Hey all…was hoping to figure it out myself…but…gotta ask the community.
I have a scene. It is an “indoor scene”, but because of the camera angle, I haven’t yet seen a need to close off the room.
Overhead, I have a number of fluorescent light that are image based, and they work fine. Of course, I got them pre-made.
So, this is a model of a real room, and I figured the focal point was lit from 3 general directions.
I took mirrorball images to build HDRs of each direction. Nevermind that my HDR compositor keeps crash or turning out nonsense (hugin, photonaut, hrdshop…any suggestions?)
I have had success building a .hdr and .exr of one of the three mirrorball images. I did both the mirrorball, and expanded the reflection to fill a rectangle since Cycles only appears to allow mirrorball IBL for the “World” settings.
My problem is…I want to set up 3 orthogonal planes or hemispheres, texture them with an emission material, and give it the material from the light coming from that particular direction.
Though I still have two more directions to work on, the one direction i DID do (and I used a plane and a hemisphere to try to emit the light)…It doesn’t seem to be doing anything? Not casting light, certainly not light representative of the image texture, and not at any intensity.
I could not find any tutorials or tips that covered multiple IBL sources in an indoor image (perhaps I didn’t look hard enough), and since there isn’t just one point from where I could capture light (the focal point is a fireplace in the middle of a room), I picked the three directions of light that would cover it correctly. So, world based lighting is out.
I either need to somehow make these plane emitters work properly, or maybe there is a way to use light portals? I don’t know, but this extra light will provide the nuanced lighting to properly recreate the scene (the actual lighting is very complicated and IBL HAS to be the way to go).
Any suggestions? At all?