Description
Anatomy of HDR Light Studio
HDR Light Studio provides a unique real-time lighting interface and includes a wealth of procedural and image based lighting content.
Light Sources: Procedural
HDR Light Studio is best known for creating studio lighting – especially suited to reflective materials.
Procedural lights can be precisely controlled and positioned to create a wide variety of lighting effects.
HDR Light Studio procedural content includes: Bulb, Linear and Radial Gradients, and Box Gradient (a blended horizontal and vertical ramp).
Light Sources: Images
For the most realistic lighting effects – load HDR images as light sources in HDR Light Studio.
Image based light sources bring high levels of realism with subtle details and imperfections seen in reflections.
Includes a Library of Light Sources
HDR Light Studio includes a library of over 200 high quality HDR photographs of soft boxes, spot lights, windows and even clouds.
View a PDF Brochure of all Preset Lights included with HDR Light Studio.
Render View & LightPaint
The Render View is a key feature of HDR Light Studio's lighting interface.
Lights are positioned by clicking and dragging on the Render View - we call this patented process LightPaint.
HDR Light Studio loads Alembic, FBX*, Collada file formats.
*Windows OS only
HDR Area Lights
HDR Area Lights are compatible with 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema 4D, MODO, VRED, Houdini and Octane Render Standalone Connections.
HDR Area lights are created and controlled in real-time in your 3D software as you work in HDR Light Studio. Light geometry, shaders and HDR RGBA image content is all updated on the fly via the connection.
Handles Huge Scenes
The Render View and LightPaint remain fast even with huge scenes.
For example this 3D scene has 19,514,622 polygons.
Matching Photography
When blending photography and CG imagery, matching the lighting between the photographic content and the CG elements is key to a successful and believable image. If a HDRI map of the location has not been captured then a lighting setup needs building from scratch. HDR Light Studio makes this process easy and enabling the rapid creation of a suitable lighting environment.
Enhancing Reality
When reality isn’t enough. Load HDRI maps shot on location and add additional light sources to bring your subject to life.
Just like on a real photoshoot, beauty lights are added to make your subject the star of the show.
Procedural Sky
HDR Light Studio includes a procedural sky shader. Replace the sky on an existing HDRI map and use an alpha ramp to control the horizon position and softness. Drag and drop the included Cloud preset images onto the sky for added realism. The sun disc can be increased in size whilst maintaining its overall lighting contribution, allowing for creative decisions about the sun scale. The sun disc has a controllable soft edge.
Mix Up Your Maps
Load more than one HDRI map into HDR Light Studio and use the alpha ramp to blend between them. Use saturation adjustments and color filtering, via blend modes, to take control of color and create a better match. Enabling you to get more out of your existing HDRI collection.
More than Lights
The HDR Canvas is a compositor for HDR and LDR content, supporting a range of image formats, mappings and blend modes.
Lights are not limited to representing light sources. A light can be a loaded HDRI map background or an additional cloud added to the sky.
The procedural light sources are very useful when combined with blend modes. Allowing precise local adjustments of color and brightness on the HDRI map – shaping the lighting effect.
Portable Lighting
HDRI maps are the ultimate portable lighting format. They can be used with different renderers and produce predictable and accurate results. Especially with physically based rendering.
When implementing the new Area Lights feature, we ensured these lights were portable too. For example, you can create a lighting design in Maya for Arnold Render (using a HDRI map with Area Lights) and then switch renderers to V-Ray, the Area Lights will be rebuilt using V-Ray lights. You can also light a shot in Cinema 4D with Arnold, and load the same lighting design into Maya with Maxwell Render to get the exact same lighting.
Industry Standards
VFX artists will be pleased to know HDR Light Studio has progressed to embrace some industry standards.
HDR Light Studio uses OpenColorIO color management and supports loading Alembic scene files. In order to efficiently handle very large image files, HDR Light Studio will automatically convert image files to mip-mapped and tiled images, saving them as .tx files. When using .tx files, HDR Light Studio only loads the image resolution and area needed – this vastly improves image load times and performance.
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