HDR cubemaps for IBL Workflow

lordsme

Hi everyone,
I'm looking for the best workflow to create HDR cubemaps for my IBL shaders (Maya & OGRE).
I'm experiencing a lot of troubles, I have to use too many different softwares and the process is very time consuming.
Here's my workflow at the moment, the goal is to obtain a DDS HDR cubemap to be used as environment for a CgFX IBL shader.

- create the HDR scene in HDRLightStudio, export an latitude-longitude .hdr
- use HDRShop (the old free edition) to transform the image into a .hdr cubemap
- use CubemapGen to get a diffusely convolved version of the image and save again as 16bit or 32 bit per channel .dds

Can you give me some advice to get a better workflow? Which software do you use for the same purpose?
Thank you!

kodde

Can the CGFX-plugin load and use a hdr format in Maya to begin with?

lordsme

Hi Kodde, yes I know that Maya can't, I use an LDR version of the cubemap there. But I use the HDR version in the final rendering engine (OGRE).

Seggy

Hi, Mark here from HDR Light Studio... Lordsme, please do contact us through support@hdrlightstudio.com, it would be great to understand your workflow issue and solve it for you.

lordsme

Hello Seggy,
basically it would be very handy if HDRLightStudio could export cubemaps too... the best would be a menu to choose which format to use (lat/long, vert cubemap, sphere, etc).Now we have to use an external software only to do this panoramic transformation...

Shrike

Does it have to be cubemaps ? If youre only using it in maya then they can be spherical aswell no ?

I generate custom HDRIs in Cinema 4D, by using a sphere, putting a 100% reflective material on it, and then bake the reflection as a simple bitmap in HDR format

Edit: Ah youre using ogre aswell, hmm it seems that there is no simple way of generating cubes as far as I know

Ive been thinking about a way of baking on a hexaeder, (since its round it will gather all rays, but uses a cubic topology) and then form it into a cube after baking or something in that matter, but it dosnt all make sense yet

Edit: Actually if you change the topology afterwards (and the sides are on the right spot, just pressed auto UV now)
that could actually work (im sure maya can do the same thing)



Edit2: now that i think of it, youd actually only had to unwrap one hexaeder pixel-perfectly into the format of your cubemap (cross, horizontal etc) and then use that all along to bake all the HDRIs easily into a cube. If you then had a sperical one and want a cube from it, you just would have to put a sky or sphere in maya and bake it to your UVd hexaeder
(if you try that out and it works, please share )