Sunset to Night HDRI Time-Lapse Sky Dome

Just completed finishing up the longest time-lapse I’ve put together yet. I’m quite happy with it, as its a blend from an interesting afternoon/sunset to night, with little flickering. Its 870 frames or 29 seconds at 30fps and featured a couple of complex blends around twilight/night time. To account for changing light levels I drop from f11 to f3, which causes a color change that needed fixing, and I even pull out the ND filter (this was slightly nerve wracking!) when it got too dark, as its impossible to capture a night scene with a filter that blocks out 95% of the light. Consequently there’s a couple of blends visible where the moon changes position, but not in a jarring way. See it for yourself here:

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5 comments

  1. I love the idea af a long walk through in a visualization with this HDRI time lap.

    Nice nice nice

    Regards
    Michael

  2. Really good job! Next step – HDRI video in real-time 🙂

  3. Hi,

    this looks totally awesome. I´m a big fan of this idea. But what I don´t understand is how can you create large spherical panoramas with only a fisheye and 36mp Nikon? This would only be 6000×6000 pixel wich is probably not big enough to use it as spherical map when rendering in hd. So, where is the trick here or have I understood something wrong?

    • The square captured is around 4900×4900 pixels, once converted to lat/long its 9500×2375. The black lower half is added to make a spherical environment that is easy to import into most rendering software, that makes it 9500×4750. Total pixels of the square is roughly the same total pixels of the lat/long version. Might help to imagine if you have, say a piece of string that you form into a circle, then roll it out into a straight line – it’ll be double the ‘width’. Having said that, while 9500×2375 is >HD resolution, you’re only viewing one part at a time, and if you zoom in far enough, you’ll lose sharpness as with any texture map/background.

  4. This is really amazing!

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