[Half Life]

In the other thread on this I came to the decision that I wanted to get the HDR Light Studio for Maxwell Studio so I can take advantage of the new integration of the Live plugin with the Fire Preview engine.

I'm going to do some instructional videos about using it in Studio to share (free) on the Maxwell THINK! site as well the HDR LS site... this way if anybody has questions about how/why it works they can just see it in action.

Before I begin I'd like to hear from other Maxwell users what questions and concerns they'd like to see answered in the videos -- also if anybody has any scenes they'd like me to take a shot at in the videos, just PM me a link and I'll do my best to work them in so you can see it working on your geometry/materials... I'll make sure to give credit for anything I do use.

Let me know either here or in a PM if you have anything for me, I'll be testing and tweaking for the next week or so and then I'll get started recording.

Best,
Jason.

[Greg]

Looking forward to it Jason. I bought HDR Light Studio a while ago (great program and great guys behind it) but simply haven't had time to work with it and 2.5.1 yet.

-Greg

[Half Life]

Hi Greg,

I think you'll enjoy it -- I'm currently still in the testing phase, here some early returns... this is a test object I use often which I built in Sketchup and have applied a glass material from my RAL library:



Which used a EXR made in HDR LS that looked like this:


For those of you who want to see how the lighting was setup here is the HDi file:
http://www.spotoarts.com/jason/HDRLS/box1.HDi

Best,
Jason.

[Half Life]

I tend to naturally go for a very over-the-top type lighting that is overly sexed -- like rock music or something...It's a pretty ingrained habit from all my years of comics, fantasy and sci-fi art gigs.



I'm pretty sure nobody is interested in seeing this type of stuff here, but if anybody is, let me know and I'll cover it too.

Best,
Jason.

[Hervé]

pretty cool Jason... could you make a render with their captured spheron hdr's.. like the spot light.. or the window...

[Half Life]

Hey Herve,

I've played with those a few times and I'll make a point of getting something for you -- BTW I asked and they use 9 exposures for those HDR's so I don't think it is spheron based.

It was asked in the other thread as to how overexposure was handled, so I created a setup to create a pleasing "artsy" overposure/high contrast look:



The setup is dirt simple -- just a softbox with a orange synthetic over the top... here's the HDi file for whoever wants it:

http://www.spotoarts.com/jason/HDRLS/wa ... ntrast.HDi

Best,
Jason.

[Half Life]

Here's the last of this type -- I think I've pretty well got a handle on most of the ways this compares (or doesn't) to Maxwell emitter-plane based lighting:



I'm going to take a harder look at the "picture lights" and then spend some time with the background settings and combinations with custom lighting.

Best,
Jason.

[Half Life]

So I did testing of the picture lights and I can say the spotlights, softboxes and arrays are all very useful and highly optimized... I'm less enthused about the window elements, there were 2 shaded versions I might use but honestly unless you were compositing these against a pre-existing HDR background I don't think they make alot of sense.

That said these are FAST (and I mean fast!) to render -- this render sample took about 10 minutes to setup from a new blank file in Studio with Fire and less than 10 minutes to render to SL 20 doing a normal render (benchmark of 3365!?!):



BTW, thats not noise -- it's my RAL carpaint flake material.

Here's a lowrez preview of the EXR file -- I used showroom glazing, spotlights and tube arrays from the picture lights library:



Here's the HDi file:

http://www.spotoarts.com/jason/HDRLS/sc ... owroom.HDi

Best,
Jason.

[David Solito]

Thank you Jason for the demo.
Can you try some SSS?

David

[Hervé]

hey Jason, thanks for you tests...

well 9 Fstops....? that's not a lot of dynamic I'd say... spheron usually have around 24 Fstops.... I am just wondering how do they deal with only 9 little Fstops....

(and I believe for the price they should have rented a spheron and shoot mayny hdri...)

Thanks Jason..

[Seggy]

Hello,

I'm Mark from Lightmap, we develop HDR Light Studio.
I thought I could provide some information here.

We do have a spheron camera in-house, but these are really designed for capturing whole enivironments, not 'front on' light sources. You get much better results shooting the lights straight on with a high end (and hi-res) pro digital camera and combining the exposures.

It is important for a spheron camera to capture 26 f-stops because it's taking an picture of an entire enviornment in 1 shot, including the lights and areas in deep shadow. But within a single light source seen within that image, you would not get 26 stops of information.

Regarding the studio lighting we have captured, then these were shot from an exposure level that went from fully black in steps upwards until the image was total white out. So we caputred all the range availalble. I have made some exmaple crops of 2 of our studio lights here for you to look at - http://www.hdrlightstudio.com/Picture_l ... amples.zip. Please do examine them for yourself and see what you think. The numbers of exposures required depended on the light.

Example 1 provided, The close up on the spot light bulb, demonstrates best the range we have managed to capture from our studio lights. You can see every detail as you look at this image through different exposures. This is the quality level we have worked to for our studio lighting.

For those who would prefer not to download the image, I have created a LDR image here, stepping through the exposures:


I hope this helps you get an idea of the attention to detail we have gone to creating the studio lights.
Regards
Mark

[Half Life]

To be clear I did say 9 exposures not 9 F-stops -- generally to create a HDR you would create a "bracketed photo" of several regular exposures skipping a number of F-stops between and using software to combine all those exposures into a single HDR image.

3 exposures will often do well enough -- 9 exposures was the most you could have last time I checked (obviously that is outdated information-- it's been a few years since I made my own).

As Mark said a Spheron takes it's image all in one go -- which would not need multiple exposures, I didn't point out the exposure count to imply the quality of the picture lights was inferior, just to be precise since Spheron (I want one!) is a very particular imaging technology separate from standard HDR. I don't know enough about the topic to judge the relative quality other than to say the picture lights work as advertised.

Honestly, I'm much more interested in the possibility of being able to create and use my own "picture lights" than any pre-made options... not that I could, because I don't have any proper equipment, but because I could possibly take chunks out of HDR's I own and composite them on-the-fly or render out HDR/EXR lights from Maxwell to make into custom picture lights.

Best,
Jason.

[Half Life]

Here's a couple of SSS render samples -- sorry for the noise but I didn't have time to render these to high sample levels... the render time here is roughly similar to what you would expect with any SSS material and moderately complex geometry in most lighting circumstances.

The material used is one of the SSS Plastics from my RAL line (color 7032).

I would say that Fire doesn't do very well with SSS materials and so I would set up my lighting using a regular material and switch out before render time.

This is the same lighting as the last:


Here's a setup where I was playing with simulating fire and moonlight:


Best,
Jason.

[Half Life]

So I broke out the big guns for my latest SSS test -- that's right... I did a dragon



SSS wizard preset "Flint" -- SL21... I could let it bake for a while longer but I have other fish to fry

Best,
Jason.

[tom]

So cool!