Since this thread has gotten a bit long, and has a tutorial in an obscure location, I've decided to add this addition.

You can find a turial on how to obtain semi-perfect integration of models into a scene using the LDR (Low dynamic range) lighting tutorial on this thread on page six, or you can click here and scroll down to the fourth post. On page five you will find a rendering of Nigel which illustrates one final result of the LDRI tutorial on pages five. To see the rendering, click here and scroll down to the seventh post.

Yves has helped tremindiously in achieving these results, and is currently working on a way to acheive HDR Images in V13.5. So thank him more than me in anything you see here. And definitely thank Martin more than me as well for creating this fine animation program.


------Original Post------------

I'm trying to simulate the effect of High Dynamic Range Lighting in A:M which are illustrated on this thread:

HDR Lighting

The most helpful part of the thread is the first post DaikenTana. There he explains how he was able to set up HDR in 3d Studio Max.

Basically all high dynamic range lighting is trying to do is simulate radiosity with exposure. Here are some examples of high dynamic range lighting.

All of these photos are from the tread above from Facepunch-Studios's forum.








All of these photos are from the tread above from Facepunch-Studios's forum.

Currently, I'm using a colored spherical projection map on half of a sphere to simulate an enironment to the camera, while the other half has a color and trasnparancy projection map. Yves's skylight right is rotated so that it is covering the half of the sphere with the transparancy map. Inside the sphere is a model, and I want to get that model to look like it's in the environment, however, I've had no such luck.

Attached is a screenshot of what I'm trying to say. My next try will be using kleig lights instead of bulb lights for the light dome.

that is going to be some feat
how many lights do you have in that setup?

Sounds like a great idea. Could you post the results of some of your attempts to date. I would be really interested in seeing how this looks so far as the idea is clearly a good one. Could you give an idea of render times as well.

Erm, I hope you got permission to post all those images without linking to the site.

Is this method useful for animation?

[url=http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=18912]
The thread listed below all of the pictures is where they came from. The thread is very long (171 pages) and I just posted the final results. There's a lot more renders in the thread than what I've posted, but my goal is to get this in A:M.


I'm using Yves's skylight dome with 25 in the 1 shot, but I've used up to 86. I think I'm going to have to use kelig lights instead of bulb lights because with bulb lights, you can light an entire sphere, rather than just a point of light on a sphere.


Yes it would be useful for ainmations. However, I have not figured out a way to get this to work correctly, so render times have not come out yet.


I don't have any good results left. The only render I did took around 10 minutes for VGA with 25 lights.


Feel free to test this out for yourselves. Go to the Wheel render needs some help and visit the links that Yves has posted for panoramic pictures like I use in my tests.

I think that John Artbox's skylight program will allow you to color your light based on the colors from an image as the skylight zips around the scene. That would be one way to get this effect--since A:M can't light directly from the image (yet).
Yves tutorials also show how to use his skylights to color the light by having the skylight outside of a decalled skydome:


tutorial here

Jeff Lee also has a rotating light rig that can use an image to control the light color and intensity. Don't know if it accepts EXR images yet.

page 53 page 54

on that thread on pages 53 and 54 it shows his first attempts which still look pretty cool
so i guess first step is to get it to look like these then go on from there

I'm abel to get renders that look like the ones on Yves's tutorials. I had also gotten similar results with 50% transparancy, though I felt it was better to create a grayscale trasnparancy map from the color map. The brighter the pixle is, the more light gets through.

The main problem I'm having is getting objects to look like they are in a small area like a room. I'm going to try a skydown that is completly spherical as well as a skydome that is made with keligs.


Where can I find that? I was going to try something like that.


The renders there are pretty easy because he's not trying to match it up like it's in the acutal environment.

I need to find some sort of shiny but bumpy model that I can test with. Cause Thom isn't cutt'in it.

Okay, I've got some renders. Don't be too excited, their only progressive renders, and only of a sphere.

