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I'm just starting to use hdri's instead of physical sky I noticed that the background image will start to overexpose when setting the intensity so that the interior room looks more like daylight using the same image in all four channels. I understand that I can (and will try/use) a separate illumination hdri which should take care of the problem. Besides that and getting as high a resolution digital image to start, are there any other considerations I should be aware of to get a top quality hdri? Thx, Joe

The most important thing is the quality of the hdri. The more exposures they used to make it, the better the hdri.

Bubbaloo wrote:The most important thing is the quality of the hdri. The more exposures they used to make it, the better the hdri.

hmmm, obviously in unfamiliar territory here, but by the sound of that it would mean that an image shot with my digital camera (of a site for instance), and then brought into Maxwell Render to make it a .hdr file is not going to give me a "high quality" hdr. Looks like I'll have to do some research on this...anywhere in particular you can suggest I look right off?

You should use good quality HDR images for best lighting, you can start looking here:
http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... 19&t=32375

You won't be able to expose the exterior correctly and also the interior at the same time, in photography what you would do is take two photos - one exposed for the interior, which makes the exterior overexposed and one for the exterior, which makes the interior underexposed and then merge the two photos to have a (somewhat) high dynamic range image. Photoshop CS2 and above can do this and there are other applications that specialize just in this. Since you can use multilight in Maxwell you can easily get those two shots from the same render and combine them later.

Thx Mihai. I found a site which had a very helpful tutorial on how to get a decent hdr image with Photoshop CS3 or 4. I'll have to remember next time when shooting a site for that purpose to get the different exposures of the same shot. Joe