HDRi Maps & Lights
OminousAutumn
Posts: 401
Can someone please tell me if there are Daz packages you can purchase that will just insert pre-existing professional lighting set ups for use with iRay render? I am getting tired of adding pointlights and spotlights and it not looking professional enough for my standards, and being so time consuming.
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What is the best way to go about creating your background, or is it a spheical environment map? Do you use a super high res HDRi? Is it animated or an actual photograph? Where is a good source for these maps/backgrounds? Essentially, how can I get nice depth in my backgrounds with landscapes let say at a high quality? Is the answer the curved flat BG's that get inserted into the actual 3D space while creating your scene? I have been using 8000x40000 HDRi jpgs and applying them to the environment map where they show up (see pic) but they often still look poor quality compared to what I've seen with other people's work. Where and what do I get, and please can you confirm how its applied? How does the foreground of the Daz Forest blend so well into the BG?
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Comments
When you see others' renders, they are either rendering them at a high resolution and scaling down, or more likely rendering at a lower resolution. an 8000x4000 HRDi usually won't render that well about 1280x720 (HD) resolutions. Often they are composited together and often purposely blurred to help hide the different sources from where all the pieces used in a scene came from.
An HRDi is actually just a set of pictures taken over a 360 degree field of view at multiple camera exposures and they extra exposures are used to calculate more light variations in the 2D background to give the illusion it is 3D modeled. Key thing is that the light information from the HRDI is used to create light for the actual 3D models in your scene. It doesn't necessarily do a good job as a background though, however usually the are more convincing and professional looking sources of light for your renders than Studio lighting and manually placing lighting from photometric sources and a heck of a lot faster. You may turn off the rendering of the actual HRDI picture used to create that light source if you like.
For the pine trees you can easily find good free pine tree models on ShareCG.com instead of the background that seems to be the wrong scale. You 2nd picture looks sort of well integrated to me. True the grey buildings are sort of indescript and plain but that was the intent and style of the modeler I guess.
I have used just about anything to make backgrounds. For outdoor scenes *always* carry a point and shot digital camera say - small and compact, fits in any pocket just about and doesn't get in the way. File the pictures away in a folder marked "interesting clouds" or something similar.
Just about any web page -- the DAZ store, Renderosity, textures dot com, Turbosquid etc. will have backgrounds for sale or free. On Deviant art some people (not all) let you use their stock background images for free. I have no affiliation; just trying to be helpful and I've used each of these "sources" at one time or another.
I find that sizing and positioning background images is a bit hit and miss... sometimes you have to go away from your work for a while and come back to it with "fresh eyes". Sometimes you can "get away" with impossible stuff if you place interesting compositional elements in the foreground, to distract the viewer and/or draw attention away from the b.g.
In your mountain scene for example the "main" cumulus cloud above the central peak is a bit too large to be realistic, given the size of the mountain... in this case you may want to edit the graphic, adding lots of matching blue sky on the top and both sides so don't run out of background when you shrink the file, eg. you want to make the clouds a bit smaller, relative to the main foreground image imagery.
Example: In the attached picture of my dog's castle (really the "Blenworth" castle, available in the DAZ store) you can see the mountains are far off in the distance and the clouds over the mountains are very small... the sunlight is by Dreamlight and the background image was given to me by a guy who'd gone hiking in northern New York state. For the picture of the dog *inside* the castle the furnishings, floor and doorway are all a DAZ model, the "Rural Chateau II" by Jack Tomalin. Now the contents of the doorway from about half-way up is a flat background image... note that it took a *long time* to properly fit and stretch and skew the background information into the "adjoining room", scaling the b.g. image and fuzzing the floor "just so", and matching the palette to the overall render.
In the DAZ 3D tutorial about the Environment tab on Youtube the narrator just says to get your free graphics and HDRI's "from anywhere".