Hi i am wondering what are all or most of the ways to light a scene professionally ?

How do you set up a scene to use HDRI map in houdini ? Is this applied to a hemisphere and do you need to turn it to a type of area light to work correctly? Example files would be helpful

Thanks

The easiest way is to stick it into an env-light..

For an “IBL”-type of lighting workflow there's a tutorial DVD advertised on the sidefx frontpage that deals with convoluted HDRs and normal lookups.

Does the area light give every reflective surface the hdri by default ? As i have noticed that some shaders dont have the hdri option.

Im wanting to do a couple of projects one been static and another been animated, i am wondering for the static one do i only need 1x HDRI ? and for the animated one do i need a Light probe ?

Thanks

what do you mean by 1xHDRI comparing to Light probe?

Light probe is 360° HDRI and you need just 1 to light the scene/provide the environment for reflections/refractions

it doesn't depend on if your scene is static or animated, you still can use 1 HDRI map, but if you environment was changing (mainly lighting) then you may consider using sequence of HDRIs to match the environment as closely as possible, but only if you really need to. Just start with one HDRI and some custom lights and you'll see

I am wanting to create an animated scene like this one with the neon pantha: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4P7fa-mDXY [youtube.com]

Q1. I am wondering if the panorama is mapped to the inside of a sphere ? would this not cause problems for the camera ?

Q2. Also i was under the impression that the way to create a light probe was to take photos of a reflective ball as shown in this tutorial: http://projects.ict.usc.edu/graphics/HDRShop/ [projects.ict.usc.edu]

But from looking at the houdini help file, the sample DOSH files are created by taking 6 different directional photos and merged using the isixpack. Does one have more benefits than the other ?

Thanks