AMAZING HDRI Tool for Blender - HDRI MAKER!

what's up guys Justin here with the CG essentials.com so in today's video we're going to check out a blender add-on that makes the creation of hcri backgrounds and domes really easy let's go ahead and just jump into it alright so hdri maker is a tool that automates the hdri setup inside of blender so instead of having to mess around with a bunch of nodes or anything like that this is going to automate that process now not only will it automate the process of creating hdri backgrounds which can definitely be a Time Saver it also gives you the ability to quickly create domes um with the backgrounds applied to them as well so you can light your model but then also have a dome that actually has ground on it that your object casts a shadow on and so that can be a significant Time Saver when you start setting up domes as well now there are tools in here that you can use in order to like edit and customize the domes that are created which we can talk about in a little bit but this is definitely a cool tool for quickly setting up up these hdris so note that there are a couple different versions of this so the full version contains libraries up to 16k you can also get some of these other versions that have the lower resolution hdri's in there as well so like for example there's very rare situations where I would actually use a 16k hdri so for me that wouldn't really make sense but depending on what you're trying to do it might make more sense note that there are 480 backgrounds included with this add-on this does also come with a tool set to quickly create a light Studio allowing you to create a solid color backdrop as well as quickly adding lights in order to light your model so we'll take a look at that as well alright so first off let's talk a little bit about what happens when you install this add-on because the way this is going to work is depending on the version that you get this may look a little bit different so if you get the 16k version this is what this is going to look like but notice how you have options in here with this version in order to download the one k2k 4K Etc as well as the actual add-on itself so you're always going to download the add-on and then you're going to install it like any other add-on in blender and then down below these are basically like zip files um containing all of the different hdris now there's more of them as you get into the 4ks and the 8ks because those are higher resolution they take up more space um so he had to split them into multiple groups of packs so you can download whatever you want I went with the 2K um just for demonstrations sake but you can really download whatever you want then what you need to do is you need to jump over into blender and under edit preferences you need to jump into your add-ons and you need to install that first zip file that's the hdri zip file that's the hdri maker zip file and so when you do that you're going to get a little drop down that looks something like this and so this is where you're going to be able to control different things about the add-on and in particular we want to focus on the install and the libraries tabs mostly we're just going to focus on the install tab actually and so the first thing you need to do is you need to select a path where you want your default library to go and then you need to select a path where your user library is going to go so I have both of these on my assets folder but you basically just click on this it's going to pop up a little window and you can select a location so you need to set both of those Library folders and then what you want to do is you want to go find those EXA packs that we just that I just showed you over on blender market and so like for me all I did is I clicked on this 2K volume 1 exit pack and I clicked on choose exit packs that should take the exit packs and put them in this folder for use and so once you've done that you should be able to access these over in the hdri maker window this is an example model I've downloaded from sketchfab this is the cat with jetpack by miru so I'll link to it in the notes down below but um let's say that we wanted to add an hdri using hdri maker um what you can do is you can tap on the in key on your keyboard the letter n and then you want to click on hdri maker and what that's going to do is that's going to pop out the hdri maker Studio window right here and you can use this or I guess we could call it more of a toolbar but you can basically use this in order to access both the hdri maker Library as well as your own custom user Library if you have one of those but say that we wanted to add an hdri background in here we would go to the hdri maker library and let's say that we wanted to add a studio so all of these are different hdri types right so you've got like garage you've got interior so those are going to be the Interiors of buildings you've also got into your public or interior studio so there's a lot of different kinds of hdris that come along with this in this case we're going to focus on interior Studio let's go ahead and just select we'll just select this option right here so say you wanted to add that hdri image in here all you have to do is click on the button for ADD and so notice how in material preview mode nothing happened right well the reason that nothing happened is because this is something that only shows up when you render it but if I click over into rendered mode right here notice how I've got that background right here so I've got the lighting from that hdri and so notice what that does is this sets this up as an hdri background and at the moment it's literally just acting as a background right it's not doing anything else so it's just kind of back here notice how if I zoom out it's not changing size or anything like this but you can come in here and adjust things like the angle alright so let's go ahead and jump over into cycles and I'm going to switch