Thanks for the suggestions! All mentioned products are quite expensive, though. As a hobbyist, I’d like to see more companies offer software for rent, per hour, like on Amazon Web Services.
I use V-Ray a lot and there is a FREE trial-demo version you can get to test it out. If you are a student, Check out this website where you can buy V-Ray for $138 for the full version, with reasonable render size limitations.
No, I’m not a student. My use of Rhino is mostly hobbyist. That’s also why I’m fine with my main computer being an i3. For the occasional rendering job (or for video), I boot up a fat AWS instance for some hours. Tools I prefer to rent rather than to buy.
Here’s something that I just did with the Brazil trial:
I formatted my computer and now I just remember what free HDR editing software I had, I think it was HDR Shop but there is no such thing according to google. Guy remember this one (or something alike), popular years ago?
The last few versions of Photoshop will open and edit HDR images. I’ve used it for basic editing and it works well.
Also, the website for hdrshop is now up. It might have been down when you looked. I also remember it used to be free, but the current price is US $199. For that price, I’d stick with Photoshop unless you need some of their advanced HDR-specific features.
I see. However, when rendering to a chrome ball, I assume very high resolution is needed to get an equirectangular image of decent resolution. All in all, this approach looks impractical, at least to me.
I’ve used the chrome ball approach successfully many times but I was creating env maps for use with Rhino shading modes, so I never needed the back of it to look good.