HDR Light Studio lets 3D artists quickly design, create and adjust HDRI lighting / reflection maps containing photographic studio lights and effects. HDR Light Studio has been created for 3D computer graphic artists wanting to create studio photography style renderings of products, packaging and vehicles. Surrounding your 3D data with a good quality studio HDRI map helps to create an image that is a good match for traditional photography, and can then be used for advertising and marketing.
Studio photographers surround their subject matter with different shaped light sources, reflectors and lighting effects - carefully positioning them all to bring out the best in the items being photographed - controlling both the lighting and reflections. This is most important for surfaces that are shiny and reflective - like gloss plastics, metallic paints and chrome / metallic finishes.
So at last you can quickly replicate these studio lighting techniques with your own bespoke HDRI maps, made to measure for each of your rendering projects. HDR Light Studio gives you the freedom to quickly adjust your lighting setup to ensure the best results - just like a real photo-shoot!
HDR Light Studio is designed specifically for creating HDRI light and reflection maps for CG rendering. Users create lighting designs by placing light sources onto a 2D canvas representing a sphere map. As you manipulate your lights on the canvas the shape is automatically distorted in real-time so they maintain their shape when mapped onto a lighting sphere.
Once lights are placed they are totally editable - so adjustments to position, size, brightness and much more can be made really fast. Working in 2D to generate studio lighting HDRIs is a much faster workflow than working with 3D lights or emitters. Also using HDRI image based lighting can drastically reduce your render times compared to using individual light sources or emitters. It's a totally different way of working but has great benefits for studio style renders.
Lighting designs are stored independent of the final output resolution so that you can quickly test your design with a lightning fast 'quick preview' output, and then scale it up to production quality for your final renders. If you use a paint package to make HDRI lighting maps, then you need to work on them at the highest resolution you think you may need right from the start. Therefore, if you are working on a high resolution project, then saving and opening these large files slows you down. This is not a good creative process.
HDR Light Studio creates maps in both the major HDR file formats (exr and hdr). The final resolution is only limited by your version of HDR Light Studio.
HDR Light Studio is an ideal partner to any 3D application that supports image based lighting and reflections from lat-long (spherical) HDRI maps. These include: Autodesk Maya, Autodesk 3DS Max, Autodesk Showcase, Cinema 4D, Luxology Modo, Bunkspeed HyperShot and HyperMove, Right Hemisphere Deep Exploration. Plus renderers such as Maxwell Render, Fry Render, V-Ray, Mental Ray to name a few.
