Custom HDRI environment

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.