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Looking great, @barbult
I have tried myself PNG creator, but it took over an hour to render 4 partial renders
and my program for making HDR from them can only make PNG or TIFF out of them.
Need to refine further EXR renderings.
Ask Chat GPT :
There are several software options available to combine several images at different exposure values into an HDR image. Here are some popular ones:
Adobe Photoshop: Adobe Photoshop has a built-in HDR feature that allows you to merge multiple images of different exposure values to create an HDR image. You can find this feature under the "File" menu, where you can choose "Automate" and then "Merge to HDR Pro."
Photomatix: Photomatix is a popular HDR software that allows you to combine multiple images of different exposure values to create an HDR image. It offers a variety of options to fine-tune the HDR result, including tone mapping and exposure fusion.
Aurora HDR: Aurora HDR is another software specifically designed for creating HDR images. It offers a range of presets and tools to create and fine-tune HDR images from multiple exposures.
HDRMerge: HDRMerge is a free and open-source software that allows you to merge multiple images of different exposure values to create an HDR image. It uses a command-line interface, which may be more challenging for beginners, but it's a powerful and flexible option for advanced users.
EasyHDR: EasyHDR is a user-friendly software that allows you to merge multiple images of different exposure values to create an HDR image. It offers a range of presets and tools to create and fine-tune HDR images.
There are many other software options available for creating HDR images, so it's worth exploring different options to find the one that best suits your needs and workflow.
(PS if any of this solution is wrong, blame ChatGPT, I had no time to check them)...
@Barbult : thank you, once again, so much for sharing your renders here, and for sharing the information that unchecking the alignement option in photoshop is sometimes not valid (and sometimes the contrary must be done). This is -in theory- in the documentation of the version 1.1.
Just in case, I asked 10 additional software :
Sure! Here are 10 additional software options for creating HDR images:
Each of these software programs has unique features and tools, so it's worth researching them further to find the best fit for your needs.
Question : Do these last 10 combine files at different exposure values?
Yes, all of these additional software options can combine multiple images of different exposure values to create an HDR image. This is a common and essential feature for any software that is designed for creating HDR images.
However, the process of combining images may differ slightly between software, and some may offer more advanced features for fine-tuning the HDR image. It's worth exploring the features of each software to determine which one is the best fit for your needs.
Now concerning the price, I asked for free software
here is a list of free HDR software options:
Some of these software options offer limited functionality in their free version and may require you to purchase a premium version for full access to all features. It's worth noting that even though these software options are free, they can still produce high-quality HDR images.
Luminar NEO has a plugin / addon that can merge several photos with different exposure values.
Thanks for this info!
Clever remark indeed!
The planned documentation update is beginning to sound like War and Peace Vol 2
Lol, no don't worry 3 pages of update notes, but mainly because it's very detailed. Plus the base documentation was updated itself and did not take many more pages, maybe one or two I did not compare. Well considering that it covers 3 products, it's ok as a number of pages per product. Plus, a link to the forum now being in the documentation, it is very likely that nobody will ever see the end of my "War and Peace vol 2."
The packages, documentation and submission pages are ready, I just finished 5 minutes ago to "triple check" all the products behaviors, but I've been annoyed these few last days by personal issue, so submissions are delayed to tomorrow (I could submit it tonight but I'm so tired I could make a mistake, so I prefer doing this after a good night of sleep). BTW I may be not available this evening on the forum (need to sleep early). Maybe I should re-read my documentation to fall asleep faster :) ...But anyway I'll be back tomorrow as usually :)
If you want use PNG files to create a bit HDR image to use as an Environment Map in Daz Studio, you will need to render enough PNG files with different EV values, to come close to the dynamic range of the lighting in your original scene. 8 bit PNG files look OK as backdrops, but they don't contain enough dynamic range to provide adequate lighting for the scene.
Here is an example. I rendered PNG images of the XI Red Carpet scene. I chose it, not because it is a good 360 degree scene, because it isn't, but because it was fairly simple and might be quick to render all those PNG files.
I rendered PNGs in 2EV intervals of 9,11,13,15,17.That is an 8 EV range. The HDR that I created with Photoshop looked fine with the dome as the background, but the lighting was not adequate. My G9 character and surfboard are under lit and dull looking.The character casts no visible shadow, because of the dull lighting.
Then I rendered additional PNG files on each end of the EV range. I rendered EV 1,3,5,7 and 19,21,23,25. Along with the first PNGs 9,11,13,15,17, that gave me a much larger EV range when I created a new HDR in Photoshop. The rendered dome background looks the same, but the lighting of the character is now significantly improved. I can seve see her shadow. I wonder if an even larger EV range would make it better.
