Custom HDRI's for PhotoRealism | FULL WORKFLOW

hey what's up so today i want to walk you through a vfx technique that i use in a hundred percent of my photo reel renders it's actually the technique i'm using to light this cg ball right here and that's with a custom the keyword is custom hdri and in this video i'm going to show you how easy it is to make your own high dynamic range images or hdris are special for a couple reasons first when exposed up or down they actually retain proper exposure values unlike other file types this works because they're made from a combination of multiple images taken at various exposures and secondly when wrapped around a cg environment you can actually use the image to light your scene okay so to begin creating our custom hdri we need to take a series of bracketed images at different exposures of our 360 degree environment and there's a few ways to do this but i'll start with the easiest way this is a 360 camera specifically the 1r from insta360 it has two lenses each capturing one half of the environment and i love this thing because it's small very portable and super easy to use so the next thing you need to do is figure out where your cg element is going to sit in our case we had a chrome ball sitting right here so i'd want to take my hdri from right here it's going to match your reflections your lighting will be a lot more accurate okay so the closer you can get your hdri image from to the actual place where your cg object is going to be sitting then you're going to be set up for the best bet okay you want to use a monopod when you're doing this this 360 camera is so wide it's going to capture any legs of a tripod no problem it even captures these legs right here so you just want to make sure that when you're shooting this thing you're using a monopod so you don't have to paint out all your tripod legs in photoshop i got this for like i don't know 50 60 bucks on amazon super easy super cheap so now all we have to do is take our bracketed images just make sure your darkest image retains your brightest highlight detail and your brightest image retains your shadow detail now if you don't have a 360 camera you can do this with a dslr and a tripod this is actually the way that everyone did it before 360 cameras came out it's just gonna take a lot longer because you're gonna have to take an image at every single angle first a full 360 with a level camera second with the camera angle down at 45 degrees and lastly up at 45 degrees now the upside to doing it this way is you'll have a super high res hdri and you'll actually be able to use it as an actual background because it's going to be so high res but in our case i think it's a little overkill just because we're not using it as a background we're using it to inform our lighting for our scene as well as the reflections so we just have to keep in mind what we're using it for so i think a little overkill and takes a little too long so now let's talk about stitching all right so since i shot on a 360 camera i don't need to stitch anything together it basically comes out as a full 360 panorama right at the gates so that saves us a ton of time all we need to do is just convert them from their native format to jpegs so since i shot on an insta360 camera i am in insta360 studio this is their proprietary program very simple very easy to use i'm just going to drag these bad boys in we got all of our shots on the left the only thing you want to make sure of is your stitching mode you want to make sure that that is normal across the board sometimes it switches it to like a dive case by default or whatever if you don't do this we're going to get some unwanted ghosting effects and no one likes ghosts no one wants to be haunted so definitely make sure that these stitching options are uniform across the board then all we'll do select everything batch export target resolution def original of course yeah you want to go for the highest quality and just put it somewhere where you won't forget now if you shot on a dslr you're gonna have a couple hundred images and you're gonna have to take those and stitch them together in a program like photoshop which is actually pretty easy so let's just go file automate photo merge and for our purposes we want to choose a cylindrical layout so since we had three exposures we'll have to do three photo merges so let's just do one of these at a time open all those and let's check vignette removal geometric distortion correction and content aware fill transparent areas you can do this uh after the fact as well and we'll just hit ok wait a really long time and you'll have your photo merge just make sure you give it a crop i usually do two by one ratio and find the halfway point somewhere around there and you get a nice seamless stitch do this for the rest of your exposures so let's finally merge all of these photos together to make our hdri so i'm gonna drag the panoramas from the 360 camera into photoshop here and you can see how the camera doesn't move because we got our stitch settings correct so now we have all these images across the top we've loaded in everything into photoshop all we need to do is go to file automate merge to hdr pro so we're prompted with this dialog box we'll just add open files right that's everything that we just dragged into photoshop and we don't need to attempt to automatically align source images because we already checked that again with our stitch settings so let's just hit ok boom so now we're looking at one image and it's made up from all of these images that we took all right and you can see here the exposure values we got plus five almost then down to minus ten so there's two settings we want to check here to make sure that this gets exported properly first we wanna make sure we complete our toning in adobe camera raw if you don't check this the image might come in dark in our 3d program and the most important thing your mode has to be set to 32 bits or else this will not work this will not be an hdr image we can't even save it as an hdr image it'd be like frodo marching all the way to mordor in all three movies and at the end he's just like you know what you know i'm just gonna chill i actually forgot the ring i'm gonna have to go back for it so let's just make sure guys this is at 32 and don't worry about removing any ghost because we properly exercise this footage in the insta 360 studio application all right so let's just hit tone and acr and you can see here if we adjust the exposure it's actually retaining the highlights unlike a jpeg where the lights will just kind of gray out we're still getting these really bright uh white values here in the lights and that's exactly what we want that's the whole point of creating an hdri image so that it can light our scene as accurately as possible but we don't need to adjust anything here all right we're just going to hit ok and make sure you just undo the adobe camera raw bit again it's just the step we need to take so that our hdr image doesn't come into our 3d program looking all dark so from this point you can totally just clone stamp out your monopod and slap a slap an exposure adjustment on it you know how you set the exposure here is how it's going to look when we drop it into our 3d program and finally we'll go file save as and make sure we save it as a radiance file a dot hdr all right high dynamic range boom throw your new creation in a 3d scene and render something sweet so get out there guys and make some custom light maps it's super fun but if you guys would rather just buy a pack or something and want to support more videos like this i actually put together a series of 14 post-apocalyptic battlefield inspired hdris i got them up on gumroad for y'all and it's about the price of like a large los angeles coffee but be sure to subscribe because you do not want to miss my custom surface imperfection tutorial we're going to be making our own from scratch and in the meantime i'll see you guys on saturday morning for my cinema 4d live stream we make cool stuff like this in this and sometimes like this and then i issue a weekly challenge to you guys where we talk about it and work on it in the discord server the link's down below as well but good luck on your cg voyage i'll see you guys next time peace [Music] bye

Channel: pwnisher

Views: 193,191

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Id: MASbLjQ9S_Y

Length: 8min 45sec (525 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 21 2020