MatteWhite in Theatre Balcony:

MatteWhite 50% Reflective in Theatre Balcony:

MatteWhite 100% Reflective in Theatre Balcony:


I was doing some testing trying to get the background to match the image correctly. Here's what I did to get these results:

1. I made a sphere and set it's transparancy to 50%. The model was then set to not recive shadows. Without this step, the background will be darker (Still working on getting it to match perfectly; still a little too bright).
2. I loaded the 360 Degree Theatre Balcony image into the project.
3. I made a new material. The attribute was changed to a projection map. The image of the projection map was set to the Theatre Balcony.
4. I added the material to the sphere.
5. I loaded Yves's skylight dome with 25 lights and it's corrisponding action and light script.
6. I made a new choreography and deleted all of the added lights and the ground. Make sure that the background color of the camera is black.
7. I added the sphere and two skydomes to the choreography.
8. I rotated the second skydome so the two formed a sphere (The skydome needs to be much larger than the sphere.
9. I made three more spheres (the models). All of them were white, and one was 50% transparent, and one 100% transparent.
10. I added the three models to the choreogrpahy and diactivated all but 1.
11. I rendered each model to get the results you see above.

I said in step 1 that you have to turn recive shadows off. Here's what it looks like with Recive Shadows ON

if this is any help you can try it with my acorn i use for all my test
its got the bumpy top and the smoth bottom comes in handy for me at least

Thanks for the acorn. Something is up with my normal maps when I use them as projection maps, so I wasn't able to use it.

I made a quick GIF animation to show the room changing and it's effect on the models (Make sure to click on the image below). These are still progressive renders. I don't want to do a long animation until I'm ready to go to bed. Let me know of any pointers you guys might have.

I'm going to make a cleaner version of the image below and one that isn't so jurkey around fram 4 and 5.

I'm impressed. Good work.

For your skydome brightness, try adjusting the diffuse falloff and/or ambiance.

Okay, I promissed better quality renders didn't I? Here it is (attached. It's big, so let it load).

Render times for these three spheres is about 16 minutes per frame on 4X4 Multipass at 512X512 resolution (Had to shrink the GIF down to 450X450 to fit on the forum).

If you look close enough on the reflective spheres, you can see pinching. That's not a mess-up, that's the sphereical projection map merging a 360 degree wide shot as a 360 wide by 360 High.

I really like the Theatre Balcony panoramic. It gives off the best change in color. Now for those renders, there is still a bit of grain on the models. I'm going to either have to increase the rays casts or use more lights. Which one do you guys think is going to work the best?


Finally someone recognizes my greatness. lol, just kiding. Thanks Yves. I'm going to try to do the real uses of HDR by taking pictures of my living room and the same shot with a reflective sphere. Don't know how well that will go, but hey, I need to experiment.


I'm almost certain that it's the light intensity. I'll try both later today when I get home from school.

I am also impressed. Great job with this so far.

I've attached the project that I'm almost done tinkering with so you guys can play around with settings so you can get your own high dynamic effects (Currently Missing all files. I'll get them up as soon as possible).

All you will need to get is a panoramic picture for the material. Get some Here!

The setup works with any environment.

These are all just quick renders, so don't think that they will create bad results.



Really Bright. Probably still need to lower the brightness a bit. If you find that your models are too birght, lower the intensity of the light in 1% intervals until you get the results you want. An intensity of 12% seems to be best for brighter shots, and an intensity of 14% seems good for darker interior shots.


I am currently working on a way to match CG with Pictures using this method.

This is my first try to blend the two together (CG and Reality). I think it's a pretty good start.

I added the shadows with Photoshop. I don't know how I'm going to simulate shadows.

Just noticed something with the shot. She's really tall! Maybe Micheal Jordan would looks that big.

Hey Matt:

Really great stuff you are doing/working on. I applaud you for your research and posting on this forum so we can all benefit from your results. Just wanted to express my appreciation

project file you sent is missing everything so i couldnt check out the setup

I wasn't aware that it was missing everything. Until I can get the files in (Dan's on the upstairs computer), Just use the tutorial on how to set it up on the first page.