It did not take a long time to render all these PNG files for the HDR. I turned off Rendering Quality Enable and set min samples 100 and max time of 120 seconds . The PNG render size was 8192 by 4096 with denoise on. I let the V3D PNG Creator do the work.
My final scene above, with G9, clothing, hair, and surfboard took only 45 seconds to render with the HDRI for lighting and background.
Very well explained. So far I haven't got any further because the png aren't really good to use to build HDR. However, I only made 3 pieces with a very large distance. Will now test again with exr but in 16:9. I think with the dynamic range you can edit it better to show it. I don't want to use it in DAZ.
It sounds like what you really want to do is just render a beauty canvas of your scene with the 16 by 9 camera and then tone map it for 8 bit viewing with other software. Is that right?
@Barbult : If I understood well, that's solved, it was just a Exposure Value understanding and now this is ok, plus he managed himself to launch the png xev creator with the 16:9 camera. @Norman_R : normally if you convert your camera to 16:9 as you already did if I understand well, you can use the exr creator directly. You must adjust the luminance corrective factor probably, have a look at the documentation, but I would test the "default 3" and if the render is black, the "50 000" value for this dial located in the second tab of the interface.
Concerning the png, I managed to have pretty fine "human" renders with less values, but indeed with a large dynamic range for the files (something like from 2 to 20 maybe). Othewise you have the solution to render only 3 or 5, even on a limited range, and include a spotlight in the areas you want to enhance on renders. If your limiting factor is time, this is an excellent solution. If you are not limited, just render as many EV that photosohp can handle!
Anyway, the png is here as a "last chance" for complicated scenes, a huge amount of scenes remain accessible via the exr creator, and even fog scene (but for haze/fog with specific two adjustments, one in the interface, one after loadng the presets, it is in the documentation).
I'm used to creating HDR. But with the png I don't have the feeling that I wouldn't be able to edit it from the normal render as well. I will try again with exr. And yes @Barbult I just want to create a normal 16:9 HDR as a jpg. I used to create HDR from jpg, that works. Now from RAW.
That came out on my first test. The 2nd test was worse.
As I said, I could have done it without HDR.
Wow the images are really cool! I love them! (even if you may not find them good). As described, the main purpose of the creator is that users can replace their heavy scene by a single environment map in order to be able to set up and render Daz Studio scenes faster and more easily. The rest of what you can, or cannot do with it is out of its main initial goal.
@V3Digitimes Thanks. Yes, I don't think the HDR is bad either, I just wanted more light in the dark areas to be able to get something out of it better. But that was not the case. What I got after putting it together wasn't much better than without HDR. Sorry, that wasn't a criticism of your scrip either. I only wrote that @Barbult described the 8bit problem of the png well and I came to the same conclusion that I couldn't get any further. So I'll try my edit with the exr try.
OK, I understand, the thing is that I'm not super pro on how photoshop will process your images to create an hdr from multiple exposure images. It does it, of course, but it probably depends on a lot of things, and it is not super well documented on Adobe side. I saw several tutorials explaining how to use multiple exposure pngs to create hdr, but they described mainly the procedure and did not give more information about some specific things which had to be done (oh, yeah it seems that having more images increase the quality of the result, I did not say it in the doc). So I cannot help you here. I guess trying is the best way to proceed for your case of figure.. Sorry I can not help more about photoshop recombining...
@V3Digitimes I use about half of the HDR programs you listed above, including Luminar Neo. Except photoshop ;)
I just wonder, if increasing the Min Samples to larger values is equivalent to rendering with many EV in PNG builder?
I have rendered EXR with Min Samples equal 400 and it looks much better - the fireflies were only in very dark areas.
The other thought is how many EVs one really need? How big difference between EVs could be?
Thanks to excellent posts of @barbult, I am tempted to try again rendering of PNGs.
@Norman_R : Oh, ok. I only have photoshop.. We're complementary.
@Artini : I said in the documentation that the min samples could be increased for a better quality. Concerning the exact number of EVs and the EV difference if you use the png xEV creator instead of the exr creator, it depends so much on your scene and on the final quality that you expect that there is probably not a unique answer. Something between 4 and 20 EVs with variations of 0.5 to 5 EVs? The best is to try for each given scene.
