Hello

As the title states, I am looking for some definitive guidance on producing high dynamic range spherical panoramas in Vue 10 Esprit.

EDIT: Or rather as the title fails to state (the important hdr aspect) ... sorry.

So far I am rendering with the "Panoramic View" and "Spherical Render" option ticked.

I am rendering using the "Render off-screen" and "Save render to disk" options ticked and .hdr selected as the file save format.

However, apparently this is not producing images in the full dynamic range; i.e. (0,0,0) <= rgb <= (20,20,20).

Assuming it is possible to achieve this in a single render (at a single exposure), is there something like an Atmosphere setting that I am missing?

Many thanks for any help or advice anyone can give here...

The HDR and EXR formats do not work in Vue.  I may have a ticket number from e-on still from my bug report to them.  I was told the fix would require a new lighting engine basically.  And that e-on would have to do some research on it.  Maybe a future version of Vue will have full dynamic range.

Ah, I see... that's a pity. I was starting to think perhaps I needed the LightTune module or something.

Well I think I can possibly work round the limitation perhaps by doing two renders at different light levels... I'll read up some more on that route perhaps.

I'll definitely need to get more adept at optimising my Vue scenes if I'm going down that route I reckon... although I need to anyway... I'm attempting to get up to rendering these panoramas out at 10k pixels wide in at least broadcast quality!

Many thanks for your help Shawn

Yep.  Just do some renders with different brightness.  Then make an HDR from them using HDRShop or something similar.  Just like you would with normal digital photos.

Many thanks Shaun. I will go down the multiple render route then. I can then composite the hdr in the version of Photoshop I have.

Cheers,

Chris

What's wrong with the EXR format, Shawn? I can open EXR renders from Vue in Phoyoshop, and they are seen as 32bit floating point images....

Monkeycloud, just be sure to uncheck Auto exposure and Natural film response in the camera post render options. This limits the dynamic range of the image.

Quote - What's wrong with the EXR format, Shawn? I can open EXR renders from Vue in Phoyoshop, and they are seen as 32bit floating point images....

Monkeycloud, just be sure to uncheck Auto exposure and Natural film response in the camera post render options. This limits the dynamic range of the image.

Thanks Bruno. Yes, I'm unchecking those two options in the post render... Vue 10 told me I should in fact... so I obeyed :-)

I haven't looked at EXR... but its just HDR I need currently.

Certainly the HDR file output seems to open correctly in PS... it's just that on analysing the image, apparently, it doesn't encompass the full range of (0,0,0) <= rgb <= (20,20,20).

Cheers

Opening an EXR or HDR from Vue doesn't mean you're also getting any dynamic values.  It's just a boring image for now.  E-on is aware of the problem.  I've sent them Vue scenes for them to test.  They don't know when it will be working as it should. 

Fanboys want to sweep problems like this under a rug.  That's why a lot of Vue's bugs are never addressed.  I can't afford to keep paying e-on money just so I can QA their software and report bugs to them (and have to prove to them that they exist, against the masses that worship e-on and say there is nothing wrong with Vue and that it is obviously the end-user not turning off auto-expose or setting gamma to 1, etc).

But anyway, it doesn't matter to me anymore if it gets fixed or not.  I'm not buying Vue anymore.  I got e-on to fix most of the bugs I reported (within their 3-month time frame).  But someone else can fight the battle now.

I guess I am the fanboy here, but I'll never know the answer to my question, sadly.

But yes, of course, forgot to add that you must not apply any gamma correction to the render (override gamma must be checked), something that should be done automatically when saving to hdr or exr, a suggestion for e-on to implement in a future version.

Quote - I guess I am the fanboy here, but I'll never know the answer to my question, sadly.

But yes, of course, forgot to add that you must not apply any gamma correction to the render (override gamma must be checked), something that should be done automatically when saving to hdr or exr, a suggestion for e-on to implement in a future version.

Actually, I 'm fairly sure that Vue 10 also suggested I turn off / override GC... which I also did, in any case.

I will continue to do some more tests regarding this and will post an update on how I get on in case it's of use to anyone else.

Many thanks

I still think the so called HDRI works fine as a background in poser mapped to the BB envsphere.

Love esther

Even without the full HDR range in a Vue HDR output from a single render, I reckon it should still work slightly better than jpeg...

...for Indirect Lighting ray calculations too.

But I'm doing some experiments in Photoshop to see how effectively I can simulate a fuller range HDR, by creating three copies of the single Vue HDR render, tone-map it etc and push the exposures in opposite directions, before then recombining those three exposures into a single HDR image file, all just within Photoshop.

Really, as I understand it, the aim is just to get as wide a range as possible for the sake of the IDL pass.

In terms of the spherical panorama, as used within the Poser envsphere, functioning also as a background, then I think the HDR matters much less... in my opinion.

Even for IDL, I'm guessing having the IDL render options parameters right probably matters much more than having a true HDR.

I have to say I've tried everything to get proper HDR lighting out of vue and it only half works while it gives you general overall lighting it doesn't cast long shadows for the light source. I'm not sure if EXR works either .