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Hi John,

The spherical wrap around part is a function of Shaderlight.  You can technically use any image for the lighting background (For example I’ve used a solid, single tone, dark blue jpeg to simulate starlight).

The best lighting results will be from the .hdr file as this contains the most/best light data. 

Whichever image you use, it should look distorted when viewed flat such that when wrapped spherically the distortion is gone.  A flat image (i.e., standard photo taken with and standard camera setting) may become distorted when wrapped. 

Here’s an example of the type of distortion I’me describing: http://orig15.deviantart.net/edc6/f/2013/331/6/8/anvil___spherical_hdri_panorama_skybox_by_macsix-d6vv4hs.jpg

I hope this helps,
Andrew

Fantastic thanks Andrew,

Is there a particular image size / resolution that fits with Shaderlight? I’ve just tried one of my downloaded images and it appears way to big in the render window.

Regards,

John.

To be honest, I have no idea.  Maybe it scales itself based on the geometry?  Can you post an image of your render where it looks too big?

Hopefully, someone else can answer your question better (or better yet, it works itself out for you)

Hi all,

In addition to what Andrew has said, the important property of the image is that its aspect ratio is 2:1 - that is it is twice as wide as it is tall, otherwise it will probably appear distorted.

The resolution affects the quality of the background image (if the ‘Lighting Environment’ setting is used for the background), the detail of the lighting and possibly the sharpness of shadows cast by the sky-light: higher resolutions will allow smaller light sources to be represented and therefore result in sharper shadows.

For the best quality backgrounds, you would generally need an impractically large HDR image. For example, at SketchUp’s default field-of-view of 35˚ (vertically, around 60˚ horizontally for a wide-screen aspect ratio) and rendering at 1920 x 1080, the HDR would need to be at least 12000 x 6000 for the sharpest background. Such a large image would need a huge amount of memory to load, so, for general use, smaller images are necessary. The built-in HDRs are 2000 x 1000 (2048 x 1024 for the Moofe ones), which gives a reasonable compromise for most uses. The background will probably look a little fuzzy, but this can often be desirable to simulate the out-of-focus blur of a real-life camera and help the subject stand-out. For cases where a sharp background is desired, a high-res background plate can be specified separately to the environment map. A selection of backgrounds for the built-in environments can be downloaded from the Lighting Images page.

Regards,
Shaderlight support