How to create an HDRI map

[Music] one of the most important things in realistic CG scenes is light this is not a DP course unfortunately or luckily we won't talk about light basics I would like to talk about HDMI maps and how to create them for those of you who might not know HDRI maps are high dynamic range spherical maps that can recreate realistic lighting in your CGC it's quick and effective way to light your scene in my workflow I usually drop our HDRI map first and then if I need to I add additional lights to enhance their atmosphere before we go further let's discuss the importance of the quality of HDMI map or that let's compare cheapish and high quality HDMI map 8-bit jpg or high-end HDRI map from a dedicated website for this particular comparison I converted high quality map into low dynamic range a bit JPEG to describe what I mean it's enough to decrease the exposure of both images 8-bit image gets gray in highlight areas that's because it doesn't have enough info in highlights and shadows it's low dynamic range high-quality HDR IMAP on the other hand looks like someone is actually controlling the intensity of light and it's getting darker properly that's what I want to teach you how to create high quality ones and how to capture all that dynamic range using HDR eye maps in your 3d scenes can seriously increase the quality of your work because you will use realistic environment to generate reflections and lights and it always enhances their realism for instance if I'm working on VFX or CG combined with live shots I will definitely make sure I'll capture several HDRI maps from location because I want to integrate 3d elements as good as I can before we start making HDRI map let's discuss what you will need obviously you will need a camera wide lens wider is better in this particular case I'm using 16 millimeters on a 7 R 2 which is full-frame so no crop fake factor also Tanner had is preferable but still optional you can get away without it the reason you want to consider pan ahead is let me show you pan ahead allows camera and lens to remain in same spot so you're basically just rotating point of view if that makes sense that way you don't have a parallax effect and the stitching software won't struggle while post producing your photos to capture something let's go outside [Music] the best environment for HDRI maps is outside I chose that room pretty unusual I like it here all you have to do to get 360 spherical map is shoot every let's say 30 degree on one axis and then rotate your camera another direction 360 that way you will get 360 view of the area important notes before you should remember our chip nation to high-end HDRI map comparison to make a high-end one one picture per angle is not enough you need to capture each angle with different exposures in order to get all that dynamic range into your HDRI it's called bracketing it's the way of shooting when your camera is setting your exposure for you so imagine I'll just show I usually set however stop and five images it means that my camera will capture five photos starting from underexposed version and ending with overexposed version and that way in post we will be able to grab all that dynamic range into one image which is really cool and useful for our CG scenes if you have a different camera from Sony just Google how it's done in your camera before we proceed make sure everything is set to manual in your camera focus shutter speed all that stuff all set now that was quick what map so now we just take all the photos together to get that HD drawing Plus set up some settings to get all those exposures and to start stitching let's jump back to my hideout okey-dokey let's drop off all the photos that we took when all the photos are uploaded you might want to do a basic correction in temperature colors all that usual stuff I recommend to get rid of chromatic aberrations because it confuses the software as for lens distortion I would leave it untouched because the software we will use applies the lens profile itself so it kind of corrects everything itself after we finished export all your photos as TIFF files TIFF is one of the most high quality formats it will contain all necessary data all that dynamic range plus exif data which will tell the software what lens and camera we used TIFF is also much more friendlier to other software than cameras native raw let's talk about software I believe there are a few out there but I'm using the most popular what the thing is called PT GUI have no any idea how to pronounce that petit petit petit GUI whatever the only downside of using this software is that it's obviously paid there are personal licenses available and pro licenses available the difference between personal and pro is quite significant I would say both in price and in performance I will use pro version cuz we were shooting bracketing and I need to get all that dynamic range in that HDR ama only pro version can do that so you have to consider this little fact let's open that particular thing and load all photos in in a first window when all the photos are loaded you already see kind of groups of photos so exposure goes from underexposed too overexposed once everything is properly loaded on your right you have that advanced button you can click it and reveal more settings there you can see exposure HDR tab where you can specify what you were shooting and how and what you want to get in lamp settings tab you already see that software knows what camera was used and what lens was used that's thanks to exist data that was saved in our TIFF sequence all right everything is fine let's click that align images button the software also knows that you were shooting in bracketing mode so it knows that we shot 37 photos with five exposures each we want to enable HDR mode and link all bracketed exposures and in the bottom of this window we want to select true HDR because exposure fusion is when the software will choose the best exposure from each image and this is not what we want we want dynamic range in our HDR IMAP click OK the process of analyzing images might take a while all done and you see the software is kind of building and aligning all photos in spherical projection looks alright but I already see several mistakes I must confess guys it was freaking dumb down to go on that roof and shoot there just because too many bricks are there for this tutorial I should have chosen a simpler environment this is GRI map might look good but there are too much manual work involved so I won't bother too much I just want to show you the process of creation of a DIY map anyways the imperfections in our HDR a map are minimal and let's export the high-res version in export settings you can specify the dimension of your age our imap low dynamic range file format is usually used for preview purposes so that's your JPEG and HDR file format as your final HDR file blah blah blah all looks good click create panorama the process takes a while as usual yeah see those blurred areas that's where software was confused and configure out the points much better job on this wall okay let's jump into cinema 4d and I will show you the benefit of using HDR I'm app click object HDRI environment and in environment tag load your newly created HDR I map click render tome this was my point of view on that roof cool part is that I can look around as if I would in real life I love it so much and yeah I have exactly the same light as I had in real life I can now start putting objects in the this environment see the shadows are cast at like if it would be in that particular environment that we were in if I'll start put reflective materials on top of our geometry you see that geometry reflects real environment usually in most of the cases you use depth of field and stuff like that so your background HDR AMA HDRI map got blurred and you won't notice those imperfections that we had but I just wanted to show you the process of creation that map and explain the importance of creating your own Maps from your locations I'm pretty happy with the result I encourage you to go and test different settings that different shooting methods for instance you can shoot one exposure difference 9 photos go crazy and get extreme dynamic you are HDR i'ma also open spaces work better than the tied environment that we were in obviously golden hours works good night scenes works seeker yeah that was the goal of this little tutorial I wanted to encourage you to start using HDI maps in your work and like repeated ten times now I think I mentioned everything I wanted so if you have any questions feel free to ask in comments I aim to answer when I can as usual if you found the video helpful thumbs up if CG and VFX is something you're into subscribe to my channel cuz why not thanks for watching peace cake say hi [Music]

Channel: Andrey Lebrov

Views: 237,882

Keywords: lebrov, cg, vfx, tutorial, how to, learning, filmmaking, step up, master, hdri, map, hdri map, spheriical map, 360 photo, dynamic range, bracketing, bracketing sony, HDR, panorama, pano head

Id: etOkgjrTfa8

Length: 13min 1sec (781 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 26 2018