Content and selling HDRIs

Oso3D

If I use bought content to generate an HDRI, am I permitted to sell the HDRI? It seems to be an unclear line between 'you can sell art made with this content' and 'you can't repackage content.'

Like, for example, Ocean Wide. I can make a variety of oceans and rolling landscapes. If I turn them into an HDRI, I'm not reselling the actual product, but ... I don't know.

 

Tobor

The EULA is pretty clear for all commercial work rendered in 2D: it's allowed.

larsmidnatt

Yeah you can sell the HDR. It's not a 3D asset. More specifically you aren't sharing the models that came from the product.

Years ago people used to sell 2D backdrops they rendered from 3D scenes they bought. Same thing.

Oso3D

Excellent. I'm thinking of picking up Terragen since it can create high quality EXRs with lighting info. And being able to pipe a lot of stuff, like city scapes or ships in the distance or whatever, would help extend the range of what I can do.

 

FSMCDesigns

While not against the EULA or TOS, for me this is an integrity issue in the least. Say I render a mountian scene using Stonemasons winter terrain product and then try to sell those images as backdrops. Essentually I am competing with Stonemasons original product and will probably cut into his sales from those that want an easier, less resource intense option. I find little difference in this and rendering a character and then using those images to make my own skin textures for sale.

Granted, the use of a 3rd party app such as terragen makes sense, but if other vendor objects appear in the scene, they could easily be mis-labeled then as merchants resources since that is what they are being used for IMO.  Just my way of seeing it and my 2 cents.

Oso3D

Yeah, that's part of the issue I'm debating.

 

But it turns out Terragen costs a huge amount of money to do what I was thinking, so... ... yeah.

 

WendyLuvsCatz

The derivative competing work thing indeed comes into play if at the DAZ store which is why backgrounds are mostly sold at Renderosity.

i myself bought a lot of backgrounds when I was solely an iClone user on iC3std and not importing other content so there is a market for it but making it original and not just reproducing a scene is good form, indeed use content from other vendors but set up your own unique scene, like say Faverals buildings imixed with Muze and others of similar era arranged in a unique streetscape with a large commons green, predations and Merlins trees where you place your camera and someone else's sky dome in background etc, add some birds and carts with idle horses etc and it is an artwork in itself.

mjc1016

With Terragen, you don't NEED Studio content to create landscape/sky images...

And there's plenty of free (as in totally free...CC0/public domain) landscape props at places like Blendswap (yeah, Blender format), Turbosquid and similar that you could use for 'filler' material. 

But, the one problem is, 'generated' HDRis are not going to have the wide audience actual photographic ones will.  And you can get pretty high quality images from places like OpenFootage for 5 Euros each (one of the cheaper sites, mind you), so you would need to package several in a set and still beat the around $20 price point...for less desirable generated images.  One reason generated images are less desirable, is that you don't need thousands of dollars worth of photo gear...so basically anyone can do it.  Another, is that traditionally, it wasn't really thought of as something that was 'real' enough for use in anything except some games (and many game studios actually use photographic HDRis).