Eric: Thanks for the appraisal, but most of this stuff was derived from Yves. Without Yves's skylight, I would have had to have placed all of the lights around the sphere by hand. I just found another purpose for it's use.

I’m still not done with it yet. I need to find a way to get better spectral. If I were to turn on specularality, you would see 25 white circles of light on the model instead of smooth specularality. In order to get the correct effect, I would have to use a lot more lights, which would definitely slow down render times.

Here is the current setup. Let me know if you get any missing files.

Remember that this is still in it's beggining stages. I have yet to find a way to get exposure settings which will get me even better results than what I have now.

Here is some background knowledge.

Specularity is a very old Computer Graphics trick to help simulate shiny surfaces in ray-tracers and scan converter types of renderers. It works in those situations because the only illumination that those renderers are capable of calculating comes exclusively from the explicit lights that are placed in the scene. What specularity does is it assumes the light in a point light (it is infinitely small) and simulates the distribution of the reflection of this light on the model.

The distribution of the reflection of light on a model is a function of the surface properties of the model. This function is named "BRDF" for Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function.

One way to very roughly visually represent a BRDF is to visualize a klieg light with 100% softness and varying cone angle. At least, that is how the Phong specularity is modeled. When a surface receives light from a direction, it re-emits light in the mirror direction by scattering back the energy it received inside a cone. The angle of the cone depends on the surface roughness. True BRDF are much more complex than the Phong empirical model though.

So the surface property that affect the most the appearance of the BRDF is the surface roughness. The smoother the surface then the tighter the BRDF, which produces very bright but very small specularity. As the surface gets rougher, the BRDF distribution angle widens which produces less bright and wider specular size.

Specularity would not be appropriate for what you are attempting here because it only mimicks the BRDF for the lights in the scene while what you are attempting is to simulate light coming from all over the scene. In other words, you are trying to simulate an infinite number of light emiting points in the scene. What you want to do is use the environment as if it was an infinite number of lights in the scene and reflect those infinite number of lights back from the object surface.

Reflectivity does exactly that. It reflects the light coming from the enviropnment which produces the environment reflection from the object surface.

Straight reflectivity, though, simulates ultra-tight specularity. That is reflections are not distributed at all. That is why you get a perfect reflected image. But if you turn soft-reflections ON, then you get distributed reflections. And when soft-reflection is ON, the width of the simulated BRDF angle is adjusted with the Specular Size property to match light specular sizes.

There are more issues to take care of but you can start with that for now.

I turned on reflective soften but when I compared the two, they were exactly the same. Should I add a bit of roughness to the models to create this effect?

If you want to see a really good scene that demonstrates HDR go HERE and download the video below the abstract.

If you would like to see how the model was created, go HERE and download the video below the abstract.

No. Don't add roughness to the model. Unless you set the specular size to zero or to a very small value, they shouldn't look the same. Otherwise, you probably didn't turn soft reflection ON correctly. Go to menu-"Tools" -> "Options" -> "Rendering", disclose the "Reflections" triangle and turn "Soft" to ON.

I tried that and it didn't do anything. Perhaps another bug on this version? I'll test it with different specular values.

----Edit----
Ohhh, specular. Okay, I found a good setting. Attached is a picture of my results, blown up of course (I was doing lots of renders and I still am). It's getting to look a lot more like HDR every time I open this project. By the way, the models arn't interacting with each other. That's why you can't see reflections of other objects or shadows created on other spheres.

The settings I changed was setting Reflective Soften On and setting its quality to 100%.
I set the spectral size of the two reflective spheres (Left and Middle spher) to 50% and their intensity to 1000%. The middle sphere is black and I don't know how to get it to reflect brighter. I'll render an animation to show the effect when moving.

The render just finished and I put it in a GIF file. Tell me what you guys think. Remember to let it load all of the way.

