Hi Biagio,
If you use the search options I have no problem to find the Picture viewer entry. In the Content of the Help, it is below the rendering now, have a look, thanks.
Please note that you can use a HDRI Probe image directly with the shrink projection on a sphere (I showed that in “Sassi’s Playground” in CV-old). Just try it. I consider that as a better way, as the conversations will lower the quality of course. None of these conversations are free of loss. The HDRI Cross could be used for a 6 plane projection, but that is some work and needs some care. To convert this to an 360º/180º panorama (Long/Lat.) for spherical projections lowers the quality as well. The quality loss is not a mistake of MAXON’s engineers, it is a typical loss that one has to expect by doing things like that.
Keep in mind that a spherically captured HDRI is correct for a single point in space and time, if done well. It is limited to this 4D point! This is especially true for reflections.
If possible shoot HDRI directly for the purpose that you need, e.g., in the highest possible resultion, to have enough resolution for all the pipeline losses on the way. Sometimes the windows for in-door shooting are just enough to have in HDRI. (Light sources should be replaced in an HDRI anyway with Light Objects, as HDRI do not have any light characteristics anymore (e.g. like spot or infinite) this is gone and only correct for a 4D point in space, where the capture camera was before.
BTW. I get not tired to give that hint. The “.hdr” is not a 32bit/c format, it is a 32bit/p format only. (c=channel, p=pixel). It is normally called RGBE.
Roughly twenty years ago the HDR format with 4 times 8bit/c were just fine. It has R,G,B as channel and a fourth one (E) to get the “floating numbers going. Even that is a brilliant trick, it is not on todays quality nor options at all. I found in pretty every second book about formats and photography, this given as a mistake. It surprises me how little people do research!!! Even some software companies don’t get the limitations of it. If you like to use future proof material, use OpenEXR. But be aware of the fact that some people just convert the limited HDR information to OpenEXR, which makes no sense what so ever.
There is another thing to consider while talking about HDRI, photographers have a very individual idea about HDRI. What we need here in 3D is a complete reproduction of light values (maybe excluding the Sun, in its full value, as that is currently not really practically). Anything that has tone mapping in it, is useless for 3D, which is a common practice in photography. To get a proper HDRI one needs more knowledge than shooting some exposure and merge these. Longer story, ... I will go into that later.
I make a differentiation between LDR, MDR and HDR. Where MDR stands for medium Dynamic range and the “L” means low, which is what you mostly get when people see that stuff.
There are many opinions about that. Of course that is part of something I work since a while. As book as well training for Cineversity. (Later this year.)
All the best
Sassi
