sprite
Just as we are clearing things up, HDRI is a form of texturing not lighting, you apply a texture to a shader then to a model and when you render it generates a reflection on the object.
Um... WHAT?!?
Okay.. you're makin' s**t up now...
High Dynamic Range Imagery. An image format (.hdr, .exr, .cin, etc) that contains more information than can be displayed on a normal 24-bit display (i.e. a television or computer monitor). For example, film. Let's say you're standing in a forest, and you shoot a picture of a tree silhouetted against the clear blue sky and sunny field behind it (I actually have this image if you'd care for me to demonstrate). If shot with a digital camera, you're stuck with whatever the picture looks like. If it's shot on film, you have
everything. If you want to brighten up the tree so you can see every little detail in the bark, you can. If you want to darken the tree so it's silhoetted against the backdrop, so you can see every blade of grass, and every wispy cloud, you can. An HDR image format, (Cineon, for example, what Hollywood uses when it scans film into a computer), still contains all that information. From the darkest darks to the brightest brights, NOTHING is lost. Every last pixel is there if you want to see it.
HDRI has nothing to do with texturing. If you want an object to reflect HDRI, all you do is put your reflective object into the scene, and give it an HDRI environment to reflect. The object does not need any special shaders or textures or anything.. ye olde chrome ball will reflect HDRI just as well as anything else. It's just reflecting what it sees. From the brightest brights to the darkest darks.
There are two methods that the next-gen systems will utilize HDRI:
1) HDR rendering. Being able to utilize light sources that are brighter than 100%. The sun, for example, drowning out the light from a flashlight. This is pretty light on computations.. Unreal 3 has been able to do this for quite a while now. HDR reflections would fall into this category.
2) HDR lighting. Using the HDR image itself to actually light the scene. The bright sky illuminates the environment, etc. The Alfred Molina demonstration at E3. The textures are unaffected and have nothing to do with it. The computer/console simply analyzes the backdrop, determines where the bright spots are, what color, what intensity, etc, and then uses that data to illuminate the model. This is the equivelant of scattering thousands of individual light sources around the scene, which is why it takes so damn long to render in CGI. How the PS3 is able to do it in 1/60th of a second, I have no clue. Probably shortcutting, and that would fall under #1, using light sources indicative of the background, rather than the traditional lighting, or lack thereof, that past- and current-gen systems use.
Nowhere in any of that does HDR have the slightest thing to do with texturing.
If you'd care to expand on how it DOES involve textures and shaders, feel free. You use it in Maya, you said. I use it in LightWave. Surely, the basics would be the same.. those two programs are quite similar in many respects.
) The PS3 isnt even released and the RSX isnt even on silicon yet. When it is... EVERY PC virtually can, because the equal will come for the PC(probably sooner than the PS3 is available to the consumer). The RSX will only be the best for 3-6mos until the next generation of hardware comes out.
