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HDRI in Blender

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Just watched www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4IN4V… by blendernerd, which is a good fast intro tutorial to using HDRI lightmaps in Blender.  Downloads are in the text on the Youtube page.

But basically everything in that video is in this picture.

Hit the "world" button in Nodes editor to change nodes to, well, world nodes, and enable nodes for the world.  Load an environment texture, plug it in to the background.  Optionally, rotate the texture coordinates and adjust strength as desired.  Optionally, turn on Multiple Importance and set resolution equal to the resolution of your environment texture to reduce artifacts.

This is basically the cube map lighting that I've played with in the past, but with 64bpp color.  Stable GIMP release won't read HDRIs, but the dev branch is supposed to (downloading right now from www.gimp.org/downloads/devel/ )  HDRIs are available plenty of places; the one I used is CC0, and it's not hard to find more that are CC0.  Most are created via photography.  You should also be able to render your Blender scenes into HDRI environments, although I haven't yet done that.

64bpp color is actually pretty important when you start using complicated shaders.  The actual amount of light in our environment spans a range much larger than 0 to 255.  There are a lot of effects that just can't be done with 32bpp color.  A good example of this is a one-way mirror-- part of the reason why it's reflective is because the amount of light passing through is so much less than the amount of light reflecting, but light does pass through, and if you wanted to create a scene where a mirror was slowly revealed to be one-way, you'd need high color depth to be able to do that.  Transparency->reflection via Fresnel is especially limited by color depth, but any kind of shading should see improvement through the use of higher color resolution.

Environmental lighting is a great way to light things.  First, it's way easier than tweaking a million individual light sources.  The entire light in your scene can be represented in a single image.  The lighting will be more consistent between scenes when lighting with well-made HDRIs.  And HDRI environment mapping can be done in real-time renderers without deviating much from how it acts in a raycasting engine like Blender.

If you're not rendering in Blender, but you're using Blender to bake textures, and you're baking any lighting information into your textures, HDRIs are a fast, easy, accurate way to get believable ambient into your textures.
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A 3-point lighting .blend file, for purposes of comparison. :-)