BMW-Z4 (painting with light)

"The Z4 was designed by Chris Bangle and began the controversy over his "flame surfacing" design and aggressive styling choices, which can also be seen on most modern BMW cars, most noticeably the 7 Series and 5 Series. As of 2007, the entire BMW car line, including the BMW 3 Series and X5 SAV, had incorporated Chris Bangle's design theme." (complete wiki here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_Z4)

just sharing an example of using HDR image in a 3d/CG scene. the HDR image is not seen here but i used it to simulate light and the reflecting environment. how the HDR looks like is somewhat similar to the background image, only that its a 16-bit floating image format like RAW(background is only 8-bit).


just like shooting/photography, i had to key-in the appropriate f-stop/shutter/iso/wb values in the software's camera parameters to get the right exposure, as well as to set up sunlight with its correct physical value, plus additional lights (as strobes) to enhance the subject, the workflow is virtually painting with light.

HDR? Enter Paul Debevec. In 1997, he presented a paper at SIGGRAPH (PDF), the leading graphics industry expo. He brought forward the idea that a high range of brightness levels could be captured by combining multiple exposures of the same image, much like the pictures shown above. Differences in brightness at the various exposures could then be stored in what is known as a radiance map, which could be added to the picture's color information. For example, most pixels are stored as varying levels of red, green and blue, or RGB. With the generation of a radiance map, a fourth value, A, could be added to each pixel, and the resulting file stored in an RGBA format. (taken from and more here: http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/lostcoast.ars/2)


(above) Paul Debevec enjoying prawn mee soup and Tiger Beer in one of the hawkers in Singapore. Who says HDRI imaging should be glamorous?