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spherical camera?

swordvisionsswordvisions Posts: 124
edited November 2016 in Carrara Discussion

I haven't been using carrara for a few years but I seem to remember using the sperical camera to create a render that I could use as for image based lighting in another scene. I seem remember there were a few tricks to getting it to work right. Any help would be appreciated.

Post edited by swordvisions on

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  • 3DAGE3DAGE Posts: 3,311

    HI Swordvisions :)

    it should be as easy as Insert Spherical,. then adjust it's rotation (by default it's inserted pointing down) rotate it to face forward. or left, right, back, ..whatever you need.

    make sure you switch the rendering camera to the spherical cam,. in the renderer settings.

    do a smaller test to check what you're getting.

    If you have Octane for carrara, it can kick out 32bit hdr

    Hope it helps :)

  • swordvisionsswordvisions Posts: 124

    Thanks, it is amazing how quick you forgot how certain things work after a while. 

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,326

    It might take some time to render, but I thought I'd mention also that Luxus for Carrara has the ability to export OpenEXR format directly! So we can now make HDRI directly from Carrara scenes!!!

    I haven't tried it yet. Hmmm... I think it might even offer HDR format too?

    I've been experimenting with other HDR attempts suing various software, compiling various exposures together. I've read somewhere that a minimum of 8000 x 4000 for images that are to be used for background imagery is about as low as we can go without too much pixelation. After that someone called that resolution puny. Personally, I've found 8k by 4k to be fine as long as we don't look straight down at the floor of the resulting surround image - so I just use a ground of some sort.

    Since then I've seen how we can use lower resolutions for a bit of automatic depth of field. 

    One of the more difficult issues I've been dealing with is scaling. I'd render a spherical background image from scenery that's pretty farfrom the camera, and in the resulting background image, it seems like the background scenery looks a bit large or close. So I'm experimenting with scaling the surrounding scenery down to a much smaller size instead of continuing to try and get stuff further from the camera. In Carrara, things will eventually disappear if we get it too far away while using atmosphere.

    Another consideration I've been messing with is trying to optimize these HDR or ordinary spherical images for rendering using Gamma Correction = 2.2, which will look very faded or washed out if we just use the straight map. 

    Also, the distance that the camera is from the ground needs to be nearly (exactly?) the same as it will be in the scene using the image as a spherical background - or things will appear off - especially when a shadow catcher is used. In my experience, this doesn't seem to be too touchy when using the maps in Carrara. I'm still not sure on getting the ground right in Iray in DS though. For some reason the ground, when made visible in the Iray settings, doesn't match up with this distance - but I haven't tried very hard.

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,326

    I should also mention that I like to use these spherical background images in my "Blank" character-creator scenes, so that I have reflections. By default, just so that the focus is on the character alone, I then add a backdrop color, where the color = black, so I get the reflective results of the spherical image, yet it doesn't show up in the render ;)

    This is a render I made using one of my HDR tests as the spherical background as well as a lighting solution

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,326

    These are Iray renders I've made using HDR I've made in Carrara using Woodlands and Badlands

  • HeadwaxHeadwax Posts: 9,964
    edited November 2016

    dont know if it helps (it;s probably what dart said)  you can do a faux hdri thingy by rendering out three images in carrara with different (eg) gamma or lighting settings - then combine in HDRI software

    I use Oloneo to join them  - great softtware

     

    see this

     

    http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/68198/can-carrara-make-hdris/p1

    Post edited by Headwax on
  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,326

    I've been using a free software - Picturenaut, which seems to work well. I'll have to look into Oloneo - thanks for the tip!

    Three is the minimum for HDRI. The more exposure changes you make and use, the more accurate the lighting solution provided.

    For this reason (and more), I'm actually very interested in trying out Luxus for Carrara on such a thing. True HDR is supposed to give excellent results!

  • WendyLuvsCatzWendyLuvsCatz Posts: 38,037

    I added some video links to this thread

    http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/78861/360-vr-youtube-video#latest

    if you are looking for another use for the spherical camera

     

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,326
    ToeJam said:

    I added some video links to this thread

    http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/78861/360-vr-youtube-video#latest

    if you are looking for another use for the spherical camera

     

    Oh yeah Girl!

    One day... that phone will ring...

    Wendy... how did you________? :)

    This stuff is SO COOL!!! 

  • TangoAlphaTangoAlpha Posts: 4,584

    I've used the spherical camera for creating simple skydomes, and it works very well for that. I did have a go once at the "multiple bracketed exposures" technique for creating HDRIs (basically the same as you'd do with a real camera) & stitching them together, but the result wasn't particularly satisfactory. I don't have Luxus or Octane, but the posts above suggest they have something extra in the HDR department.

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