I've recently cracked UV mapping and HDRI lighting. This is a really big step forward; now I can light my scenes with HDRI images. I'm wrapped to have worked out UVs, which help me accomplish this. UVs are the data point that let us texture and detail model surfaces. We can use all sorts of texture maps, like bump, specular, normals, and of course colour.
So what's the big deal here then? Any render engine can use texture images already, right? Yes, just about all can. But Hyperion does not use lights. I've designed Hyperion to work this way, so scenes must be lit with HDRIs (or something equivalent). This is to mimic the real world where surfaces are lit by light that comes from other surfaces. I want Hyperion to work like the real world, so it has to operate underneath like one.
And besides, for me it's a big deal. I'm figuring this out as I go and I'm making this happen with my own code.
The images below show some progression of the stages I went through. Things were a bit over the place to begin with, but I gradually refined them until bang, it came out right!
As an aside note, I had to flip the UVs on the Y-axis because Cinema4D uses a different UV layout. This is a historic thing with the software to do with their interface and user areas. I wanted to use the industry standard, so that's the reason for flipping the axis.
Here's another experimental image below. You can see some strange things going on. Some bits are a little hard to see, but I wasn't handling UVs correctly and my surface colouring was completely off. It took some time to iron these things out.
But I did get there, which you will see below. I'd like to resolve a couple more things from here. There are still some surface attributes like reflection and refraction to complete. They are present, you can see reflection in some images above, but it's not refined. I'd like to add some additional lens and camera sensor settings as well.
It feels like I'm only a few crucial steps away from being able to use Hyperion in some early animation renders.
To finish, here's a better quality render:
