Ongoing - HDR Lighting For Poser/DAZ Studio WorldBalls

I recently created a couple of scripts to make the generation of worldball environment sets much less tedious/error-prone. Once I'd got these scripts the daunting prospect of going through the whole tedious procedure several times at different exposure settings to create an HDR light probe suddenly became irrelevant. The long-winded, tedious, error-prone procedure had prevented me from doing any proper investigation. But now, with the help of modified versions of those scripts, I can create HDR light probes for Poser and for DAZ Studio's UberEnvironment2 in around 15 minutes. This has allowed me to play around a bit more and work on dentifying the best Terragen Classic exposure settings, Poser root light node settings, and DAZ Studio UberEnvironment2 light settings.


There are several vital elements that helped me get to where I am now, so credit where it's due:

• Horo's "HDRShop v.1.0.3 – 1. Creating an HDRI" helped me get the HDRShop part of my process working - many thanks Horo!
• Vincebagna's "How to use UberEnvironment2 with your own HDR pictures" at RDNA helped me get the procedure for creating a correctly formatted .tif sorted.
• And my own "UberEnvironment2 - Can Anybody Explain The Result Of This Simple Test?" thread at DAZ3D prompted lots of useful input from many people (especially Horo and Takeo.Kensei)
• The realization that HDR images used for diffuse lighting are usually very small (512x512 or less) - many, many places confirmed this!

I found that using negative Terragen Classic exposure settings was the biggest mistake - these made my HDR much too dark and I couldn't get things to look any good in Poser/DAZ Studio no matter how much I fiddled and tweaked. However, when I tried using just four exposure settings of  0, +1, +2 and +3 the end results in Poser/DAZ Studio were much better. A picture speaks a thousand words, so here are two Poser 9 renders (top) and two DAZ Studio renders (bottom - DR3.duf) using my worldball with a new HDR set that I'm working on:

In both cases the worldball sun is switched off, so the only light is from the HDR.
- In Poser this HDR light is my worldball IBL with my HDR angular map plugged into it. (Root light node intensity=1.8, Contrast=0.5,AO swithed on with default settings)
- In DAZ Studio both worldball sun and IBL are turned off, and I've used the UberEnvironment2 with my 'convolved ue2ified TIF'* as the IBL. (intensity scale=150%, contrast=75%, 4xHi quality, occlusion with directional shadows)

I'm very pleased with the results!


*I know what that means! ;o)