Can you use hdri images as your background in a final render?

Question

Would it be a good idea to use some hdri image of the room as background? Such as for some kind of advertisement, where I have an object on the table beside the window. Right now I am struggling to understand how to do such thing. Cause normally designing the whole room just for one object wouldn't be a great idea, I think. Is there a way to do something like a room background very fast in Blender? Any suggestions? Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

Blender comes with eight HDRIs (all licensed CC0), one of which is interior.exr . Here's an example (3.0, Cycles) of our product Suzanne casually displayed on a default cube table with interior.exr as both the only lighting and the background. To get this the HDRI file needs to be set up in your World Shader (Shader Editor > Shader Type: World) in the Environment Node.

Although there are several advantages to using an HDRI as your background (save the time/effort of modeling a room as you noted in your ask, complex ambient light well-coordinated with background, etc) there are also disadvantages: There are plenty of HDRIs available (Blender's come from hdrihaven.com ) but you're stuck with whatever's baked into the HDRI you've chosen. There are some adjustments you can make (rotation with the Mapping Node, Strength with the Background Node, both shown in the example above) but if you're not happy with how far away the curtains look you're back to modeling (or finding/buying/importing) curtains and maybe a window in a wall for them. As the vid Allen Simpson linked to above points out, there's potential artifact issues due to the resolution of the HDRI and the spherical-surround nature of HDRIs that your potential audience might find objectionable.