Enviroment / Sky Textures

despite having no feedback from Blender to show the environment effecting the scene

Yes this is one of features missing in the Blender viewport. Luckily, it is going to change.

Though I am trying to figure out how to use "typical" equirectangular HDR images.

You need to convert them to cubemaps in order to render with blend4web.

I also should point out that there may be some unintentional miscommunication when it comes to the various terms involved with Environment maps in Blender. When I said "mirror map" in the last post; I did not mean creating a map the renders reflections of object into each other; I simply meant a background image that reflects into all reflective objects/materials etc.

Yeah we differentiate them as "dynamic" and "static".

Such as a simple sky background; verses a mirror map; or using one for both.

"Cubemap" is the WebGL's cube texture. It consists of 6 separate 2D textures which can be loaded separately or packed in some format (e.g. DDS). In Blender cubemaps are called "environment maps". Blender format for such images is 2 rows by 3 tiles.

Cubemaps (aka environment maps) can be used for various purposes. For example:
1. For skydome
2. For static reflections
3. For image-based lighting
…

Sorry for the long winded post; but I hope this feedback can help sort ofut some of the possible confusion in the environment textures area.

Thanks for the feedback, perhaps we should make it more clear in our manual.

I realized that I should be able to render objects into a world environment to add realist reflections of all objects into one another.

Dynamic cube-mapped reflections were implemented in version 15.05

Hi Yuri,

I was wondering if there is a guide on how to convert "typical" HDR images to cubemaps for blend4web? Do i need to do this manually or is there a function that can do this automatically for me?

"Though I am trying to figure out how to use "typical" equirectangular HDR images.
You need to convert them to cubemaps in order to render with blend4web."

Thank you!

Hi Yuri,

I was wondering if there is a guide on how to convert "typical" HDR images to cubemaps for blend4web? Do i need to do this manually or is there a function that can do this automatically for me?

Sorry, but there's no automatic convertion from HDRI to cube map. But you can apply your HDRI image on sphere (in blender directly) and then bake from it cube map. You can read how to make cubemap in our documentation, jsut type in search "cubemap".

Withdrawing the question.