Welcome to another tutorial in which I demonstrate my obsession with Cycles :)
In this tutorial you’ll learn how to:
- use an image to light a scene in cycles
- adjust the contrast of the image inside Blender
- create your own HDR image from photos you take and a simple Christmas decoration using HDR Shop


It would be nice if you made the tutorial without using software that is only available for non-commercial use. Nice otherwise.
If you can find me something like that then I'll rerecord the tut :)
There is this QTPFSGUI for Linux, since we are using a free open source software, we should use this one, uh... All of us are using Linux, right?
http://qtpfsgui.sourceforge.net/
Hugin can make panorama_formats
http://hugin.sourceforge.net/ GNU GPL
http://wiki.panotools.org/Panorama_formats
Its just stupid blender is an open software which can be used for anything not just non-commercial.
Can I sell my Blender creations?
Anything you create with Blender - whether it's graphics, movies, scripts, exported 3d files or the .blend files themselves - is your sole property, and can be licensed or sold under any conditions you prefer.
And this is from the official blender site.
How is your client going to know (or care) what software you use to create the thing you created?
I went thru this mental anguish when I stopped doing 3ds max and started with Blender.
@Davos Yes you can sell anything you make with Blender
If you re record the tut, might you show a way to make the image map on a program that works for mac as well? HDR shop does not apparently release any software for mac, so I was unable to follow the tutorial through the environment mapping part (which I was SOOO excited about!)
Thanks for this Greg, looking forward to the next Blender Cookie tut, the orange tut you did was great btw.
Thanks Greg :)
just get an hdr map lol
Video has no sound.
It does :)
I'm so sorry about that - it was totally my fault! I accidently muted the vimeo-player but I didn't realize that at first.
No worries :)
Openfootage has a great selection of free HDR images as well as defuse lighting maps, all free.
Now your thinking in Cycles
This is for the spelling nazis
"Now *you're thinking in ycles."
I second Openfootage.
http://www.openfootage.net/
howdy, is there any way you can get it so that your camera is not in the image? or do you just take the picture from far away and zoom in?
Hi there, thank you very much for this tutorial