cliffhanger visuals

HDRI tutorial
2005 copyright cliffhanger visuals
http://www.cliffhanger.nl
3D visualisatie 3D illustratie 3D animatie
Introduction

In this tutorial, I won’t go into the technical and physical backgrounds of High Dynamic Range Image.
Instead, I’ll present you with a basic instruction about the photography of the images needed to
produce HDRI’s, the way to go about in Photoshop (which in CS2 has a feature incorporated that
will produce a so-called Radiance document with little effort) and how to use the HDRI in 3D (I use
Cinema4D but other software will differ only slightly)

Just a little background though: Did you notice that
on a sunny day, your camera tells you that you need
1/30 seconds of exposure with a 2.8 lens opening
indoors and when you step outside it just needs
1/1000 seconds at f11.
In fact the difference between complete darkness and
complete “lightness” is pretty endless. A camera or
your eyes can only see a portion of it without adjusting,
and once they have, they can’t see as well anymore
what they saw before the adjustment. When you step
back inside the house it takes a second to get used to
the darkness. And when you take a picture with your
camera still at 1/1000 at f11, the print is black.
In an HDRI, multiple situations are all combined in
one image: indoor and outdoor at the same time so
to say. You need a slider to make it visible to the eye,
but when you do, it is all there: the sphere of the sun
and the inside of a drawer.
In 3D-software maths, this wide boundary or high
dynamic range can be inverted to do something
special: it can act as an actual light source.

Ansel Adams
HDRI photography: what do you need?

If you have all of the items above, you’re a rich man: Adobe Photoshop CS2 to convert different
camera exposures into a Radiance image, a tripod and a camera that can shoot RAW-images. In this
tutorial we’ll use them all. But:

If you can’t shoot RAW, that’s OK. If you don’t

have Photoshop CS2, visit http://graphicslab.
ict.usc.edu/HDRShop/ to get a free copy of
HDRshop v1, which does a good job. It’s only avail-
able to the Wintel platform though. They have a lot
of fantastic information about the technical side of
HDRI, too.
And if you don’t have a tripod, you can ask your sister
too stand really still for a while. No, I tripod is handy.

The item on the right isn’t mandatory either. If you

don’t have a professional probe, you can use a christ-
mas ball. But again here, you can work without a per-
fectly reflecting sphere.
(You would use it to get 180 degrees of surrounding
environment to encapsulate your 3D scene. In the
following example I used simple rectangular images
and for me that works just fine. If your scene contains
smooth, dome-shaped objects, then you start need-
ing a probe of some sort as the seams of a rectangu-
lar image would be visible.)
HDRI photography
Open a RAW-image into Photoshop and Photoshop
will open its RAW-image dialogue.
This photo of my studio door is pretty much balanced.
You can more or less see what is inside and you sort
of see what is outside. There is no pixel information
in the highlights though. I check that by activating the
Highlight-tickbox:
When I do that, Photoshop gives me this feedback:
Pixels that are pure white are displayed as red. As
you can see there’s no information in the sky be-
hind the door, nor is there between the blinds. If I
want to see that information, I need to bring the
exposure down. But when I do that, dark parts in the
foto start to become pure black. I can check that by
activating the Shadows-tickbox:
(It is difficult to see -overexposure happens much
easier than underexposure- but it’s the blue areas.)
 Each of the photographs cover another part of the
light situation and the range per photo is quite small.
Going from the deepest shadows up to the brightest
highlights, in this weather, I need to make about 6 to
7 photographs that I import into Photoshop CS2:

You can see, the top image is overexposed but you

can see details in the door and the foreground. The
photo below is underexposed but there is information
in the sky. Well, on the particular day I made these
shots we had an almost pure grey sky, so still not
In the dialogue that appears you can either choose
much to see but the rain drops on the glass become
multiple images or a folder containing a set of images
visible:
or images that are already open in Photoshop.

If you didn’t take the photos from a tripod and they

have slightly different angles you can use this fea-
ture. Beware though, it can’t make up for big differ-
ences and it’s time consuming.
After I browse to my folder with different exposures of
my studio door, Photoshop starts to batch process all
of them and finally comes up with this:
All images that have a green mark:
next to them will be incorporated in the final HDRI
when I click OK. By default, they all have one. When
I uncheck one, the preview is updated.
With the Set White Point slider I can view through
the whole exposure gamma. I want 32 Bit/Chan-
nel because I need as much as information as I
can into my 3D setup. When I click OK, Photoshop
merges all the images into an HDRI that I Save As
Radiance. Note that there’s nothing really special to
see about the HDRI at a glance. That is be-
cause your monitor simply can’t show all the
information it contains. But when you go to
Image> Adjustments> Exposure and slide through
Exposure, it is like day breaks and night falls..!
(Like I said before, I made my HDRI from RAW-im-
ages but you could also build it from TIFF’s.)
On the next page, I am going to light my astronaut
character with the exact lighting conditions from my
studio door.
HDRI in 3D software

Now that we have a Radiance image, we need to set up a simple setup in 3D and make it act as a light
source. As I mentioned before, I will use Cinema4D (version 9) to do that. My object is an astronaut.
It goed without saying that you can use anything to light with the HDRI output.

Make a new material and load the HDRI in the Lumi- In the Attributes of the tag, turn off everything but
nance channel. Set Mix Mode to Multiply. My HDRI is Seen by Rays and Seen bij GI:
very bright and if I don’t bring down its Mix Strenght it
will wash out the scene.

Throw a Camera in with a Target and a Plane or a

Floor object to be able to see the actual forming of
shadows. And of course put in your model of choise.
The whole thing looks as follows:

Put a Sphere in the scene and set its radius to a large

value so it will encapsulate everything else. Apply the
HDRI to it plus a Compositing Tag.
HDRI in 3D software
Next, in Render Settings, activate Radiosity and in
Options deactivate Auto Light:
I found the above settings after some trial and er-
ror. Parameters for the amount of light you should
adjust are Mix Strenght in the Luminance channel of
the HDRI or the Radiosity Strenght. It’s best to adjust
just one or you’ll get confused.
Fighting artefacts in your render is done with
Stochastic Samples and Min and Max Resolution.
At this stage of the process you need some patience.
HDRI-lighting and can give some unexpected results
at first and rendering can be slow.
In the reflection of the helmet of my astronaut you
can clearly see the door and window of the studio.
Notice that the brightest highlight, the one from the
door, casts a complemetary shadow.
This tutorial cannot cover everything there is
to know about HDRI-imaging. There is more to
find about the subject on the internet every day.
Just Google HDRI and you’re presented with a
plethora of results. Some of them go into the
physics, some of them into rendering, there
are manufacturers who sell ready-made HDRI-
images and there are many questions answered
on the subject in forums. I hope I revealed the
basics of making your own and use them your-
self. Happy Rendering!