Rendering an HDR light probe from Bryce 7.1 Pro
I used to know how to do this... I've got the renders to prove it. I'm fairly sure I found out how from asking here on the forums, but it was on the Old Forums and on my Old Computer so I don't even have my notes.
I'm setting up a scene for making a full light probe in HDR to use as lighting/environment/etc in other software. I know somewhere in here is an option to change from a "regular" camera to a spherical camera that will render a lat-long or mirrorball or something image for me, and I was pretty sure i could output directly to HDR or EXF too but perhaps I was just controling exposure.
I can change the camera angle to as wide as 180 degrees, but it stops there, so clearly this isn't the right control I should be tweaking. How can I turn my camera into a lat/long or spherical or whatever camera?
And second question, how do I set up for HDR/EXF rendering? Or failing that, how do I set exposure? If I can set exposure, I can just rerender six times at different exposures and make the HDR myself.
Comments
Bryce can render a 360° cylindrical panorama directly, but not a spherical one. There are lenses you can put in front of the camera, there are two products in the store by David Brinnen and me (the Spherical Mapper and Scene Converter).
However, without spending any money, there are other means to create spherical panoramas (360° x 180°) in Bryce. In the main Bryce folder, you should find a content folder and in there several more folders. Open Tutorials and then Horo Wernli. Open Start.html in your web browser. There are 4 different methods to create a full HDRI panorama. It was written for Bryce 6 but it is still valid.
In Bryce 7.1, a render can be exported as HDRI. This must be done directly after the render has finished, before saving the file.