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From Odwiki

An environment map is a map of the sphere of light around a point. This is most often for creating Reflections or for ImageBasedLighting (or IBL)

These maps can be photographic or computer generated and then stored in a few ways:

• Colorspace and bit depth can vary - please see HDR
• Mapping can vary and these are supported directly in Mantra
  • LatLong : latitude/longitude
  • CrossImage : cubic environment stored as a cross
  • CubicMap : a DeepRaster storing each face of a cube mapping.

There are some HDR environment maps shipped with Houdini 9.+ for your free usage under $HFS/houdini/pic/DOSCH*.rat

See Also

• HDRI - high dynamic range images, often used for environments
• CreatingReflectionMaps - creating them from within Houdini
• Devebec : Paul Debevec's site containing a lot of great information and examples about lightprobes and IBL. You can download a collection of HDR images, cross probes found on Paul Debevec's web site, here.
• isixpack : a Houdini utility for transforming between different mapping.