this to GP compute mode just so you can see what this does when you're rendering in cycles and so notice how if you make adjustments using the angle function the lighting in your scene including things like the Shadows right here is going to adjust along with this so this is using the lighting from your hdri image in order to light your scene and I'm going to jump back into EV just so things run a little bit faster now notice that you can adjust things like the brightness using the emission as well as the exposure and the Hue and the saturation right so the Hue and saturation is going to kind of change the colors inside of your scene that are generated from this hdri image so another thing you could do if you wanted to is you could use the lighting from this hdri image but then check the box for transparent background that's going to light your image using the hdri but notice how it doesn't actually show up in the background anymore so this is easily like masking out that background if you wanted to do that now in addition you can also if you don't want to use the hdri image you can click on the option for use solid color if you do that what that's going to do is that's going to block out the hdri and that's going to allow you to add color in here as your hdri instead so I can use this in order to set this color but then I could also set the transparent background if I wanted to so you can come in here and adjust this so that it's only using a color as a background instead so we could do like a fully white background or something like that okay so so far this is pretty simple right this is something that you could set up pretty easily without using this add-on however where I think this add-on really makes a lot of sense is in the ability to quickly create domes so let's say that we wanted to take this model and let's say that we wanted to just put it in an outdoor location so maybe like an open world or something like that so what you can do is you can click through and notice how there's a number of other there's a number of other hdris in here let me go ahead and click on one of them I'm going to click on ADD but what I want to do because I don't really like the way the background's in here and the way this kind of floats in space I'm going to scroll down I'm going to click on the option for Dome and so what the Dome is going to do is this is going to automatically set up a dome and apply this hdri to it so that it actually acts as like ground geometry so the way that works is if I click on ADD Dome notice what that's going to do is that is actually going to set up a dome using that hdri image in here and so my model is kind of centered in the middle of this but notice how now instead of just kind of floating in space this is actually projecting the hdri image on the ground and so um it may not look like too much right here though obviously the result is already significantly better let's say I was to toggle back into Cycles notice that that shadow is actually being cast on the ground based on the lighting from this hdri and your Shadow will adjust based on the rotation of the hdri one of the cool things about this that I'm going to jump back into Eevee just to just for performance sake but another one of the cool things about this is you can also go into the Dome properties and adjust them so notice how I have an option to hide the dome which we don't really want you can also scale the Dome up or down and so notice how the more you scale the Dome the more or the larger the Dome gets so you can use this to create a really large Dome um you can keep keep it small other things like that but then you can also rotate the Dome 360 degrees so notice how this is rotating around my model just like this and this Dome setup is just super easy you can also see the wireframe of the dome in here as well okay and so one of the really cool things about this is say that I didn't want this ground to be flat right so say I wanted to use this in order to create something that doesn't really have this like Ultra flat ground in here well you can actually add geometry so let's say I was to add something from like we'll call it ant landscapes for right now um the add-on for that which I can link to in the notes down below but let's say you didn't want this to be super flat you wanted this to have some more ups and downs maybe we'll make this a little bit bigger something like this right so it's basically just a mesh that's being created using procedural noise in here you can adjust other things about it as well I'm not going to worry too much about that for right now but let's say we wanted this to match the ground well all we have to do is this is a mesh type right well I can come over here and look at this mesh type and then underground there's an option in here for add ground and so when we do that what that's going to do is that is going to take the texture that's from the ground or the bottom of the Dome and that's going to apply it to our ground object so now if we take a look at this and we look at our render notice how this isn't flat anymore this actually looks like Rocky ground so this actually looks really cool do note that this would look even better if I had downloaded the 8K textures or the 16k those files get really big so I did this more for like a speed standpoint but again you can come in here and you can adjust the angle of the Dome we'll notice how when we adjust the angle of the Dome that ground mesh is tied to that and that is adjusting as well so we can use this to really quickly add that ground detail from our Dome bottom which I think is one of the better features contained inside of this tool it's super cool okay so one of the cool things that was added in this new version is this actually gives you the ability to actually adjust these so let's say for example that we were to add this abandoned building in here I'm going to add it now we don't just want it as a background we actually