I'm wanted to test out to see if the specular was working correctly. I rendered the attached frame with thick stripes to make sure specular wasn't coming through dark areas. The test showed that it works, and just to make sure, I rendered an interly black environment, and everything was black.

If you want to use this method, make sure to have specular maps on your character that are the same as your reflective maps.

Attached also is a test with 50% Grey to see what the specular is doing. The specular should be a circle, instead, it's a bloby circle. This is because I'm only using 50 lights. If I were to use more, the blobiness would start to fade out, and your render times would go up.

The two other shots are in the bush house. The first of the two is using my setup for HDR. The second is with the added effect of bloom. I'm trying to get the effect where light is over exposing brighter parts of a picture, but haven't been able to get it to work. The last picture illustrates what I'm trying to do. That picture is taken from a real time render of a demo from ATI. Wish A:M could render that fast.

Hey Matt, that is crazy. It's looking better everytime I look here. I wish I had time to help you test.

I hope my words of encouragement are helping a little though. You are truly doing a great job here.

lol, Hey thanks Zaryin. I'm a student, so I have a bit more time to devote to this than most people. I also have my brother, and we nic pick everything.

/////For the bloomy effect caused by the galre, I'm going to see if putting a transparent patch over the camera will help any./////
This won't work. I'd need to put on custics (Which doesn't look good at all), and having a patch that close to the camera is making renders really slow.

I'll have to figure out some other way.

I made this animation to show the effects of HDR. By using this method, you can obtain overly bright images. The example shows that even though the entire scene is getting darker, the brightest part is still white.

The animation replicates what your eye does when you walk into a really dark room after being outside in the sun.

Here's the update. Let me know if you guys have any problems with the download.

The only thing not included is the .zip file is a panoramic. A good 360 Degree High by 360 Degrees Wide panoramic can be found HERE.

If you want cleaner looking spcular, use a higher number of lights for the light rig. You can find more light rigs HERE.

I've had enough testing for one day. I'm going to go play a video game (possibly one with HDR ).

Okay, one more post for the night. Yeah yeah, I know, I post a lot. Anyway. I wanted to make a comparison between lights. The results are quite promising.

The top row had 50 lights, and the bottom has 272. The First column has no specular, the second does. Their still quick progressive renders, but they get the point across well enough.

Matt, with what you've learned so far, can you integrate a model into a real setting and apply your setup? I would like to see a "real life" application.

Really looking forward to this

Well, first your going to need a digital camera, and a very reflective sphere (Don't have to go elaborate on this one. Could be a christmas decoration). Take a picture of what you want to integreate CG into, then setup the reflective sphere where you want the CG model to be placed (Makesure you only see the reflective part of the sphere. Use a tripod so you can get the same reults twice (Use the highest quality your camera can handel).

Just use a hemispherical dome positioned directly behind the camera with the normal sphere of lights all around. In the hemispherical dome's model create a decale. Open up the photo with the reflective sphere and decale it to the model so the model looks like the reflective sphere from the shot.

Create a rotoscope for the camera of the picture you took without the reflective sphere. Make sure the model is in the center of the dome or close to it when you render. Makesure the model is in the position you want when you render.

I'll then render the model with a completly magenta background and have white objects posing as the floor or chair (real rudimentional) to get a good idea about shadows.


That's just how I'm going to tackel my first try. There's different ways you could do this, but that's what I've pulled from the 3d studio max guys.

Nice rendering. Keep it going!

I'm currently looking for a program that can turn a picture of a cubic (reflective sphere) into a panoramic. It's nessisary to have a panoramic because reflections need more than just a dome to reflect. The image below illustrates my point.

This current mothod will work fine for models without any reflections, but I want to find a way to make it universal accross the board.

Yves: for this method of HDRI imagry we have a picture of a reflective sphere. We're trying to get the model to reflect in the same way as the sphere in a fashion much like normal mapping, where only light from a sertain angle is refleced. Matt tried to duplicate this with a single hemisphere in front of the model, but the test did not give back good result.

