Making the HDRI interface more intuitive...

[anders smith]

I seem to be struggling every time I use the HDRI editor.
My problem is to understand where the different lights are and how it's oriented.
Degrees are confusing/unintuitive for me as I don't use them in setting up the rendering image and requires some back and forth for me to understand orientation....

How about making a centerline pointer in the HDRI window to show where the camera is looking or more elaborately have the image in the HDRI editor window move when I rotate it, so that where I'm looking in the rendering window is always in the middle of the HDRI window..... I'm sure there are many ways to do this and if there already is some feature I just haven been able to turn on, please enlighten me as anything would be a help to speed up my workflow.

thanks
anders

[mattjgerard]

Yeah, I was just about to start tucking into this problem as well, as I'm taking the advice to the veterans on here and creating my own HDRI's . But you are right its a bit confusing when dragging a new pin around in the viewport and watching it jump all over the place in the HDRI editor. I can't see the relationship between the two. I though there was a tutorial for that somewhere, but can't find it right now.

[Will Gibbons]

I understand where you're coming from. Think of it like a map of earth. It helps to have your environment/HDRI visible in the Real-Time view and be zoomed out a  bit to learn about the relationship of spherical vs planar coordinates.

I encourage you to use the set highlight button we made which allows you to simply click on part of your model that you want illuminated... then the pin is placed in the proper location on the HDRI. From there, it's easier to tweak. You can also press the 'set highlight' button when a pin is selected in the HDRI preview and click and drag in the Real-time view to 'drag' the highlight around/over your model.

[mattjgerard]

Yep, that's what I've been doing, and for the most part it works really well, so that's a great feature to have. Would like to know more in depth about how the two relate though. Might have to do some expierimenting like you said and zoom way out so I can see the globe and see where the pins are going when I drag around.

Would be nice to figure out how the HDRI editor places pins, so I can add back light pins in the editor.