want to end here is a dome well notice how there's two kinds of Domes in here the cube and the cylinder that actually allow you to adjust the way this is mapped using the hooks function so the way this works is if we click on ADD Dome what that's going to do is that's going to add this dome in here and first thing we're going to notice is if we look at this the projection is not right right so if we look at this dome for example the scale of the Dome has this so that our our has this so that our columns are projected in a way that they're getting bent onto the ground right and sometimes I find that toggling this wireframe on is helpful so if you click on the display wire under your Dome properties but what we want to do in this situation is we actually want to go down into our Dome vectors and we can actually adjust the way that this is in here so for example we can use this to adjust the scale of the ground that's in here so notice how I can scale this up so I'm not getting that kind of like weird ground Distortion over here by that column and we can come in here adjust that size or scale of that Dome as well if it's getting too big you may have to go back in and make some adjustments though so you can still adjust things like your ground scale other things like that in order to get those kind of lined up in here so there's also an option in here for coming in here and adding Hooks and so what adding hooks is going to do is it's basically going to add points in here that you can use in order to adjust the way that this is placed in here so notice how for example I can move this hook around when I move this hook around what that's doing is that's actually adjusting the way this is projected and it's actually adjusting the mesh that's in here so you could adjust like multiple hooks if you wanted to so let's say that we wanted to bring this one closer to a g why and I can start kind of like bringing this in and actually adjusting the way that this is placed inside of our 3D space right here so it actually gives us a ton of control over the way that our hdri images are placed in here so there's a full tutorial on this which I'll link to in the notes down below it's one I kind of want to practice with a little bit more um to feel 100 confident with but this does give you the ability to really kind of adjust those projections in a way that you wouldn't necessarily get if you're doing this manually without having to do a lot of extra work all right so you can also create and save your own backgrounds into your user Library so the way that that works is there's an option down below for Save and so when you save what you want to do is you want to choose a source folder so in my case I've put four HDR files I think I got them all from hdri Haven into this hdri import folder and what you can do is you can click and drag and select them and when you do that you can click on choose path and so when you do that that's going to find the PATH right here and what you can do is you can use this option to do a batch save now in this case what you might want to do is you might want to create your own collection in the user Library folder so what you're going to do is you're going to click on add new category and I'm just going to call this Justin's hdri files I'm going to click on yes in order to create this and click on OK so that's going to create a category that I can save these two but now if I click on batch save it's going to go through and it's going to save those four files in here now you can click on the file list and exclude some of them if you want we're not going to do that we're just going to click on yes we're going to click on OK and so what that's going to do is that's going to batch save those four hdris and it's actually going to bring them in and do kind of a batch creation thing so it's going to bring them in and it's going to save them to your user folder okay and so if I go into my user library and I look under Justin's hdri files notice how those four files that were in there are now created as hdris that I can bring in so I can click on ADD I can add them to a dome if I want to do that so we can go into the Dome function they're going to function in exactly the way that we want them to function inside of this 3D space right here so you can use this in order to create and save your own files to this Library and so you can also create hdri files from your 3D models so this is an abandoned warehouse model I've downloaded from sketchfab from aurelian Martell I'll link to this in the notes down below but basically um this is a 3D environment right it's an actual model that we're going to bring into blender and so once we do that and I'm going to make sure we're in material preview mode right here okay and so now what we want to do is we want to go back down to that save function right here we want to go to our user library and in this case we're going to do the same thing we did before where we're going to start by adding a new category and in this case I'm going to call it just created hdri say yes in order to create that category and then in this case what we want to do is instead of using our current background we want to click on Panorama 360. and so what I want to do is I want to place my 3D cursor right here so I'm just going to hold shift and do a right click then I'm going to click on add 360 cam on cursor I'm going to move that up a little bit because it's basically going to use this as a 360 degree camera I'm going to go ahead and delete out the C but this is going to create an hdri based on this location and so now what I want to do is I want to click on this option for Panorama save so when we do that it's going to ask us to name it we'll just call this Warehouse that's going to allow us to set things like our size in here so the size of the image I'm just going to do a 2K as well as some other things like the kind of denoising it's going to use other things like that I'm