I've been creating full spherical HDRI maps for many years now, but lately I've been a little obsessed with creating full spherical HDRI time-lapses. These are very difficult to create if you want the full dynamic range without any flickering in your lighting. The easiest way to produce them is by using a 8mm spherical fish-eye lens and simply shooting straight up into the sky, this creates a single frame with a round image that has complete coverage of the sky, but this will waste a large portion of the image with black pixels, and image quality along the horizon with a 8mm lens simply isn't good.

Because of these limitations, I have developed a technique that has none of these drawbacks, which means I can make them in a better quality and in a higher resolution. At the moment each HDRI image has more than double the amount of pixels than the nearest competitor, which gives you the freedom to point the camera anywhere you like.

The preview video above has been rendered using just the HDRI files for lighting, reflections and backdrop. The shadows are crisp due to the high dynamic range of the image, and the backdrop is detailed due to the high resolution. It's rendered using Vray 3.0 with Exponential Colormapping, Bruteforce for primary lighting and Lightcache for secondary lighting. Rendertime at 1080p on an I7 was 1 minute.

When purchasing this product you will receive a text file with information on how to download the .EXR file through an FTP server. The total dataset is close to 40GB, so expect above average download times. On the FTP a low-resolution sequence has been made available as well, you can download this first to get up and running quickly and then switch seamlessly when the full resolution files has been downloaded.

Fun fact: The total file space taken to create the final .EXR sequence is 2,9 terabytes!