Hey guy’s,

I ended up doing this light dome after I was experimenting with different approaches to environment lighting. The environment light in Houdini is good but to the expense of render time like in all 3D packages.
Then I tried the shader approach from 3DBuzz which is very nice. So I thought of starting from there.

After doing some more research about HDRI’s , like almost everybody who does, and ended up on the site of Paul Debevec [gl.ict.usc.edu]. While reading I stumbled on a link to the site of Francesco Banterle [banterle.com] who created a plugin “Median Cut” for HDRShop. This plugin uses the median cut algorithm to analyse a HDRI image and output light positions and light colors for every light.

Now my little project got a whole new direction.
My goal now was to create a digital asset who can readin the file exported from the plugin and create the lights automatically. There are probably several way’s to do this but I chose to do it with python.

Below you can find a link to a preview of the workflow.
After I’m back from holiday (05-Jul) I’m going to finish it.

http://vimeo.com/12804994 [vimeo.com]

Cheers

I thought HDRshop already had a way to output a script that runs in Houdini? LightGen but I guess it's fallen into disuse.

Hey Edward, I didn't knew about LightGen.
But like you said I don't think it's used allot.

Hey guy's,
One of the problems I'm still having is with the shadow maps.
I can't seem to get them working.
On pointLight_01 the shadow map doesn't work and on pointLight_02 it does.
Does anybody understand why this is happening.
I have attached a sample file.
Cheers

claudio_101
Hey guy's,
One of the problems I'm still having is with the shadow maps.
I can't seem to get them working.
On pointLight_01 the shadow map doesn't work and on pointLight_02 it does.
Does anybody understand why this is happening.
I have attached a sample file.
Cheers

Well … not exactly sure what you mean by not working but I did notice that when you look thru pointLight_01 there is nothing visible. Therefore, your shadow map will be blank.

thx for that rdms.
The difference between the 2 lights is that the first one is created with a script while the second one is placed manually.
And that's my fault, I didn't took in account the rotation of the lights I just positioned them.
Well I know what to do now! :wink:
thx again.

Hey guy's, I finally found the time to finish the asset.
I uploaded it to the exchange for those interested in using it.
If you find some bugs please let me know.
Cheers

H11 v1.2 is on the exchange

• - Added Lightgen support. Exported text files from the HDRShop Lightgen plugins are now supported.
  - Added the “Dome Scale” parameter.
  - Added X:180 & Y:-90 rotation for the lightgen dome.
  - Removed the Transform tab.

H11 v2.0 is on the exchange

• - Supports the new MedianCut SSE v1.6.1 plugin.
  - Cleaned up some code.