Selfmade HDRI for Photorealistic lighting in Cycles

[CG_Sky (Leander Burger)]

Hi everyone.
I recently bought myself a mirror ball and tried to do some spherical HDRi environments.
I easily created one of my garden.

here is a test. Note that the light comes only from the HDRi.

Here is the HDRi (just a jpg)

and a unwrapped version:

-BRS

[richardvdoost (Richard van der Oost)]

Hey, interesting! I always spend way too much time shooting a panorama…

Do you create a true HDRi shot (high dynamic range) or just the jpeg? If you shoot in multiple exposures and recombine them later, you can capture the true light intensities of the environment.

[CG_Sky (Leander Burger)]

@richardvdoost

Do you create a true HDRi shot (high dynamic range) or just the jpeg? If you shoot in multiple exposures and recombine them later, you can capture the true light intensities of the environment.

Yes I indeed created a true HDRi shot. I only couldn´t upload the hdr.file to BA, so I converted it into jpegs for the preview.
For the scene above I used the HDRi.

[richardvdoost (Richard van der Oost)]

Ah cool. You probably wouldn’t be able to get such a great lighting on your model with just a jpeg