Product Lighting Hdri

[Marilina Crawn]

EDITUnfortunately due to a misunderstanding with licensing regarding some of the HDRIs content, I had to take the product down. I will in the future remake the problem HDRIs from scratch and re-upload the pack in a way that is not in violation of any agreements. In the meantime, I am still here to answer any questions regarding lighting for different types of shots and am here to help however I can.

Hey everyone. I really want to post here about this just because I have been with blender artists for so long now and I think that with the creativity that shows up on this forum that it would be a great platform to share this with all of you.

Anyone on here who works with me or has helped me or maybe I have helped knows I love my case studies and I am constantly growing my library. I spent the last week working on an image based lighting pack which I am now selling on gumroad. My main reason for wanting to sell this is because despite the many free studio style environment lights I see available online, many of them seem pretty arbitrary. Perhaps there was a motivation for the lighting but I am not sure what it was and that leaves me as an artist at a loss given the time it takes to load a new HDRI and trying to dig through tens of them and pick one for a scene based on how the light looks on a sphere. Instead I built all of these around actual scenes where I used common scene staging and camera placement with lighting motivated by actual real world lighting. I did each setup in real life first or observed the lighting from friends of mine who are professional photographers. In some ways I think that makes these more user friendly and you have a clear example render of what type of scene each of these works for. On the flip side, they are also in some ways more specialized so for a scene unrelated to any of these the lighting may come across no less arbitrary than any of the others I find online which seem to have been made by simply lighting suzanne or a tea pot. One way or the other, I hope these can benefit to your artwork and add value to your workflow in some way or another.

I spent days working on these lights given the additional scene setup required but I also want to make sure I am not offering these at a price which seems unfair in a day and age where we can get so many great alternatives for free. I set the base price at $3 but you are free to offer more if you like

In addition to this, if you purchase the pack and would like a light slightly modified for your specific scene you are free to shoot me a private message with proof of purchase and how you need it modified and if it is a simple enough adjustment I would be happy to make adjustments for you. Additionally I know for some people spending money at all right now is hard. If there is a specific HDRI you want and you can let me know your circumstances then I can make this a sliding scale a bit and work with you to figure out something fair.

I am curious about this so I downloaded your free offering (thanks for that ) just to see what it is all about. And it is an EXR file, which is yet another new thing for me. I had to google it and I had a read of this wikipedia page:-

OpenEXR is a high dynamic range raster file format, released as an open standard along with a set of software tools created by Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), under a free software license similar to the BSD license. It is notable for supporting multiple channels of potentially different pixel sizes, including 32-bit unsigned integer, 32-bit and 16-bit floating point values, as well as various compression techniques which include lossless and lossy compression algorithms. It also has arbitrary c...

@ThorntonStrolia Great work! I love them. I am buying it now. It comes in a great moment, soon finishing the jeep wrangler tutorial and these setups look gorgeous. Are you planning to keep adding over time? As Industrial Designer I highly appreciate these thorough and more specific materials.

I love the one for the Lamborhini with the subtle light coming from above.

Hey there Andy, yeah EXR is just another 32 bit file format. Fancy way of saying there are a LOT more colors than 8bit jpg. This allows blender to recognize the dark areas a truly producing little to no light and the white areas to define and much wider range of brightness. In face the white value can be so much whiter than an 8 bit white that 8 bit white is read a bit like a little LED light while a 32 bit file can read as bright as the sun.

You might be surprised. I have a degree in computer animation and specialized in shading and lighting, and have been doing this for around 11 or 12 years now (2020 is a mess, I lost track of time). Lighting is about 40% of photo realism. Good lighting can turn a mad scene into a decent cartoon scene and a good scene into a naturalistic scene and a great scene into a photo real one. The most realistic shaders and models will fall apart like a jenga tower with improper lighting. Setup is very simple and I suspect you would benefit from it. It will also give you a better idea of where you are at skill wise because you will be able to actually see what your doing in a more final lighting scenario vs hypotheticals where no matter what you do your model will not look as good.

It will also give you a better idea of where you are at skill wise because you will be able to actually see what your doing in a more final lighting scenario vs hypotheticals where no matter what you do your model will not look as good.

But none of that is really helping that much when it comes to working with Blender and all the marvellous things it can do. In my profession, no one is interested in photorealism and lighting. So although I may be fitting right in with some of the modelling aspect, and even a little bit into the animation side of things, lighting is totally new.

Unfortunately due to a misunderstanding with licensing regarding some of the HDRIs content, I had to take the product down. I will in the future remake the problem HDRIs from scratch and re-upload the pack in a way that is not in violation of any agreements. In the meantime, I am still here to answer any questions regarding lighting for different types of shots and am here to help however I can.

@ThorntonStrolia I love the renders you have. I wish these items were still available for sale. Are you available for custom job? I need a clean scene for car rendering from all around the vehicle. If you are interested let me know! Thanks

Everyone knows lighting can make or break an image. But do you know when to use a KeyShot HDRI vs physical lights? KeyShot has two methods of lighting, five physical light types and dozens of settings for each. Most people try a few and move on. But what if you knew which option to use BEFORE going into trial-and-error mode?

HDRI stands for High-Dynamic Range Image. Combine the same image at various exposures to make a single HDRI image. The result contains lots of detail both in the darkest and brightest areas of an image. A common JPEG image has a limited range of values (lights and darks). By combining the range of values from each image at different exposures, you end up with an image that has a greater dynamic range.

An HDRI is often contained within in a 32-bit image format. This is to contain the full range of values from the combined images. OpenEXR is the open-source standard file container used in the VFX industry to hold 32 bit images. Because of this, most HDRIs have an .EXR file extension.

Changes like brightness, contrast and rotation are adjusted using simple sliders. For further control, KeyShot allows users to paint extra light sources. These pins appear as circular or rectangular white areas on top of the active HDRI.

HDRIs should be used for lighting only, not for a background or backdrop behind your product. This is a common beginner mistake, but an HDRI is always spherically-mapped. This distorts the image, resulting in a round horizon line that looks odd. Also, an HDRI has to be VERY high-resolution to not look blurry or pixelated when used as a backdrop. Super high-res HDRIs are harder to find, more expensive and become exponentially larger in file-size.

Another drawback of using HDRIs for lighting has to do with shadows. As mentioned, HDRIs are spherically-mapped images. Think of a beach ball. Now, imagine taking an image and applying it to the inside of the beach ball. Your KeyShot scene exists within the center of the beach ball.

When the HDRI casts light into your scene, every pixel of the HDRI is the same distance from the center of the scene. Thus, the light source(s) are all the same distance from the middle of the KeyShot scene. This is not how our world works, and it leads to unrealistic shadows and highlights.

In KeyShot, any light that is not an HDRI is a physical light. There are five kinds of physical lights in KeyShot. Lights are materials in KeyShot, not objects. You apply thme to a physical object or piece of geometry in your scene to work.

In many 3D applications, physical lights are items to be added to a scene, just like a light you would hold in your hand. In KeyShot, physical lights are materials. This means you can find them in the material library and drag them onto a piece of geometry in your scene.

In contrast, when using a physical light that emits from a surface, such as area or emissive light, the piece of geometry you apply it to will remain visible. It turns bright white or a lighter shade of the specified color.

After applying a light material to an object, double-click on the object in the real-time view to edit its material properties such as brightness, color and softness. To shape an area or emissive light, scaling it with the move tool will control the sharpness and softness of the shadow.

When adjusting the brightness of a physical light, you can use real world values like Lumen or Lux. This makes it easier to set brightness values that are appropriate for the scene and contributes to the realism of an image.

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