Creating my own HDRI environment for sIBL

[5kywalker]

Could anybody explain briefly the best solution for creating a personalized sIBL for  my own studio.

I will be photographing and using 3D images of my products.

I'm unclear as to whether I should use a Chrome ball or my fisheye?

I have Photomatix, PTGui, CS5 and I have built my 3D images on Solidworks.

Cheers.

[waters]

I am planning on doing the same thing; a HDR spherical of my shop with my backdrop in place, and then a better shot of my backdrop for a back plate. As I understand it, the HDR gives me the lighting and the rendering is done with the back plate. After one day of trying Key Shot I am very happy with the results and still have much to learn.

[5kywalker]

Hi waters,

It sounds like we are two newbies trying to achieve similar results.

I just did a pano of my studio, but as you can see the results were very poor.
http://flic.kr/p/8VBPPe

I will try to find a suitable tutorial that will demonstrate how to create a spherical pano. Once I have this perfected I will build in an extra 4 shots per sector of the pano and make it into a HDR.

You mention a better shot of your backdrop for your back plate. i'm not sure what you mean by this. Could you explain?

Good luck and if you make any important break through I'd love to share our growing knowledge.

Cheers.

[waters]

You may want to check out http://www.panoguide.com/ for lots of info on panoramas. With the 10.5 you can get a very nice spherical. Nodal Ninja makes very nice pano heads. They are between product lines, but the NN5 is great, and coupled with looking at Panoguide you should be up to speed in a few short months! As I understand it, the HDR panorama is used to illuminate the scene, but not as a back plate, i.e., whatever lighting is in your HDR will be the lighting in your rendering. The back plate, shot when you do your panorama, with a normal ( less distorted ) lens, is what will be in your rendered image, as sphericals don't translate well to a normal projection. The HDRI handbook explains this well. I'm not sure if Key Shot plays with Sibl.