Basically, what i'm trying to say is, how do we get the reflections on the model to mimic that of the spheres reflections? Is there any way that you know of in how to do this? I hope this diagram can explain.

I thought that's what BitMapStyle was designed to do.

Well, i tried that plugin in, and it seems to work, but its not terribly accurate, and it flips the image. Maybe it's just how we have our image set up... Is there an example on how the texture is supposed to look? Here's the results we got from the bitmap plugin.

Until I can figure out my real environment delema, I've taken up mixing CG with CG. I'm using the same method I will use for the real environment (so I get some practice at it). In the shot is Thom in a garage from Half-Life 2's Garry's Mod. Attached is the environment taken from the game, and stiched together using autostich, which is quite a nifty programe. Also attached is the background photo and the rendering. Shadows are still done in Photoshop, but the results are looking good. Now all I need to do is find a character with more attitude, give him some stance and then I'll be getting somewhere.

Nigel In the garage looks a lot better. I'm using a CG green screen behind Nigel and deleting the screen in photoshop. I then scale Nigel and add shadows. I'm thinking of a way to get shadows in A:M then putting them in photoshop as nother layer so I don't have to do them by hand (which usually isn't that great). I'm going to move the renderings outside so you can see a bit more brightness. Hopefully it doesn't get too bright though.

I just rendered Nigel in another area. It's outside, so he's a bit brighter. I'm still messing around with the values to use for lighting cause it seems a bit off. There is one way to get ride of pesky parts of the render. Just crop them out (for now). I'll find a way to get shadows looking better.

I've made a few more panoramics. I enjoy the panoramic creating process. These are all 360 degrees high as well as wide, so you guys can use them on a sphere. Their high quality too; 2177X1000 pixels. If you guys want to use those just let me know and I can get you some photos to integrate your models.

I've even made one of my own living room, though it's not complete yet. It's a lot easier and a lot faster to get a panoramic picture from a game. It took about 5 minutes to get all the pictures needed for my living room whereas it only took about 30 seconds from the game.

Dan and I have found a way to get better shadows. Make a white patch to act as a ground for your model and render that in another image. Take the image and make it a layermask of a completely black layer below the green screened render of your model. Crop out the green screen and you've got yourself a pretty good render. Here's another Nigel illustrating what I just said.

Perhaps you should take this new thread over to the "CG & Live Action" topic just below this "Radiosity" topic. Also, A:M will separate out the shadows into a separate buffer for you to use in A:M's built-in compositor (no need for Photoshop), and since you guys are so lighting conscious, you should probably be using the OpenEXR-based light buffers so that you can adjust the levels in realtime after rendering only once, (see the "Compositing" topic just above this "Radiosity" topic).

The is absolutly incredible. I've been watching this thread since the beginning and I still don't iunderstand most of what you guys are doing, haha.

Matt, please forgive my ignorance, but how do you turn a spherical image into a normal looking shot? Also, since a spherical image projected onto a sphere will look somewhat like a sphere with a pic on it (for lack of better tech terms), are these backgrounds used mainly for reflective lighting sources?

Man, so much to learn

ive been playing with this for about a week now and just trying diffrent ways of doing it.
you threw me off my legos arggh lol. but this is fun as well, anything new is fun.
thx for giving me something to do when im bored matt

I've been waiting for you to show up... I mean, I think I need to make a clearer tutorial. Though I should learn the built in functions of A:M so that users don't have to go out and buy Photoshop (though if you don't have photoshop, I really suggest you go out and get it). I wasn't even aware that A:M had EXR not even the shadow buffers. I will have to check that out. I'll put it in "CG & Live Action" when it's finalized.


I don't use the environment sphere as the background. I use a green screen behind the model (Nigel) and delete the green screen in photoshop. I then bring in a picture looking at the area that I made a panoramic of. The picture attached shows what I mean. The base of the line indicates where I was standing when I took my panoramic photos. The Ball indicates the altitude of the cubemap.


This all I've been doing for the past few days too. Though I need to study a bit for finals. Art History tommarow Yeah!