For those of you who don’t know, HDRI-environments are 32-bit images that you can use in your 3d scenes as way to more accurately replicate lighting and reflections from a real life set. That makes it perfect for VFX integration work like in the image below

This image is a frame from a short animation I did for my demo reel.

The background plate was shot in 720p with my handheld Panasonic DMC-TZ10 camera. It was rendered in Cycles, with a custom HDRI-environment. Additional passes was rendered with Blender Internal and comped on top, like AO, Shadow and Velocity-passes.

I’ve used HDRI’s for years, but I have never actually known exactly how make one from scratch… until now

Real life shiny ball to the left, and Computer Generated version of the same scene on the right. That is really cool!

Unfortunately Gimp does not support 32-bit images so I had to use Photoshop to create this. It would be really nice to be able to create this kind of HDRI with open source software. Hopefully Gimp will support 32-bit in the future.