Castle: Bryce HDRI background test

After using Bryce for years, I had found that its atmospheric model had not much improved and was lacking, especially compared to other software like Terragen.
What was the most annoying to me was that it took enormous efforts to get realistic clouds.
Here is an example of an IBL render with a classic Bryce sky.
This uses an HDR map made with a reflective ball. It is blurry and unusable as a background image.

I then found it was possible to take "normal" digital photographs and turn them into HDR images. Here is a first example.

The Digital photograph needs to have a sky devoid of any foreign object and located in the middle.

The modified sky shots are wide angle and high res (6 Mpix). The HDR images used can thus have very large solutions (2048*2048 pixels).
This is essential or the clouds of the background image are too blurry. 

With version 6.1, it is now possible to rotate the HDR image without rotating the whole scene and camera. This way I could position the clouds to get exactly the result I wanted.

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Horo
Posts: 2

Bryce IBL
Reply #1 on : Fri August 22, 2008, 09:50:10

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Thank you for showing these render tests. I've also experimented with the mirror ball and a 6 Mpix camera but switched to fisheye lens and a tripod with a spherical panorama head meanwhile. The best I can do are 8400 x 4200 pixel spherical panoramas and they transform nicely to 6400 px diameter light probes. This is the most Bryce can take though the scene cannot be saved anymore but it can be rendered. If you're interested, you can have a look at www.horo.ch the topics Raytracing and HDRI & Panoramas may be the most interesting. Even at a size of 6400 px for the light probe a bit of blurriness can still be detected (see http://www.bryce5.com/details.php?image_id=3117) for an example. Thanks again for the examples above, they are most instructive.