Pretty much as the title. I want to bake my scene as an HDRI, and then use it as environment lighting map, to save future render time.

Basically this:



But in Houdini (preferably Karma/Mantra). How could I do this?

For mantra, change the camera projection to polar and place it where you want the light probe to be. Then render with mantra using this polar camera. To use the resulting render as a light, use an environment light with the render as the environment image. It may need to be rotated by some factor of 90 degrees as it may be offset out of the box. It might be possible with karma, but I'm not sure if it has polar projections yet.

It's also possible to bake a cube map from an object in a mantra scene.
https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/render/envmaps.html#generating-cubic-environment-maps [www.sidefx.com]

jsmack
For mantra, change the camera projection to polar and place it where you want the light probe to be. Then render with mantra using this polar camera. To use the resulting render as a light, use an environment light with the render as the environment image. It may need to be rotated by some factor of 90 degrees as it may be offset out of the box. It might be possible with karma, but I'm not sure if it has polar projections yet.

It's also possible to bake a cube map from an object in a mantra scene.
https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/render/envmaps.html#generating-cubic-environment-maps [www.sidefx.com]

Thank you very much. Are there any fundamental pros/cons between cubic and spherical (equirectangular?) environment maps?