Photography - Create Dome Panorama HDRI for IBL

Tue Apr 18, 2017 9:04 am

Hi,

I have been making my own HDR dome panoramas for a while now, to use as IBL enviroment. And I am thinking about how to make them better not higher resolution, they are at 24k as is.

I have been making these images of 3-exposure stops (normal, under and over-exposed). And I am thinking of going up to 5 or even 7 stops, to get a higher dynamic range.

My questions are:
* Does Octane handle a 7 stop HDR dome panorama for IBL image.
* My Nikon D800 has 14,4 EVs in a single image, and does that meen that a 7 stop image will go to like 60-100 EVs when done? It will not be linear as they will get some overlaps in exposure. The human eye can se about 12EVs (or is it 24?) and a computerscreen can handle ?? (I dont know), so it it worth it?
* Should the output to Octane be an EXR/HDR file in 32 bit and unclamped? To get the best result.
* Should I limit the histogram on the EXR/HDR file to somthing like 5-247 to not use unreal values in this unbiased render system? Or does Octane fix this for me?

Why I am asking this is to find out if it's worth the extra memory usage on the GPU/s and time to make them.