Thinking @ Speed of Light

I was getting a bit annoyed trying to explain a few people (you know who you are) that the iPhone camera is not different from their phone cameras (also having a 5MP sensor) and that with just a bit of hard-work they can also get HDR pictures. All u need is an app that does that for you ... Ok fine for all the people who do not want to install an app on their phone or want to create HDR using a normal "Digi-cam" there is another way. You can use Photoshop (or GIMP for you Open Source freaks) and make yourself a an HDR image. The process is fairly simple but this post is just for the above mentioned people and for all the others who are oblivious to the fact that this can actually be done. So is what u need :              1) A camera that has adjustable exposure settings               2) Photoshop or GIMP (why did they have to name it that?)          ...

Just to clarify "Ogre-Rig" is not some wired space age monster that lives in the jungle and renders 3D images for fun it is just a normal computer that has been named so as it belongs to a friend Ogre (Mudit Gupta) . Moving on. Here i setup a scene using an earlier made model of a  Ferrari F430 . But this time instead of using a daylight system in 3Ds max i decided to use HDRI with Final Gather to light up the scene.I took me a bit of time to get the settings right and the shadow generation part was really annoying but i finally did it (Will post a tutorial soon explaining how to make your own HDRI image lighting with shadows and what exactly is HDRI ). Note: I downloaded the HDRI images from www.openfootage.net . The specifics of the scene are: Polygons : 202092 Lights : 5 (Ray Traced Shadows) , 1 HDRI Lighting system Image Resolution : 3840x2560 Renderer : Mental Ray 3Ds Max Version : 2011 Image Precision (Anti-aliasing) : High ( Min =1 , Max=16) Final Gather...