Where do you put your HDRIs?
mavante
Posts: 734
in The Commons
The title says it all: Where do you put your HDRIs, from whatever source, so you can consistently and easily find them when wanting, e.g., to load one as the Environment Map in Render Settings?
There doesn't seem to be any consistency about where commercial HDRIs packages install their images, at least not that I can find.
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I have an HDRI folder on my dropbox that I put them all in.
Funny you should bring this up because I've been trying to sort out my HDRIs today. Those you buy from DAZ (like those from Dimension Theory, for example) come with clickable icons in the Content Library (I don't use Smart Content). They are in my Light Presets folder. Otherwise, those that I download from one of the free HDR sites are all in a folder outside of my DAZ library and I navigate to the image when I want to change it in Render Settings > Environment > Environment Map. The problem is that those HDR images don't have thumbnails that are viewable in Windows so I have to try to remember what it is or keep loading different ones until I find one I want. Very time consuming - I wish that DAZ would make it so that Studio could recognise content that is not their own format.
Another problem with the clickable commercial ones from the DAZ store is that when you click and load them, they sometimes change your render settings (Tone Mapping, Filtering, etc.) and add cameras that I don't want or need. So I bought them but don't use them (like so much else I have bought over the years).
I have a folder in Daz Studio Content Library where I can easily load all the HDRIs I've purchased. When I buy a product with an HDRI I find them, load them up individually into Daz Studio then save it as a Render Settings Preset in that custom folder. I save it so that it only loads the HDRI (uncheck everything but Environment >> Dome >> Environment Map). This lets me keep all the HDRIs in their original folders but allows me to quickly find the perfect HDRI for my scenes without having to find every individual product I've purchased that have HDRIs in them. It's been a huge time saver and helps me to use HDRIs that I otherwise would have forgotten about.
Yeh I put them into Light Precets too. Make your own thumbnail - render the HDRI and save as a png 91x91 pixels, name it the same as your HDRI and put it in the same folder.
I use Map Master Pro to make the thumbnails. There is also Thumbnail Mastery - I don't own that one but I assume it does the same thing, renders and sets the icons right in Daz Studio.
So you can just load up the HDRI in Daz Studio and render that as the icon. It's a big help, so that you can see what the HDRI looks like when rendered.
When I say name it the same I mean the same but with the .png file extension of course. Rendering HDRIs with nothing else in the scene is extremely fast.
I have a folder in My Library. I use Sage Thumbs to preview them.
But are they, though? Really? This is part of the whole thing that drives me nuts. (I know, I know: "Short trip." Haha.) It seems to me that what the commercial ones (or some of them) actually do is have a .duf file in Light Presets, but then that .duf file is pointed to an image file that is stuffed off somewhere in (I think) Runtime/Textures/(VendorName)/(ProductName). I mean, I think that's what is going on. Searching "My Daz 3D Library" for ".hdr" or ".exr" turns up items that are scattered all over that directory in different subdirectories.
Yes. Very frustrating. That's part of why I want to get ALL of my HDRs collected into ONE place where I can easily find them, and load ONLY them into the environment map when I want one.
Thanks, Diva. What you're describing gives me hope that I might be able to do what I want to accomplish. Loading each commercial product's HDRIs up (with all their excess baggage) and then saving each as a Render Settings Preset in your own created folder (with all the excess baggage thrown overboard) is brilliant. That way I can have the HDRIs from those products stored with all the HDRI's I've gotten from elsewhere.
I think your tip should be stickied! Great, great, great solution!
I'm viewing HDRIs in Windows Explorer using the old TxView.dll file.
...save for the ones purchased from here or Rendo, I use a separate HDR folder on my library drive with a shortcut from the desktop.
hahah You're welcome. :D I find that custom folders like that can be helpful for quite a few things.
I sometimes am tempted to take all HDRI out of subfolders and put them in a single place. But I do just create a product category for them, and put them there.
Some good tips in this thread but I'm not sure some of them apply. For example, yes, I can view HDRi images in some applications but I have not found a way to show a thumbnail of that HDRi image. That's important because I want to see what I'm selecting. Similarly, saying that I can render a 91x91 thumbnail is fine but the non-DAZ HDRi files that I download from HDRI Haven, etc., don't show up in my DAZ Studio Content Library so neither would the thumbnail. It might help to have a JPEG of the HDRI file in the same folder just so that Windows can display a thumbnail with the same name as the HDRI.
The TxView.dll affects the entire system. Here is the open image box (extra large icon view) when selecting the environment map inside Daz Studio.
It takes a decent PC to view the HDRs as thumbnails if the Windows OS has not yet made them. It will crash your system if you're trying to select from several hundred files. (I have 383 HDRs from HDRI Haven)
The JPEG option is definitely better if the HDR creator provides one since that is not resource-intensive.
