What Room Is This?
onimusha
Posts: 195
Wondering what room was used in this promo image. I wish DAZ required assets used to be listed for all promo images. It would probably get me to spend a lot more money here.
https://www.daz3d.com/home-sweet-home--serenity-16k-hdris
Post edited by frank0314 on
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The room is one of the HDRIs in the product.
Wait, the room comes with the product? I thought it was just lighting. Maybe I'm confused about what an HDRI is. Thanks for pointing that out, I appreciate it.
The room is part of the HDRI. HDRI are images that give off light.
So there's no "room" as a model, but if you switch "dome on" in render settings, the image of the room will be visible. If you switch it off, only the light will be there.
I was super confused about this for like the first six months I started using Studio, especially since High Dynamic Range Image does not QUITE mean the same thing in the photography world that it does in the Studio world.
Like Joanna said, it's a big image that gives off light. Some of them may also be "backdrop" images, like these are; others are pure lighting, no backdrop to speak of; some of them give off light in such specific ways and directions that you get different lighting effects on your scene if you use dome rotation (Futuris night scenes, which I use a lot, are especially notable for this, they cast reds and greens and purples across your set); others have extremely even, omnidirectional lighting.
The figures in the images for that product are posed in front of a flat backdrop*, in other words, and done so very sneakily so that it almost looks like they are standing in a real set (a 'three-dimensional' set, but none of this is really three-dimensional, now is it?) I can tell they're not, which is why I very seldom use HDRI backdrops for this purpose.
*OK, fine, a curved dome backdrop, but I can still tell.
Wow, I am so confused. Thanks for the info though. I appreciate everyone trying to explain it.
I should probably not have stopped to do this but I could not resist. Apologies to all, unless it is helpful to you, in which case, I regret nothing.
(Not gonna put these inline. Click the attachments to read them.)
An HDRI is an economical way of seeming to havea complex environment. As columbine says, it is wrapped around a virtual sphere enclosing the scene and when rendering Iray treats each point on the sphere as a light source with the colour and intensity of the image at that point, instead of having to send real light paths through the scene to bounce off mdoelled objects to build up an approximation to the corect colour. The iamges need to by high dynamic range to cover the range of possible light values, a standard 8 or 16 bit per channel image wouldn't do much.
You can use primitives to stand in for parts of the scene (e.g. a cylinder for one of the colums there) with the Advanced Iray node Proeprties script applied and Iray matte turned on so that it catches shadows and reflections, and hides things thata re behind it, but doesn't itself cast shadows or reflect or appear in the render. A good HDRI, with the ground on (or with a matted promitive) should give shadows.
Maybe it looks confusing because the HDRI was created from a 3D environment with 3D props, and not a real environment. But, it begs the question, what 3D environment did the creator use to create their HDRI?
No, those are most likely photos. DT has a very nice camera setup and has been taking real world photos for HDRIs for years.
Nah, I'm thinking those are real-world photos.
EDIT: And CC said the same while I was sitting on this unsubmitted post. oops. oh well.
One minor correction - your character actually IS casting a shadow, but they don't fall in the same direction as the ones in the photo backing, appearing only on the parts of the shadowcatcher directly beneath her so they're only visible in the areas directly underneath her shoes. Indoor HDRs can be really weird.
Interesting. I'd have said there was nothing to catch her shadow under her because there is no floor/ground plane present in the scene. But since I agree that HDRs can be really weird, I'm not gonna stake my life on it.
The ground plane in Studio is like a fake invisible floor that can catch shadows. It can be turned on/off in the Environment pane. (Side-note: If trying to render from below ground with the ground-plane 'on', it'll render blank).
I'm aware of the ground plane. I THOUGHT it was turned off for those renders. It's almost always turned off, unless I forget. I find it a pain in the ass. :P
That said, Cybersox is right, because now that I look at the images again, hours later (and less distracted by the day's activities), I see there is a shadow under the front figure's shoes. It's barely there but it's definitely not part of the HDRI backdrop. So maybe I didn't turn off the ground plane because SOMETHING is catching those shadows. --shrug--
This is all pretty far afield of the original post. I don't know how it is I derail threads so much. Sorry, y'all.
