CGTalk - HDRI help needed.

jamesdoc

10-31-2007, 01:40 PM

Hi all,
Im a noob in need of some help with solving a hdri problem. I hope this is the correct forum for this. if not please feel free to point me in the right direction or mods please move it.

I work for a small mograph/animation studio in belfast ni. We mainly use lightwave and zbrush for 3d. Recently we have been commisioned to do a job were a large number of hdri images (30 initially with the possibility of many more) may be beneficial to speed up our (limited) production time.

We have composited in the past without hdri and found it a bit of a headache but workable. However we are currently considering our options and thinking about splashing out on some new hardware to speed up our work.

We are considering buying the sphero cam hdr -

http://www.spheronvr.com/en/PI_spherocamhdr/PI_spherocamhdr.php

But at nearly £15,000 or $30,000 its not a decision we are taking lightly.

Is this the only/best camera of its type? We have scoured the net and havent found any other dedicated alternatives.

In terms of work load how hard is it to create hdr images using a dslr, photoshop and some patience (I know whats involved here - just havent put it into production reality)

Thanks in advance if anyone can be bothered to offer any advice.

Tussen

11-05-2007, 05:04 PM

I don't know if there is any newcomers on the scene since last year when I took a course in HDRI and image based lighting, but back then the SpehronVR was the best camera to have. It captures full spherical panoramas at very high resolution and covering something like 8 orders of magnitude if I rember corectly. However it can take 15-30 minutes to capture a full 360 degree image at the highest resoution so if time at the location is limited it might not be the best.

Using an ordinary camera and a mirrored sphere works fine for many occasions. For example IBL (if this is what you will use HDRI for) resolution is not very important so you will come a long way with this method. Capturing the data and composing a basic light probe image is not very difficult or time consuming. Making a high quality light probe involves more complicated steps such as removing the camera, removing "ghosts" etc. But this is a problem regardless of capturing device.

Check out www.debevec.org (http://www.debevec.org) for Paul Debevecs work and HDRShop software for composing HDR images.

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