Most of the HDRIs I use are from HDRI Haven, with a handful from other sources and of course a few from the Daz store.
The non-Daz store ones I have in a folder I created in my Studio > My Library > Light Presets which I labeled HDRI of course. I have dozens of HDRIs in there at this point. In any case, yeah I just navigate to there from Render Settings > Environment Map to utilize said HDRIs.
I generally download the 4K, 8K, and 16K ones from HDRI haven, but mostly use the 4K ones as they tend to look a bit blurry, which complements the DOF camera setting nicely.
As for the ones from the Daz store, a quick search for HDRI in the Content Library pulls most of them up for me.
Well, yeah—but I've never once had a use for one from inside the Content Library. I need to be able to find them from that funky little text-only popup browser thing-a-ma-jig in Render Settings for loading into the Environment Map. That's why I want them all in one directory, which I also will be able to break down into descriptive (for me) subdirectories.
So do a search for files with the HDR extension, and put them all into one folder and make subdirectories. Pin that folder to your Quick Access in Explorer and done. At least that's in Windows.
Well, you could do the Content Library search to ID the products, then download their packages from the store manually (again) or just track down the packages in your DIM > Downloads folder, and then manually copy the HDRI files from said downloads into the new folder you are creating. There aren't very many products in the Daz store yet that are HDRI oriented.
A couple of these products also aren't true HDRIs. I ran into this recently with a 'space based' product that, while it did have 360 degree maps, didn't include any lighting info with said maps.
Of course, a few of the products from the Daz store include a customized ground plane along witht the HDRIs, such as Pines Beach, but of course you could assign those to their own sub-folders.
But as for manually assigning the HDRI via the Environment Map slider versus just clicking on the relevant HDRI button after you search for HDRIs in Content Library, whichever you prefer. Note that when you pick the 'Render' buttons in Content Library that relate to HDRIs, sometimes those include adjustments to your Render settings as well that are optimized for the HDRI in question.
Yeah, well, what would be better would be an option to load the HDRI without screwing up every other render setting. Sometimes you just want a different sky or background lighting and don't want to have your render settings at default, or match the HDRI vendor's taste.
That's not the only place where they will be loaded into the Environmental map
I used to copy every HDRi to a folder but they are such big files the duplicates start to add up fast
I use HDR's in multiple programs so simply put them where they're easy to find in a top level folder such as D:\HDR's. As long as you leave them there, any DAZ preset made & saved in your Content structure should be fine.
Yes, that has all been thoroughly hashed out upthread, and was at least one of the reasons I started this thread at all, so we are beginning, I think, to go circular. All the above is why I think that @Divamakeup has a solution that is both elegant and effective. It works for me, anyway. YMMV.
Note that this is how it's supposed to work. The .duf file in your Content Library is not supposed to be the HDRI file, it's a settings script that retrieves the actual HDRI file from its proper place in /Runtime/Textures/ and adjusts various Render Settings parameters so that, when you render, it appears properly. Not all HDRIs are created equal, the default settings do not work for all of them. It doesn't matter that the /Runtime/Textures/ files are "scattered all over", the .duf file that loads them tells D|S where to find them. It's the same way all texture settings files work.
FWIW, for HDRI-only downloads that I get from places like HDRI Haven, I have a /Runtime/Textures/!HDRI/ folder. Note the "!", it forces the folder to the top of directory lists so it's easier to find when I manually load a file.
That's why my solution is good. Creating a Render Settings Preset for the HDRIs that JUST load the HDRI and nothing else. Having them all in one folder for quick load is a big help. Being able to load them without changing your render settings is an even bigger help. :)
With all due respect, no, that is not how an HDRI is "supposed to work." A properly constituted HDRI is supposed to work as an HDRI, regardless of the application used to load it, so Daz Studio's own Render Settings do not constitute how an HDRI is "supposed to work." There are no ".duf" files for other applications that use HDRIs. HDRI-related products sold commercially in the Daz store may be "supposed to work" that way, but only because the PAs and Daz have ordained them to work that way.
"Properly" according to whom? That goes to the heart of why I asked about HDRIs, explicitly, not about .duf files that make use of HDRIs, often with other settings that I don't need or want.
Lord knows we are 100-percent in agreement on that count!
(It amazes me how often I get told in this forum what matters or doesn't matter to me.)
It doesn't matter to you. Okay. I got it.
It does matter to me. That's why I created this thread.
Right. Understood. Thanks. Now I'm going forward with @Divamakeup's solution to gather all my HDRIs into one directory, no matter where I got them from—or how many .dufs have a leash on them—and gather them there free of other Render Settings bric-a-brac.