HDRI Haven is here!


Hey folks!

So for the last few months I’ve been working on a dedicated website for all my HDRIs, and I’m proud to announce that it’s finally here :slight_smile:

Say hello to HDRI Haven! A new and affordable resource of extremely high resolution, high quality HDRIs that contain the full dynamic range possible in each shot, giving you accurate and beautiful lighting from the real world.

“These are the highest quality HDRs I’ve seen online.” - Andrew Price

"It’s an awesome resource, and the price is simply unbeatable." - Sebastian Koenig "HDRI Haven is a must-have in your arsenal. Superb quality. Period." - Reynante Martinez

All HDRIs and bundles are 50% off until next Monday, but if you’d like to try-before-you-by, there’s a free sample bundle available.

And if you’d just like some more free stuff, the 1k resolution versions of every single HDRI can be downloaded for free and used for any purpose, no sign-up required.

Check it out: hdrihaven.com

Those look fantastic, nice work.

BOKKE :smiley:

Thanks Greg, downloading a free sample to try out now.

Shaun

Nice, I bought the complete set. Totally worth the price.

Just added another 20 HDRIs this week, bringing the total to 85: https://hdrihaven.com/hdris.php?sort=popularity&npp=100

This one’s my favourite :slight_smile:


Thank you Greg! This is a great resource of HDRIs.

These HDRI’s are brilliant.

I rendered this scene using just the “Annency” HDRI from your free sample bundle, It produced great results even with a multiple importance map size of only 1024!

I used the HDRI as the only light source for this scene, and the quality of the lighting is marvelous! :slight_smile:

Thank you for your generosity in giving away this great little pack! :smiley:


3d model from threedscans.com - Le Transi de Rene de Chalon

Even if your HDRIs hadn’t been top notch, I’d be tempted to buy a couple just to thank you for all your wonderful contributions to Blender throughout the years. Thankfully, they are top notch, so I’ll get them just for the quality!

Thanks guys <3 really glad you like them!

@Jamie B - This bundle? I don’t have an Annecy HDRI (yet!), but what a great idea! I’m going to the Blender Conference this year, will shoot some HDRIs around there, that sort of counts right? :slight_smile:

Weird? my pack has all the ones in the link, and an 8kx4k annency HDRI too? I must of placed it into the file with your HDRI’s by mistake! :o

But yeah, if you are there you should definatley get some shots! :smiley:

I will re-render the scene with one of your images later today lol!

Here is what the image i used looks like (Coverted from HDR to 16-bit jpeg) Upon closer inspection it seems this HDR is sourced from Disney/Pixar Authored by dylan sisson! lol… Literally have no idea how this ended up with your images! haha :spin:


Turns out i didn’t even save the last test scene i made! so i made a new one using a different model from threedscans.com. This time it’s the sculpture “Cupid Disguised As a Shepard” by John Gibson :slight_smile:

This scene uses your 8k x 4k HDRI “Woods” as the sole lighting source, with a multiple importance resolution of 4096 and bounces set to 1024.

I think my comments from the previous posts still stand, these are magnificent HDR images, with fantastic range, Producing very realistic lighting! i’m sure that someone more skilled at creating realistic shaders could create amazing scenes using these! :slight_smile:

Heres the render, Wish i could of allowed more samples, but the render time was pretty long even with just 500 samples :confused:


(StatueMat) Wish it could have looked a little more realistic, but i’m still learning when it comes to procedurals :slight_smile:


Thanks again for giving away this awesome pack :smiley:

Love this! Very nice and the free pack is extremely generous. We will most certainly be picking up a few of these for our work.

Just one question: When we shoot our own HDRI’s, we wind up having to go a fair bit beyond the exposures that you stopped at. Specifically we were finding that the sun would max out at about 140,000 (in float) whereas in your “dry field” it is clipping at 52K. In Nuke, when I mult down your image I can see that the sun disk itself is clipping which means that some of the dynamic range is being lost (a fair bit of it in fact).

When we shoot an HDRI, we will keep dropping the exposure until no part of the image (usually the Sun in a daylight scene) goes beyond 1.0 in any channel. ND filters are a requirement for this of course, because no easily accessible camera can handle this on its own.

Doing tests to compare a grey ball lit with a full dynamic range image vs. one with a clipped image (even if it is very high) shows significant differences.

This isn’t to complain or to knock your product. It is excellent and, as I mentioned, one we will almost certainly be making use of. I just wanted to point these details out in case you were interested.

BTW, none of this are things we came up with on our own. Specifically we are mostly following this Siggraph presentation and paper:

http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2016-shading-course/unity/s2016_pbs_unity_hdri_notes.pdf

Edit: Look at page 39 for an example of the exposure brackets that take into consideration the intensity of the sun.

@Jamie B nice material! Wouldn’t have thought that’s procedural if you didn’t say.

I’m a bit confused here, ‘dry field’ is definitely not clipped:

(16-stop reduction in PS) - this would be solid white/gray if it were clipped, but it has a gradient and colour. A bit out of focus perhaps (hard focusing with strong ND filters on), but not clipped. Maybe there’s something funny happening with how nuke reads the file?

Ugh. I’m an idiot. “Shouldn’t stay up late and try to do math AND post on the internet” is the basic lesson to be learned here. My sincere apologies, I was looking at it wrong.

Another question for you though (hopefully I can trust my brain on this one):

When you look at your most stopped down source image (i.e. the one with the most ND filters), do any of the pixels in the sun actually still hit a value of 1.0? This is mostly just curiosity on my part.

Your library looks great and I look forward to purchasing some for our work.

Hah, no worries man. Good to discuss this stuff here anyways :slight_smile:

Nope, hitting a value of 1.0 would mean clipping. I use multiple ND filters (ND8+ND400) when shooting the sun, and like you mentioned, in the darkest shot the sun (or whatever light source) has to be exposed properly (usually in the right third of the histogram) otherwise the HDRI will be clipped. With those filters stacked, ISO 100, F22 and 1/4000 shutter speed, the sun is never clipped for me.

F22 also means quite a bit of softness from diffraction, which is why the image above looks kinda blurry (though that might be out of focus a bit too). Need to get me a stronger filter and a sharper lens :slight_smile:

Also, about exact brightness values in HDRIs: we can’t really put a rule down and say that the sun is supposed to be 140000.0 bright and if it’s lower then it must be clipped. You can always adjust the exposure level of an HDRI in photoshop and save it out again. No dynamic range (at the top end anyway) will be lost, the sun would still be unclipped even though it’s brightness value would be lower (or higher, depending on which way you adjust it). The only way to determine if an HDRI is clipped or not is by looking at the brightest pixels and making sure there isn’t a cluster of solid white/gray pixels.

Slightly related note - photoshop secretly doesn’t support 32-bit EXRs. When you open an HDR file (which it does support) and save it to an EXR file, no matter what the colour mode is set to, it’ll always save it as a 16-bit EXR. 16-bit images have a much lower maximum brightness value, so the sun will be clipped in the saved file. See here for more details. Krita and blender do support 32-bit EXRs, so best do your editing/conversions with one of those :slight_smile:

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Cool. Thanks for the update, and thanks for the note about Photoshop and 32 bit exr’s.

We try to avoid Adobe products wherever we can. Their color management is one of the reasons why. All of our image manipulation is being done in PT gui pro and nuke (with some other software in there for handling raw images and the like).

Thanks again