Don't know much about HDRi but just incase they may be useful to someone on the forum, here is a link to free skies, about 7 total, ranging from 5 to 10 mb in zips.

Michael

at the bottom of the page

http://www.iseetheskyinyoureyes.com/

Very nice skies. I'm going to use a few of them. These are primarily to light a cg scene rather than put cg into a real scene. If you want to use them in animation master, all you have to do is convert them to exr files by using the hdr2exr converter that Yves told us about, and then simply apply it as a projection map to a scene with the two light rigs. Though it would be nice if we could use hdr files in animation master.

Thanks for the link Mike.

Does anyone have any examples using these skies in A:M to show & tell?

I have an example I was just working on. The Whitier image shows the image without the environment map, and the blue one shows the image with the environment. The thing I don't like doing is adding a sun, and these images have a sun in them. I'd like to figure out a way to base lighting solely on the environment map, and not have to rely on adding extra lights. The method does come with it's downsides. Rendering this way takes 4-6 times longer than just using a normal skylight rig.

Textures from Doom 3

I did a real render with the exr image and it took 15 minutes and 46 seconds per frame at 160X120 resolution with 4x4 multiplass. The shot has reflections from the geometry and added to the render time. I was also using 172 lights in this render instead of the usual 50 to clean up the renders (with fewer lights, it appears as though all geometry has roughness). The render that is closer to the boxes too 22 minutes and 48 seconds (also turned on soft reflectiosn for this render). I noticed that when the final pass of the render was done that the sky darkened about 25%.




After analysis of the hdr file that I used for the scene, I've come to realize that it's not an accurate caputre of the sky. The sun should remain bright up until the sky disapears, and the file I used the sun faded with the rest of the scene. Another thing I observed that I found was that in the first sky image, the sun fades to a heart.

matt,


I belive in version 13 it supports hdr images.... or at least thats what i picked up from the flyer i got in the mail yesterday.... boy did that make me feel important : D


Ben

Now I really want to upgrade to v13 (also because of the new pixel offset for infinite resolution displacement maps). If I get the $99 upgrade, do I get a disk or do I download an update?

Matt, you'd get a disc in the mail.