Digital Art Zone

ok well another play..... The one with the Trex and nanotrano I did with the standard setup. The lady with the flyers is done with the same setup just different maps... and i rendered them seperatly the BG and the 3 then merged them in photoshop......

Realize this question has been asked and answered but slight
technicality involved.
Have a huge collection of hdri's. in the hdr format.
Can these be used as is or does the hdri have to
be converted to another format (.tiff, etc).
Thank you for what appears to be a marvelous product

hdr's have to be converted to Tif to use in Uber Environment. There is a convertor in Daz Studio for this. Just double click on the convertor, browse to your hdr and click accept/ok. Then you will have a converted tif in the same location, you then load that tif into the Colour channel of Uber Environment.

Szark - 08 November 2012 07:53 AM

hdr's have to be converted to Tif to use in Uber Environment. There is a convertor in Daz Studio for this. Just double click on the convertor, browse to your hdr and click accept/ok. Then you will have a converted tif in the same location, you then load that tif into the Colour channel of Uber Environment.

Many thanks for your fast answer. Appreciate it.
Unfortunately this means cannot purchase product.
Thank you for saving me money!!!!

Sorry DT just trying to help.

Why can't you purchase this set, what did you want or expect?

Szark - 08 November 2012 09:34 AM

Sorry DT just trying to help.

Why can't you purchase this set, what did you want or expect?

Many thanks for your reply, again you saved me money!!!
Wanted and expected same thing, ability to import a hdri image without
converting. Otherwise you might as well use your vacation pictures.
A .tiff file is not a hdr file.
In Maya, Vue, Poser ( familiar with these) all have the ability to import hdri.
( also saving as Photoshop,but that is another issue)
Again, thank you,did not mean to imply I was ungrateful

Sorry I wasn't implying you were ungreatful I was just puzzled as this set includes 6 HDRI so they can be used in Carrara, Vue and yes even Maya etc.

Yes Daz Studio works a little different when it comes to HDRI but the results speak for themselves IMHO.

bicc39 - 08 November 2012 10:15 AM

Wanted and expected same thing, ability to import a hdri image without
converting. Otherwise you might as well use your vacation pictures.
A .tiff file is not a hdr file.

I am afraid you are wrong. ,hdr is not the only format for HDRI images. 32-bit Tiff files can contain HDRI pictures and are indeed used to.

The UberEnvironment 1 and 2 lights very definitely do HDRI lighting. They merely require standard ,hdr files to be converted to a specific (actually .tdl, but tagged as .tif) format that is optimized for the 3Delight render engine. But they are still 32-bit HDRI images in the format they are converted to by DS.

The product this thread is about IS very much an HDRI product, and is quite defintiely NOT the same as using your vacation pic jpegs.

DavidGB - 08 November 2012 11:11 AM

The product this thread is about IS very much an HDRI product, and is quite defintiely NOT the same as using your vacation pic jpegs.

Exactly thanks David for chipping in and teaching me something new.

For info, Greg Ward developed the radiance .hdr format for holding high dynamic range imaging pictures, but then later developed the logluv Tiff format to address what he came to see as weaknesses in his earlier .hdr format.

Logluv TIFF

And a paper by Greg explaining the developments of the various HDRI image formats, including his. (Note the first format described is a PIXAR tiff format, then his own .hdr, then his logluv tiff, and why he hopes it will replace .hdr.)

HDR encodings

And finally, from the page from the 3Delight docs on the use of tdlamke to create the tiffs (but wiith the filetype .tdl) that the renderer uses:

tdlmake supported formats

under 'Supported input formats' you will see that it takes .hdr radiance files as an input to convert to the standard .tdl tiffs the renderer uses (the Omnifreaker HDR converter is just a GUI to use tdlamke to convert the hdr to the logluv tiff that DS will recognize. and under Tiffs it says:

LogLuv encoded TIFFs are supported and are kept in their LogLuv form when processed.

In other words, the conversion converts the .hdr to a 32-bit logluv tiff, which IS still and HDRI image.

Sweet info David...time to get a refill and settle down for some learning. I can't thank you enough for this, cheers.

So I can't use my Bahamas vacation shots?
(after converting to .tiff)

Some things of note...

When converting to .TIFF with the script included in UberEnv it's going to 16-Bit Floating Point. For all intents and purposes, this file along with the full resolution backdrop provide the same information as the HDR would at around 5% of the file size.

http://www.openexr.com/about.html

ILM decided to develop a new HDR file format with 16-bit floating-point color component values. Since the IEEE-754 floating-point specification does not define a 16-bit format, ILM created the "half" format. Half values have 1 sign bit, 5 exponent bits, and 10 mantissa bits. For linear images, this format provides 1024 (210) values per color component per f-stop, and 30 f-stops (25 - 2), with an additional 10 f-stops with reduced precision at the low end (denormals).

You can convert any .HDR into these separate parts without losing any of the functionality, so it's not a matter of what it produces. Just whether or not you want to bother with the act of converting files.

barbult - 10 October 2012 10:18 PM

I'm having a problem when I look down on a character. The UR background details are huge in comparison with my character. Is there a workaround for this?

I tried moving the character, camera and shadow catcher up 4500 units to put them further from the Skydome. That made the details of the skydome smaller, but gave it an unnatural curvature and the details still seemed too large.

I'm sorry for not responding to this sooner, I stopped receiving updates for one reason or another and things have been rather hectic.

The problem you're having should exist to some degree with all spherical backgrounds depending on what you're trying to do. It has to do with how high the camera is from the ground in the actual panorama scene, compared to where the camera is in DS. My camera in most of these was about 4-5 ft off the ground, when you think about M5 being about 6.3ft and your camera being a few feet above his head it's more like 10 feet off the ground in DS. Closer features in the panorama get to the camera I was shooting with the more pronounced that effect is going to be, things start to look weird in regards to scale when it's taken to extremes. Changing the angle of the camera in DS helps but adds the fisheye effect just like it would in real life.

PS. to above discussion of product.
Bought it!
Thanks to all for the help