit png. Its important to save as 16 bit if you want a nice clean and smooth displacement, 8 bit often doesnt have enough grey levels so you get a stepped gradient which looks ugly when displaced.

This is what the finished displacement map looks like:

16 bit png download link

If you use vray, then the displacement settings were (units: mm) :

The actual material settings were very simple, a brownish diffuse colour, slightly more pink reflect colour, ward brdf

And finally some renders (click for higher res):

Click images for high res.

I’m planning a making-of tutorial, but first I wanted to show some high res versions of the exteriors (interiors to follow) as they really should be viewed big for best effect! The following renders are my particular favourites of the exterior set, click for a high res version.

Watch on vimeo for full HD.

The code for the wired rotation is:

radToDeg(Z_Rotation/360)

The HDRi skies he used were:

Check out Daniel’s architectural visualisation portfolio and blog.

Thought I should do a quick tutorial on how I use these HDRi Skydomes I’m selling. Note that this is just one of many possible workflows, and there are probably lots of tricks I’m missing and even things I do completely wrong. I should also say that I work mostly with still images, not animations.

1. Here is a typical architectural scene. It is a model I made of Waro Kishi’s Fukaya house in Japan that never really went anywhere.

2. I use a gamma 2.2 workflow together with reinhard color mapping, so not strictly LWF but shares some of the advantages. I don’t want this to turn into a LWF tutorial or discussion, but this post on cgpov.com pretty much sums up how I feel a gamma corrected workflow helps us as visualisation artists.

The reinhard color mapping helps to control burnt out (overexposed) areas. Screenshot of my color mapping set up: The burn value of the reinhard color mapping typically ranges from .75 for an exterior to 0.05 for an interior. You need to experiment with the value until you gain control over the burnt out areas. Here is an example with a camera pointing at the HDR sky:

For the final render, I use the Vray Frame Buffer, and add a slight s-curve to the output to compensate for the lack of contrast that the gamma corrected workflow introduces:

3. Add a vray dome light and load the exr/hdr using the max bitmap loader. Set the mapping type to environment/spherical. If you are using .hdr files, you can use the vrayHDRi loader instead. It makes no difference whether you use the bitmap loader or the vrayHDRi loader, the vrayHDRi adds a bit more control in that you can control the render multiplier independently from the viewport multplier. Set the output of the .exr to 1 and the vraylight multiplier to 1. If your hdr/exr has no alpha channel it seems you can save quite a bit of memory while rendering (approx 200mb in my case) if you load the exr/hdr as realpixel float rgb rather than the rgba option.

[Click for original size]

4. To rotate the HDR you need to enter a U offset value from 0-1, so to rotate 180 degrees with would enter 0.5, 270 degrees 0.75 etc.

5. Add a vrayphysicalcamera, and set the aperture and shutter speed to something that would work for a typical outdoor scene, like F4, 1/200th & ISO 100. Remember that you are in effect using a completely manual camera, there is no ‘P’ or automatic mode so you need to experiment with different exposures until you get a good result.

[Click for original size]

6. Hit render and see what you get. If it looks too dark/bright I tend to adjust the bitmap’s output rather than the vraylight multiplier, so that I can have a couple of ready setup HDRi’s ready to drag and drop onto the dome light. In the examples below I use an output value of 1.5.

UPDATE: The slideshow below will automatically update as I add new HDRi skies.

Click image to zoom