Very cool trick for creating your own HDRI backgrounds

[Kaare Baekgaard]

I wanted to make a renderworks backround, that was blurred but I don't have the software to do it - or so I thought...

In a stroke of inspiration, I placed a sphere in empty space and gave it a mirror texture with 10% blur.

Then I set the background to the HDRI, that I wanted to give a blur.

Then I set the perspective to very narrow (50) and cropped the view to fit the sphere in front view.

Then I rendered the sphere and exported the square image in the High Dynamic Range Image format

Then I imported the resulting HDR image back into a new HDRI background.

And presto! - I have now created my own HDRI background with a faux-blur perfect for making fast renderings of stainless steel objects.

That got me thinking:

Some of you architect guys & girls go through a lot of pain to make really nice exteriors and interiors - and I am always short of good HDRI-backgrounds.

Can any of you be talked into placing a mirrorball (whitout the blur) into one of your models and post the resulting HDR-image in this forum?

Thanks.

Edited December 5, 2010 by Kaare Baekgaard

[cad@sggsa]

Good day

Could you post a render of what this blur effect looks like please.