Tutorials

Quite often I get people asking me about HDRI night sky maps, why my Night Sky collections aren’t HDR, why aren’t there many available, etc. I often answer that without a moon, a night sky isn’t naturally a HDRI. The brightness difference from the black night sky and the stars is within …

I do like to talk up how great our HDRI skies are for 1-step image based lighting and how you don’t need additional lights and so on, however every project is different and sometimes you might like to tweak a few things! Over the years I’ve had a number of emails …

Here’s a quick and somewhat un-edited video I just put together on frame blending time-lapse HDRI with After Effects. Frame mixed issues with IBL Probably the only thing I didn’t really touch on in this video is the effect of frame-mixed HDRI frames on IBL, which is in a word, not good 🙂 …

For my HDR Time-Lapse Sky Dome project, I originally stuck to shooting afternoons, sunsets and dusk time-lapses as I only had the battery that came with the D800. It only lasts a max of around 4 hours. Creating day-length time-lapses required the creation of a custom battery setup – I’ll …

Here’s a quick, straightforward look at getting time-lapse HDRI skies into Blender Cycles. The same technique should work for non-HDRI image sequences, animated texture maps, etc.  

First: LDRI To easily explain what HDRI is, we can compare it to an every day LDRI (low dynamic range image). LDR images are what we use commonly for photographs, the web, in print, 3d graphics, and on TV. As their name describes, they have a low dynamic range, which …