Easy HDRI Creation with just a Phone!

in today's video i want to show you how to create custom hdris with your smartphone let's get started hdri stands for high dynamic range imaging hdris are usually 360 degree captures that are used to match real-world light situations by using them as a world texture probably the best place to get them from is hdrihaven.com they provide hundreds of high quality cc0 environment maps that you can download for free and use for any of your 3d projects in some situations you might need an hdri of a very specific location in those cases it is best to create them yourself in this video i am going to show you an easy way to do so all you need is your smartphone and the google street view app press the plus button in the bottom right corner to record a new image stand in place and rotate the camera onto those orange dots to create the panorama once you've finished it takes a moment to process the image and stitch everything together then simply press the share button and transfer the image to your computer to import the world texture into blender open up a shader editor and switch the type to world then add an environment texture note and open the image we just created as you can see this perfectly wraps around the scene and reflects the surroundings in this metallic sphere however this isn't an hdri yet since it is just a jpeg with a very low dynamic range you can clearly see the difference to a real hdri when i turn down the exposure the one on the left preserves much more detail the missing dynamic wrench is also the reason we get hardly any shadows under the spheres fortunately there are few things we can do to fix this issue for the first solution you need to download and install the free sun aligner add-on from github i'll leave a link to it in the description back in blender you should now find the hdri sound aligner menu in the end panel this tool calculates the position of the sun based on the brightest spot in the environment map we can use this to add a sun object with matching rotation this way we achieve realistic lighting and shadows for the second technique go to hdri hcrihaven.com and search for an hdri that is similar to yours in the shader editor duplicate the current setup and load in the downloaded texture add the texture coordinate and mapping node to match the sound rotation then mix them together and use a light path node for the factor now we have the lighting of the real hdri and the background of the one we created to fix the reflections duplicate the mix shader and this time use the is glossy array output for the factor here is the complete node setup the third option is to increase the dynamic range with a few nodes to start off plug the color output into the strength then add in a math note switch it to power and increase the exponent duplicate the node and switch the operation to add this value can be really low then duplicate the math node once more this time we want to change it to multiply and set it to a high value as you can see we now have shadows they are not as strong as they were with the previous techniques but you can see the difference it makes when i compare it to the original one there's also a way to increase the dynamic range of images with the help of ai jonathan crone made a great video about this topic i leave a link to his tutorial in the description i also want to recommend you this video by clinton jones he goes through the full process of creating custom hdris with dslrs and 360 degree cameras that's it for this video i hope it was interesting and you could learn something new feel free to leave a comment if you have any further questions or feedback on this video i'm nick from blender daily see you in the next one

Channel: Nik Kottmann

Views: 106,149

Keywords: Blender daily, blender, blender 3d, tutorial, blender.daily, tips, 3d, how to, hdri, custom hdri, street view, google street view, create hdri, capture hdri, 360 degree image, 360, panorama, import blender, increase dynamic range, self made, diy, smartphone, iphone, camera, high dynamic range, hdrihaven, light path node, mix hdri, hdr, easy, simple, fast, quick, beginner, free, how to create hdri, lighting, realistic lighting, realistic reflections, panoramic, 360 camera, sun aligner, add-on, 2.91

Id: Aco0UDxL6rA

Length: 7min 17sec (437 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 09 2021