Hey Everyone,

This week’s part 3 of the 3-part series on rendering HDR panoramic images in 3dsMax or Vue 6 Infinite, and then bringing them back into 3d Studio Max.  This week I’ll show you how to set up the lighting and background in order to make use of those HDRI files we created.  It’s easy as pie!

Hey Everyone,

In this Monday Movie we’ll be looking at how you can render panoramic HDR images in e-on software’s Vue 6 Infinite.  It’s a great program for rendering natural landscapes and skies.  A fantastic addition to any pipeline (though if you’re really crazy you can get their Ozone plugin for 3dsMax).  Next week we’ll look at how to bring these 360-degree images back into 3dsMax for use as backgrounds and illumination maps.

Hey everyone,

In this block of 3 video tutorials, we’ll be looking at how to render and use panoramic, 360-degree images in 3d Studio Max.  This week is part 1 where I cover how to render these “fish eye lens” images and save them out as high dynamic range images (HDR or HDRI).  It’s pretty easy to do in mental ray- just apply the “Wrap Around (lume)” lens shader, and you’re done!

In part 2 we’ll cover how to render great backgrounds with e-on software’s vue.  Finally, in part 3, I’ll show you how to bring those big renders back into 3dsMax and use them as image-based lighting.

There’s a free HDRI library out there with lots of high resolution images of studio lighting setups. HDRI images are 32-bit graphics that contain luminance information so it’s basically canned lighting setups! Note that these are huge HDRI images (~1000×5000) so they will bog down your computer. Just take it slow and give your computer time to work through it and things will speed up.

It’s free and it’s a torrent, so you’ll want to get a good torrent client if you don’t already have one. I recommend uTorrent; a small, smart little torrent client with lots of good features.

I’ll be seeding this thing for a few weeks, so you’ll always have a peer, but please help me out and keep seeding. It’s not like you’re going to get in trouble with this one. Learn how to use these images with my HDRI Setup Video Tutorial.