Hyperfocal Design
I wrote a post for Jeff Mottle at CGArchitect last week on HDRI, what to look out for when choosing them, and how to fix them if they’re not exactly what you want. It covers some negative effects you might see in IBL renders if using a HDRI that isn’t captured properly for the specific lighting situation.
You can read it here.
A quick update on the time-lapse skies as well – I’ve been shooting a lot and I’ve captured a couple new ones that are worth keeping, and chucked out probably 3-4 more that got rained out, salt spray all over the lens, interesting cloud formations that turn super-boring… yknow, the usual things that will drive you nuts if you’ve just spent a whole day shooting for nothing!
I’m also still fine tuning the process of merging the HDRIs and deciding on what software solution to use. I’m finding that Photomatix is generating HDRIs that have a strange, high contrast gamma to them, while PTGUI seems to have the right contrast, but is utterly desaturated. I’m about to go back to the old grand daddy of HDRI solutions, HDRShop, and see if it fares better. I suppose I just hadn’t tried it before as I assumed it was too long in the tooth, but the new V3 has batch processing among other things, and its built to make 32bit HDRIs rather than as a stepping stone to tone-mapped LDRIs.
I’m about to get back to that now, and since its pretty close to Christmas, I’ve decided to release the samples next year, perhaps around mid January, so look out for them then! I’ll probably also spend some time in the next two weeks creating some quick tutorials on using the time-lapses in Blender Cycles and Blender Octane Edition, and I’ve got some artists lined up to create some for software like 3dsMax and VRay.
Have a great Christmas and holiday season!
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