Hi Jason,

Nice technique with the re-projection. Certainly deals with the problem of 
spacial uniformity. The problem is, as soon as actual geometry gets involved, 
you're getting somewhat software-specific. Luxology has branched off their modo 
environment presets from our smart IBL idea, by including scene geometry. We're 
not planning to do this, we would like to keep everything referenced in 
image-space for reasons of simplicity and portability. We will, however, 
include photographic back plates in the near future. As long as they're shot in 
the vicinity of the main panorama, we can align a backplate using Hugin's image 
stack, and then use the actual recorded FOV versus the calculated FOV to 
triangulate a relative matching camera position.

If you're rendering glossy materials, the placement of the lights becomes 
rather important, and should be adjustable. There was a recent paper on that: 
http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/resources/ReflectionEditing/
Not production-ready yet, though. So far your workflow is what comes closest, 
and is actually used a lot. The folks at Digital Domain have developed a 
workflow where they routinely separate the brightest lights on separate pieces 
of geometry, essentially creating floating textured light polys so they can 
adjust placements. They use Nuke for that, but it's rather easy in any 3d app.

In terms of capturing: Since there is very little time on set, I do still rely 
on auto-bracketing. Directors and grips get antsy when you fiddle around with a 
laptop, or when the setup takes more than 10 seconds. So 9er brackets with +- 1 
EV is all I can realistically get, anything more would require me to break out 
the Promote Control, which I try to avoid for reliability reasons. Turns out, 
if you pick your battle, Nikon's 9 frames are often sufficient when you align 
the entire sequence to the brightest light source. For lighting purpose, it's 
totally fine if the "metered middle exposure" ends up on the dark end of the 
bracketing set. You might miss some of the shadows, but they barely contribute 
to the lighting anyway. Here are two slides illustrating the different ranges:
http://www.hdrlabs.com/files/screenshots/shoot4bg-20110126-111240.png
http://www.hdrlabs.com/files/screenshots/shoot4light-20110126-110907.png

.Blochi

On Jan 26, 2011, at 8:27 AM, jason huang wrote:

> Hey, Bloch,
> 
> Thanks a lot for all these tips. Very valuable to me.
> 
> Actually, just like you mentioned, I converted these light sources
> into CG lights to better address GI sampling issue and to have more
> flexible control on lighting.
> For interior shot, I reconstruct the set as rough geometry via
> photogrammetry and project fill-light-only environment map onto these
> geometries to capture animated environment maps for ambient lighting.
> Then, I cut light sources from the original environment map and set up
> area light sources with these cut-out HDR textures based on original
> lighting apparatus real-world positions.
> 
> I have thought about requesting this kind of feature to be added into
> future sIBL sets (for interior shot) for physically-based lighting
> setup. But I have no clue how to approach it as it involves much more
> preparations than simply separating diffuse and reflection component
> of the lighting as well as extracting light sources as traditional CG
> point, spot, or directional lights.
> 
> Best,
> Jason
> 
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