I wabt ti set up and environment as a default for testing materials.

I have several large HDR images, all are 360 degrees. When I set up world nodes, I can get the image to light my scene, but can’t get an undistorted image. I use a mapping node to set scale, rotation and location, but as I move the image it’s always distorted at the ends, and usually way to big for the scene. What is the proper node setup? I want to have this as my default lighting scene so that I can add objects and test different materials, textures etc. and this environment would provide some light, reflections and so forth for testing.

Usually too big? Background is infinitely far away, the only control you have is changing the camera focal length. And the only real manipulation you can do is z rotation. I assume you’re using environment texture rather than image texture.

If you ignore clipped sunlight often found in HDRs (use a sun lamp instead), only trick that comes to mind is substituting the HDR with a backplate for camera rays only; either a regular photo (use window texture coords iirc) or a higher res but LDR equirectangular version. Also common is to either blur a low res version to use as camera only or to blur originals coords in order to fake a DOF effect.

I see so many tutorials that have what appears to be a 360 emission background image. This seems to start the scene with pretty good lighting, as well as some details in the image that let objects/shaders a more realistic look. This is what I want for my default Blender startup, so that I can easily test textures, materials etc. without having to add a lot of object to show reflections, refraction etc. The tutorials I have seen show object reflecting the scene, refracting if the materials are transparent, and so forth. But I can’t find out how this is done. I know that when the tutorial screen is view is moved around, the background image is always there, like a 30 sphere or something. I tried to make a sphere, and put the camera and lamps inside the sphere with my “test” objects, but it just doesn’t work.

Found it! Some information online was totally wrong! Had me setting up background image, but it needs to be environment texture!