going to go ahead and leave these as is okay so what that's going to do is that's actually going to come in here and render out a 360 degree Panorama based on that camera location using your model now one thing I'm already noticing with this is I didn't set up enough Lighting in here so this isn't going to work very good as an hdri but we can still take a look at what this does and then we'll go back in and fix it and so once you're done it's going to tell you that this is done and you can click back in here well notice what that did is that created a warehouse hdri in here okay and so remember that the lighting of your scene is actually going to be important so this one that I created is actually too dark I've come in here and just added had some like really lazy Lighting in here um just with like uh just with like some area lights that are inside of this building just to give you give you kind of an idea of what this might look like but we're just going to do the same thing where we're going to do another Panorama save and we're going to call this try two and then we're going to click on OK to try to render this out again all right so now if I jump into my user library and in this case we're under the created hdri notice how both those hdris I created are now in here as options but I can click in here and I can actually add this as a background so if I jump over into Evie and this is pretty low resolution um just because I kind of ran out of time on this video but if I add this as a dome notice how I can actually come in here and use the lighting from this hdri that we created in order to actually light my scene so notice how my shadow is moving around other things like that the lighting is actually coming from that hdri that we were able to create from a 3D model which is pretty cool okay so I'm gonna go ahead and remove this really quick and what I want to do is instead of adding in an hdri I want to add in lights instead so what we can do is we can click on this lights option right here we can actually click on the add button and this will actually create like a lighting studio for you and so notice what that does is that takes those lights and it allows you to bring in however many lights you want and you can use either Point lights or you can also use spotlights or area lights depending on what you want to do that's kind of up to you but you can use this in order to quickly and kind of automatically set up Lighting in your scene notice how you can adjust like the Z value which is how far out they are using this little slider right here so you can say we want these to be lower higher other things like that you can also adjust where the target is because the target's actually a 3D point in space that's close to your object um but you can use that in order to move the Target around if you want to change that once you can also adjust the power of the different lights you can either adjust these one at a time so you can also click and drag down from the top down to the bottom in order to adjust the values of all of the lights at the same time so in this case right we would want or you could do like half of them two just by clicking and dragging like this if you want to do the front or the back so you can also adjust the size as well as adding like a random color if you wanted to do that you can randomize those as well now note that I don't think there's a way to just set them all back to White um let me see what you can do is you can click and drag in here but I don't think there's just like a res reset to single color option in here so just be aware if you click on the random color that is going to randomize things and you're going to have to go back and fix them if you don't want that and there's a detailed tutorial on the lighting Studio on the developers page as well which I can link to in the notes down below then there's also an option in here that's designed to help you add volumetric fog so if you go down into the volumetric section you click on ADD that's going to add in a volume that's going to add fog in your scene and so if we zoom out and we look at this notice this is adding an actual volume of fog in here like this and you can adjust things like the density of the fog as well as things like the height so like for example that fog is pretty high up here so I could bring this down if I wanted to do that but you can use this in order to add really strong fog or not so strong fog as well as adjusting the color so if you do want to add volumetric fog to your scene this is definitely a tool that's going to allow you to use that so just note that when you do try to render out that fog that's obviously going to be a lot heavier because that's an actual volume in your space but you can definitely render that out with cycles and then if you want to get rid of the fog you can just click on the remove button right here and you're back to normal so I'm not going to lie when I first looked at this add-on I wasn't 100 sure why I needed something that could create hdris like this but after using it a little bit I'm actually a huge fan especially of the Dome function it just makes the setup so easy and the results actually look really good but I'd love to hear from you in the comments down below what do you think about this add-on I will link this add-on on this page and in the notes down below as well if you want to check it out as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this and I'll catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The CG Essentials

Views: 8,144

Keywords: blender, blender 2.82, blender 2.8, blender modifier tutorials, blender tool tutorial, the blender essentials, the cg essentials, thecgessentials.com, justin geis, justin geis blender, blender 2.9, blender 2.91, hdri makre, hdri maker blender, blender hdri maker dome, hdri maker dome tutorial

Id: Z-nY77-RKtQ

Length: 22min 22sec (1342 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 23 2023