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I've almost given up. I'm trying to find some HDRs or background photos, and one would think it would be simple.
What I want for the scene I'm trying to do is an urban background, hopefully a shot of Manhattan, from the perspective of a bar on the street level. It's a bar. There's windows. There should be a street outside, then businesses across the street. The perspective you would see on one side of the street looking across the street from a bar at street level. Not in the middle of the street. We're not in a car. Why, oh why, do so many hdrs give you the perspective of the middle of the freakin street?? I'm so frustrated. This seems harder than it needs to be, and it's holding up what I"m doing. Also, I'm looking for a view that you would see in an urban apartment above ground level: buildings across the street. Not in the clouds. I'm not in an airplane. Not in the water. I'm not in a boat. A little skyline maybe, but the other apartments and buildings across the way. Another one: a view you would see from a beach house. The beach is a little ways away. It's not on the sand. That would be a stupid place to build a house.
I mean, maybe I'm missing something, but every time I try to move the environment I end up in the same place or, in the case of the above ground stuff, in a place where the outside view curves from the dome.
Please help. This taking way too much time.
You might want to take a look at the CityScape Backdrops series:
These are just flat, planar images (though they can be curved if necessary for perspective) that you can position at whatever angle and distance you need for your shot. Very useful for those "upper floor apartment view" scenes when positioned up close.
For the street-level scenes, you could use a similar facade kit, like the storefront series:
None of these will give you lighting, of course, since those images are all statically lit, but they'll give you the visual details you're after. You can then choose a generic HDRI that approximates the location and time of day, rather than counting on the HDRI to provide the visual detail as well. The HDRI is just to give you the ambient light for the scene, really, and possibly some "on the horizon" detail. Use billboards (or actual geometry) for closer scenery.
The best solution for this kind of problems is do it your self. There are two simple ways.
A/ Create an hdri from a 3D scene
It is very easy to create an hdri. Basically, the process is the following:
1/ Create the scene and position the camera at the proper position
Select your camera and Camera > Lens > Lens Distortion=Spherical
2/ Render Settings > General > set Aspect Ratio (Global) to 2:1
Render Settings > Environment > Env intensity 0.0002
Render Settings > Advanced > Tick Canvases and add a canvas (Beauty)
3/ Render the scene and save it.
You get a normal render and a folder named xxx_canvases with an EXR file
4/ Improve the image.
Open the exr file in gimp (or photoshop, but gimp is free)
Probably the image will be all white.
RClick > Colors > Levels and click on icon at the lower right position
(should be labelled as Pick white point for all channels).
Click anywhere in the image to have some details.
Select a point with an average brightness.
When you are happy with the level of details, export you image as an exr
You can now use the image as an hdri.
I have already used this method several times. It is very interesting for instance to get an hdri taken from the 2nd or 10th floor of a building.B/ Another solution is to use google street view. There are some tools to do that. I have never tried them, but it seems to work. In terms of lighting it should not be excellent (no sun!) but in your case it should be sufficient if you can find a google street view that fits your needs.
Look at https://evermotion.org/articles/show/10254/extract-panoramas-from-google-streetview
or https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts5/anywhereintheworldstreet view is crap, always middle of the road and the the camera is also way too hight above the ground for any usable perspective.
Manhattan is particularly well served by Google Street View. There are plenty of areas where the camera view is from the sidewalk, Broadway for example, and you can take a walk through most of the parks using it. I've used street view to create a lot of HDRI backgrounds for various projects and the lighting isn't really an issue. You could even take your image into AI and use the in-painting function to remove any pedestrians that might be spoiling the view. AI on its own should be able to give you reasonable Manhattanesque backgrounds, I've used it to get some pretty decent background images of early 20th Century Paris.
One place that may be useful (not sure about city street scenes, because people constantly mess those up) would be HDRI Haven, which is a site with megatons of free downloadable HDRI images: https://hdrihaven.com/hdris/ (they even have freebie models if I remember it right.)
Street-scene HDRIs are notoriously hard to get because people are all in it, they all move, and they tend to distort everything.
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