TurboCAD v10 HDR Tutorial

Uses TurboCAD's original environments and materials
Diamond picture

Original by Alfred Kypta
Edited by John R. Sollman

Basic requirements for "Image Based Lighting"
  1. Place one standard light in the scene and turn it off, especially if you are not going to use any additional lights with IBL. Bypassing this procedure will lead to the installation of default lights, even if you answered NO in the warning message.
  2. You must use the "Render Scene Environment" and assign an appropriate image in the Global Environment page as well as select Environment in the Background page.
  3. For Image Based Lighting to work, you must create a global Luminance in the "Render Scene Luminance" and set it to Simple Environment. If a scene has Global Environment set, then Simple Environment forces the environment to shine, and controls its luminosity. It does not matter, on which format (HDRI or LDRI) that Global Environment is built, but HDRI is still presumed to be the main one. (Vlad Veselov)
Render the scene in Raytrace Full with Perspective.
That's it for the very basics of it.

Quick Start
  1. Create a new file in TC or if you are using the downloadable tutorial you can load the HDR Tutorial.tcw file.
  2. Add Objects to the scene.
  3. Add materials to the objects.
  4. Add one standard light and turn it Off. If you bypass this step above, TurboCAD will create default lights even if you answer no to the warning dialog box
DD palette - Lights

  1. Add a Global Environment...
Options - Render Scene Environment dialog
Here, for simplicity, I used the Ginza environment from "Cubical Maps" category.
You can also create a new Environment and use your own HDR images.

Note that I have increased the Intensity of the environment to 3 (default is 1)
Environment dialogs
All other options are left at the TC default settings.

  1. Create a new "Render Scene Luminance" Category and Luminance.
Options - Render Scene Luminance dialog

This newly created Luminance is the key to lighting your scene with
the High Dynamic Range (HDR) of the HDR image.

Apply "Simple Environment" to the newly created Luminance.
Checkmark the "Shadows" box.
Change "Shadow Type" to Hard.
Set "Shadow Resolution" to 0 (zero).
HDRI Dialog
  1. Render your scene, using the "Ray Trace Full" rendering mode with Perspective turned on. Some of the settings which I have not mentioned here are self explanatory and others are discussed at depth on the forum. Perhaps I will add a list of the functions when everyone is sure what they are actually do. :))

Well that is pretty much it for a start on HDRI based rendering; play and have fun. I hope this will give anyone a quick start to HDRI.
Please give John R. Sollman a big thanks for editing and re writing this tutorial
Alfred