Create a Sky Dome from a scene?
thomas_c4201264
Posts: 5
I've made a scene with lots of landscape - distant mountains, and far-away features. I'd like to render the scene into a skydome to use for more intimate scenes, in that world. From what I figure, all the necessary information is there, there are physical cameras that capture skydome images, fractions at a time. Is it possible to create (or purchase) a camera capable of generating a 360 image? HDRI would be a great benefit, and it seems it should be possible.
Thank you,
--Thomas
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
I'll repost, as this can be pain to find for people:
First, create an environment, and place a camera (you need a camera, perspective view doesn't have some of the required settings) at a convenient location that gives you the desired surround view. Remember that the viewing point of the camera should be very near the viewing point for all renders you're going to make with the resulting HDRI. For wide open areas, it won't make too much of a difference, but if you make a HDRI of an interior, things just won't work out well if your viewing point isn't positioned perfectly where you'll want to place your camera in later renders.. Set camera rotations to 0 (though it doesn't matter THAT much if you leave the Y-rotation, but it's probablly better to make a habit out of setting them all to 0.
Add an environment map if necessary, just to have a bunch of clouds and stuff if you need them, and supply your baseline lighting.
Next, go to your render settings, set exposure value to 0, and environment intensity to 0.0002 (or even as low as 0.00002 if you like things a little darker)
Also go to your camera's parameters, and set Lens Distortion type to Spherical
Now make sure all your remaining render settings (resolution, convergence, fireflies, denoise, whatever) are correct.
Finally, go to your Advanced Render Settings, tick the Canvases box, click the plus-sign right below it, and leave that on Beauty.
NEW stuff I figured out: Set texture compression tressholds (top left of the last image) really high, like 9,000 (or 8192 if you prefer to stick to numbers in the 2^n range) to keep a sharp image for background use. Probably doesn't hurt to have the main image you render to a similarly high resolution as well.
Hit render. Wait for the render to finish, give your render a name, and open your favourite filemanager (probably windows explorer) to find your render in its usual location. In the folder with your render, you can now also find a new subfolder with the same name as your render, and "_canvases" appended to its name. That folder contains a .exr file, which is the HDRI you just rendered.
Note: thanks to @PhilW for figuring out the oddities of overlighting when creating your own renders/HDRI's and the Exposure Value / Environment Intensity workaround.
Edit: added links to the images, they now point to the big screencaps I originally uploaded.
This is fantastic! There are a lot of parts I knew nothing about. It worked great. :)
One question - I notice in your images that it looks like your aspect ratio is 2:1 or so. Is that the ratio the that works best for the domes?
Thank you, very much!
--Thomas
Oh, very cool! I did make a HDRI before, but it involved rendering 3 times with different parameters and then merging the results in Photoshop. Did not know that DAZ can do this itself! Thank you!
Wait, does this method work for indoor environments too? I've been trying to get that working for really long time, and no matter what I do, my indoor HDRIs are always twisted some way or another. I'm making a series of images in same location, so if I could just prerender HDRIs of those indoor environments for my camera spots, and then just pop in my characters and furniture and just render, that would be awesome and a huge time saver, since indoor rendering takes ages in Iray.
Oh, that aspect ratio is just what shows up in the viewport, what happens in the render is whatever dimension you specify. I prefer to get as many pixels in as possible, so my actual renders and the HDRI are in a 1:1 aspect ratio.
It works for interiors too, but you REALLY want to make sure that your camera when making the HDRI is in the exact same spot as where you'd want to put your camera when making the final render in the old fashioned way.
Also keep in mind that when you use the HDRI and position your other assets, that zooming in or out will not change the size of the HDRI, only of the added assets. So it's possible, but it's also very tricky to work with interior HDRIs. For example, if you place a character asset next to a chair that's on the HDRI, and then zoom out your camera, then the character will look smaller (because it's farther away), while the chair will stay the same size.
Honey I shrunk the kids!!! ... sorry ... it was the first thing that came to mind reading that lol ...
@Drip Thanks for the info. I'll be sure to test this method out.
Can you elaborate please ? I didn't find any @PhilW post in the discussion you pointed. AFAIK the exr files should be independent from tone mapping, that is, they should contain the raw data before tone mapping is applied.
It's from an even older post where PhilW was discussing making HDRI images: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/2714171/#Comment_2714171
Most of my information I got from there, and then simply worked out a simple workflow for the short guide I posted above. Anyone could put all the important bits together from that original thread, but not everybody will, hence condensing the important details into this guide.