What are HDRIs?
HDRIs are special images that contain a higher range of brightness values than regular images. This allows them to capture the lighting of a real-life environment, which makes them ideal to simulate environments in a 3D scene in Blender. An HDRI will create a background in our world and project light into our scene, which allows us to complete our projects with better lighting and backgrounds.
Figure 12.1 shows a simple scene that has an HDRI applied as an environment texture.
Figure 12.1 – A simple scene with an HDRI environment
As you can see, the metal sphere looks photorealistic simply because of the lighting and shading cast onto the object from the environment.
Figure 12.2. shows what an HDRI looks like when viewed as a regular image. HDRIs are 360-degree images that can be imported into Blender as a spherical light source.
Figure 12.2 – An HDRI image
To understand how HDRIs work,...