In the documentation I changed my inputs on hdr toning in photoshop for png xev script, due to information by Barbult. Using hdr toning will be ok for an hdr as a background but with bad lighting due to a 16 bits conversion if I understood well Photoshop documentation. Instead if you want to control the exposure for instance and keep a good lighting (the full 32 bits), you have to go through a create new layer, adjust exposure and merge operation detailed in the new documentation, and taken from both Adobe documentation and video tutorials. Now, I will really have to stop there with the updates otherwise I will never submit them. So everything coming after now for documentation as well as for scripts will be made in an eventual 1.2 version, but won't be in the 1.1.
Great, thanks for the explanation, @V3Digitimes
in what dimensions are you creating that in the tool?
12000 x 6000 ? ... moment ... this doesn't work
10000 x 5000 ?
?
@Lonesome Cowboy exr or png xEV creators can work at any resolution : for higher resolution, before you launch the script, go to "Render Settings" Tab, General group of this tab, and left click on the gear on the right of the "Pixel Size" box, choose Parameter Settings, and in the new popup, uncheck "Use Limits". This will be fixed in the 1.1 update to come with an auto adjustment of the limits by the script.
Then I think what we see here are 16:9 renders or photos (I'm not sure). 16:9 can be made using the exr creator by renaming any "normal" scene camera you have using a "V3D Env Camera" name, and by defining properly your width and height in the exr creator so that it corresponds to a 16:9 (and uncheck the 2:1 option if it is checked). Then the script can proceed to an hdr "normal" render (but I never played that much with it with the exr creator).
I made an HDR from UltraScenery XT to use with UltraScenery,.
Great idea and looks nice, @barbult
Wow, that's excellent!
Hi, This is a great product and I'm enjoying playing with it. Just one question so far though. On the 2nd tab of the V3DHDRC 04 exr script there is a section called "Additional Camera Settings : (see documentation). Can you please tell me what setting the Draw Style does to the final output? If I change this value all it seems to do is change the draw style in the Daz Studio viewport.
I looked in the provided documentation but I could not find this option mentioned.
Thanks
Thank you for this great product. My apologies if I am missing anything and I understand it is probably too late for the next update but... It would save a lot of external editing steps if the 1. The string that adds ".prev" to the preview name was optional and 2. the same string was editable. That way the previews could be generated once with it disabled to create DAZ thumbnails and a second time (using ".tip") to create DAZ tips. I don't see how to do this in the product, I hope I'm missing it, and spend a lot of time renaming and copying files to do it.
@cshaw999 Thanks for this nice feedback! The drawstyle is just here to allow you to change the drawstyle while in the interface, and has nothing to do with the render you will make afterwards. For instance, if you launched the interface in "NVIDIA Iray", and when you decide to change the camera height, the scene is too heavy and this is slow. Then you can change for a more responsive viewport drawstyle without leaving the interface. That's all. Indeed it was not mentioned in the documentation.
@greg_82000392 Thank you for comment. I think you speak about the "asset" script of the V3D HDR Addon Tools. I roughly understand what you mean, but as I always try to do, I try to make my scripts accessible to new users as well as pro user. What you propose here sounds good for pretty advanced and pro users, who perfectly know what are the limitations of a thumb, know when they risk to erase previous thumbs or not, what are the caracters allowed in an extension, etc, etc, that rendering big thumbs is useless because of DS auto rescale. But if the beginners have the "choice" of their extension, it might result in huge thumbs making them lose a lot of space on their computer and probably ugly in content pane due to DS thumb size reduction, and for the tips, some of them would even not know that a tip extension is .tip.png. Using no additional extension in a lot of cases replaces your thumb so I don't see the interest of creating the preview without additional extension, because it would only be a thumb not respecting Daz rules of size for thumbs, whereas you already have an option to check to render those thumbs. For the preview themselves, the choice of ".prev" was made because it made them automatically compatible with the tools of the manager, and was very relevant of what it was : a preview for your explorer or my other scripts.
I don't see why you would have renaming steps. Thumbs are calculated if you check the "thumb" option, "tips" if you check the tip option, and "previews" if you check the preview option. Once checked you only have one button to click to render them all in one single process, furthermore, you can save your preferences (at the bottom of the interface, in "Darkside" interface style only, this button is not visible in other "main street" or "highway" styles (fixed in 1.1) so that you have the same options the next time you launch the script).
I still don't understand why you would renaming or copying anything, or a preview, as I never needed it, and you're the first to ask (I had other feedback of people not having issues with it, the only issue I was told was that the "save preferences" button was not avaiable in some styles. I'm not sure that the "free extension" possibility in the interface is efficient or safe for everybody (every user even beginners). Maybe if I understood why you have to rename something it could make more sense. Otherwise I can post a script to mass rename the ".prev" with something else,