My hdri map is blurry

Support Lighting and Rendering
1

I rendered out a 360 degree scene using panorama camera setting at 4096x2048

I saved it as a radiance hdr file.

Then I created a small test scene and added it as an environment map in Cycles. The image is very soft and blurry.

Can someone give me a quick rundown on what I might be doing wrong?

2

The environment map is supposed to span across the entire “world” in full 360 degrees. 4K x 2K really is not that much of a resolution to cover that…

3

I assumed the same, so I re-rendered at 400%. The file size is 79mb as a radiance file. Is it normal to do this? Is there anything else I should consider?

btw - the larger resolution of course was sharper, but thats a gigantic file.

4

I have a few professional HDRIs lying around on my HDD - 10K x 5K at almost 250 MB. So, no, that’s not uncommon…:wink:
What you could do is use a low res version of that HDRI for lighting and a high res LDRI (which will use much less memory) visible to reflections and camera.