I have it turned off by default on mine, but some HDRIs, at least those intended to be used like these ones, turn it back on when loaded.
Thanks to the OP for the question that prompted such a good summary of some features of HDRIs, which I've never got into because they seem tricky to use well. At least now I have a few tips.
Hey, the only reason I noticed those shadows is becasuse I've lost track of how many times I've caught them in my own images while in mid-render or after the fact, so checking for them now has become an ingrained habit.
Is anyone else experiencing issues with the Home Sweet Home product referred to above? I purchased the 'Home Sweet Home - Tranquility 16k HDRIs' pack today and when I load the various HDRIs none of them seem to be scaled to Daz3D figures (like Cake and Bob's HDRIs are). Am I doing smething wrong? The figure appears to be 6 inches high in comparison wwith the surrounding HDRI environment. I wondered if there was a parameter for scaling the HDRI dome but don't see it (and surely it should load correctly anyway).
As far as I can see the issue seems to be the HDRI Dome is set to 'infinite sphere', so if you zoom out the figure gets smaller but the HDRI enironment doesn't. Conversely this is not the case with Cake & Bob's domes (as an example) the difference seems to be these are set to 'finite with ground'. However, when I use this setting with the Home Sweet Home HDRIs there are additional scaling parameters that I can't get to rectify the distortion in this mode.
Any help would be much appreciated!
Wow, this has been super informative. The cartoon was really fun. Thanks everyone, I now have a much better understanding of all this.
HDRIs usually work best, when the camera is in the center of the HDRI sphere (meaning X=0, Z=0 and Y at the height the camera was when shooting the sphere)
This means you never get distorted lines at edges, regardless where you point your render camera at.
Here are some illustrations: Camera 1 is in the center of the HDRI at X=0, Z=0 and a guessed eye level of 165, Camera 2 is off center at X=-525, Z=300 and Y=134
The following image shows a top view of the scene where the red circles indicate the camera positions. Camera 1 never shows any real distortion. For Camera 2 the distortions really get obvious depending on your dome settings. The product used is UltraHD IRAY HDRI With DOF - Blockhouse Beach
The following shows a setup for an indoor scene in a small bathroom. The HDRI is available for free here https://polyhaven.com/a/modern_bathroom
No distortions from the center camera, off center is distorted:
In conclusion:
My workflow for unknown HDRIs:
Tangential question, but what program did you use to create the text bubbles?
Ah, thats good to know! I've always just used those ones as they were so easy to use. Seeing the explanation below I now realise it is the inverted way of working - instead of rotating around you subject which is at 0,0,0,. The camera is centralised at that point, and everything is placed around you (quite a head-flip from the way I was working, particularly I now have to scale everything to fit the perspective. Thanks for your help.
Hi Markusmatern, Thank you so much for taking the time to assemble these screenshots and explanations that has really helped me get my head round this, as its the opposite way I was working with Cake and Bob's HDRIs. I have tried it out, and that seems to do the ticket. I've also saved a camera preset with the settings you suggested so I can quickly deploy it for HDRI use. Many thanks once again, and I hope your illustrations on this subject can help other lost souls such as myself.
That's Comic Life 3, same as I use for all the comics I do regularly (so I had it close at hand).
Thank you!
I would like to add my thanks for this discussion of HDRIs- it's been very informative!
My introduction to HDRIs were a few sets made by Cake and Bob. They worked so intuitively, I thought all HDRIs work that way. Now I'm seeing what I was doing wrong with some of the other sets I've purchased. Hopefully I'll be able to make better use of them now.
think of hdri's as a green screen just like in movies or tv where greenscreens are used for actors or tv show hosts stand in front of and an image is projected on it
Glad I could provide some insights!