Shooting 360 HDRI

One of the task of Visual Effects supervisor on set is to shot spherical degree high dynamic range (HDR) panoramas. Those panoramas can be very useful in post production as a source of light or reference for computer generated environment. This article briefly goes through all the steps required to create basic HDRI.

Reasons to do on set HDRI capture

Use in 3D application for image based lighting
Use as background or base for a matte painting
360 degree environment projections
Reference of the environment

Equipment

Camera: Canon 5D Mark 2
Lens: Canon 8 mm
Tripod
Nodal Ninja (Figure 1)
Smartphone or pan and paper
Camera remote (optional)

Figure 1: Nodal Ninja

Shooting Procedure

Mount Nodal Ninja on the tripod head.
Mount your camera on Nodal Ninja (NN)
Configure Nodal Ninja

How to find you lens nodal point
Nodal Ninja manual

Configuring the tripod

Level your tripod as shown on the Figure 2.

Figure 2: Setting the tripod level

Configuring Nodal Ninja

Nodal Ninja purpose is to take parallax free images to make it suitable for stitching in one continues panorama later on.

Figure 3: Setting the nodal point side, [1]

Figure 4: Setting the nodal point front, [1]

Shooting process

Before shoot checklist

Tripod leveled
Shoot a slate
Image is in focus
Camera set to manual mode (M)
Autofocus is disabled
White balance is locked
The exposure note change between each bracket shoot and follow repetitive pattern (e.g 1/25, 1/100, 1/400, 1/25, 1/100, 1/400, and so on).
ISO set no higher than 800

Shoot set of picture with different exposure in 4 direction (90 degree angle)

Assuming that you use 8 mm lens on full frame camera. You have to end up with overlapping pictures for each direction

Depending on your goal you can shoot between 3-5 pictures for each direction with 1 or 2 f-stop difference.

Slate

It is a good practice to shoot a slate for every panorama that you shooting. The reason for that is when you stiching your photos it might be difficult to find where is one sequence ends and another begins. An example of a slate by using a smartphone illustrated on the Figure 5.

Slate for each panorama should include:

Project name
Scene (e.g. Forest, Silver Lake, Garage Interior etc.)
Point Number (Different shooting point within the same scene)

Figure 5: Slate example

Stitching images together

I would recommend PTGui for stitching your images. It does fantastic job combining multiple exposure Canon RAW images and then stitching it together.
If you did not messed up alignment or image exposure along the way this process should be automatic.

Figure 6: Example of final lat-long panorama