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HDR Light Studio 3.5 is coming to Germany – FMX 2012

April 13th, 2012

We are really looking forward to attending this years FMX2012 event in Stuttgart, Germany – from May 8th to 11th. It will be a great opportunity to meet with our users and 3D artists who are interested in image based lighting rig creation with HDR Light Studio. It’s perfect timing too, as visitors to our stand will be able to try for themselves the brand new ‘LightPaint’ feature in HDR Light Studio 3.5 – which will be available on Mac and Linux platforms too for the first time in our history.

For more details on FMX2012 please visit the web site: www.fmx.de

If you want to come and see Lightmap Ltd at our stand at the event, but don’t want to pay to get in, then the Friday Open Market is a great option. The Friday Open Market takes place on May 11, 2012. To obtain a ticket, the special registration form (download the PDF form from us here) needs to be filled in and signed. It provides free entrance to the School Campus and Marketplace at FMX 2012 on that date only. It provides no entrance on any other date or to any other offerings taking place at FMX 2012.

We hope to see you there!
(P.S. Thanks to ArsThanea for the cool 3D model seen above in LiveLight on the Mac! Model created by Daniel Komuda and Adam Nakonieczny for Ars Thanea)

Posted in Events, HDR Light Studio News | 1 Comment

AIR-CGI – F1 on the streets of Chicago!

March 23rd, 2012

Nigel from www.aircgi.com sent us this awesome shot that the team there recently put together, a Formula 1 car tearing down a Chicago backstreet in the rain. Superb stuff. Created in 3DS Max and V-Ray. Lit with HDR Light Studio of course! Click on the images and soak in the pixel perfection in hi-res.

Posted in Customer Work | No Comments

LightPaint is coming!

March 22nd, 2012

An amazing new set of features is coming to the next update of HDR Light Studio, version 3.5. We call it LightPaint. New tools to allow the user to place and select lights directly on the 3D rendered view. Objects can be lit with lightning speed and a level of precision simply not possible before – it’s a fun and fast way to light a scene. Of course at all times everything it totally adjustable, that’s the great thing about HDR Light Studio… it’s non-destructive and resolution independent. At all times the user is not painting pixels, rather designing a complex lighting rig built in a system designed for that sole purpose. So lighting colors, size, and brightness can all be adjust easily on the fly with instant feedback on the 3D model.

But it doesn’t stop there… remember HDR Light Studio is a powerful system for adjusting existing HDRI maps. So you can place adjustments to exposure, color and saturation just as easily – with fine control over the fall-off of the effect. So if a part of the model looks a little dark, click on that area to make it brighter, cool! It’s so simple, even your granny can use it, or your 5 year old! But the quality of results is simply outstanding – perfect illumination and reflections. Once you have used LivePaint, there’s no going back and it’s coming to Windows, Mac and Linux real soon! HDR Light Studio 3.5 is a free update for version 3 customers!

Here’s a quick demo!

Posted in Demos, Tips & Tricks, HDR Light Studio News | 3 Comments

PK3D Studio – Awesome F1 Shots

March 21st, 2012

Awesome F1 shots by PK3D Studio. All lit with HDR Light Studio. Created in 3DS Max, rendered in V-Ray. Thanks for sharing Piotr – hats off to you sir!

Posted in Customer Work | No Comments

HDR Light Studio at DEVELOP3D LIVE event

March 5th, 2012

Lightmap will be demonstrating HDR Light Studio on our space at the DEVELOP3D LIVE Conference and Exhibition, 20th March 2012, Warwick Arts Centre, University of Warwick, UK. There so are many reasons to attend… you can see the latest a greatest on display from Luxion, Luxology, Autodesk and Dell to name a few!!! We might even have some surprises on show ourselves!!!

Simply click on the image above to Register.

Posted in Events | No Comments

Lightmap Labs: Sneaky Peek: Part 1

February 22nd, 2012

It’s been very busy down in the depths of Lightmap’s Labs, and we cannot contain our excitement at the tech coming to HDR Light Studio any more so are going to have to give you a sneak-peek of what’s coming very, very soon!

Mac and Linux is here!
You have been asking for it, and we have been listening! A huge amount of effort has gone into porting HDR Light Studio over to Mac and Linux over the last few months, and in the process we have been tweaking things here and there to give you an even better experience designing and augmenting your HDR’s. It’s faster, sleeker, and busting with new features such as SunShade Nodes, LightPaint technology, Light Node previews, and much, much more. Here’s a screenshot of the enhanced UI to get your juices flowing and we’ll go on to explain a bit more about some of the new tech here and in later posts.

SunShade Node
As the name suggests, this new node enables the precision control of very bright light sources on existing HDR’s. Sources such as the Sun (or any bright area in general) can impact the quality of your renders in unfavorable ways, such as by producing speckling artifacts or overly bright illumination from certain angles. The SunShade Node allows you to tackle these problems head-on and control these undesirable effects with a powerful and yet intuitive control system. It also provides total creative control to ‘dial down’ the brightness of any light source in an existing HDRI. Here’s a movie we had on show at CVMP 2011 (more on that later) showing it in action:

LightPaint Tech
Lightmap’s new LightPaint tech is one of our favorites. It allows user interaction from within LiveLight (or any LightPaint enabled host) to pass back into HDR Light Studio to control Light Node placement, giving the user ultimate control over their effect on the final render. This exact positioning of reflections and illumination by clicking on the 3D model in LiveLight really helps boost productivity and getting the right result in those tricky-to-light areas.

CVMP2011
In November 2011 Lightmap attended ‘CVMP 2011′, meeting 3D artists and TD’s from the VFX community. We treated them to a sneak peak at these new tech features behind closed doors as well as talking about image based lighting, HDR augmentation, and our plans to bring HDR Light Studio to Linux and Mac.

We thought we’d share with you now this short video that we had playing in our display area to form a basic introduction to the core concepts of our technology and its application for VFX lighting projects using image based lighting.

We hope you are as excited as we are about these new technologies coming to HDR Light Studio, and in the next few weeks we will be expanding on these features in the blog in the run up to its public release.

Posted in Lightmap Labs | 1 Comment

New HDR Light Studio plugin for SprayTrace

February 20th, 2012

20^th February 2012 – London

Lightmap Ltd are proud to announce the launch of HDR Light Studio live for SprayTrace.

Users of SprayTrace for Maya and HDR Light Studio Pro version 3 can now enjoy interactive image based lighting design and augmentation sessions, all in real-time on their Maya MentalRay scenes. Move a light in HDR Light Studio live and see the results update instantly in the SprayTrace viewport. Read more

Posted in HDR Light Studio plug-ins, SprayTrace | No Comments

KeyShot 3 – HDRI Contrast Confusion?

January 10th, 2012

Don’t get caught out by subtle changes between KeyShot 2 and KeyShot 3 when using the HDR Light Studio plug-in, or in fact any HDRI map.

You’ll notice that the Environment settings tab now has a ‘Contrast’ setting which has replaced the old Gamma slider found in KeyShot v2. If you create a new scene in KeyShot 3 this Contrast setting is set to 2.5. I changed this back to 1 straight away to ensure the HDRI lighting information was going to be used accurately, without any contrast adjustments being made which would alter the relative brightness of each light. But I quickly found out that my lighting was just not working as expected and looked terrible. It turns out the setting of 2.5 was in fact correct and is the equivalent to the old environment gamma setting of 1. Read more

Posted in Demos, Tips & Tricks, KeyShot | 3 Comments

HDR Light Studio – Lighting Contest 2011

September 30th, 2011

LIGHT UP OUR WORLD!!!

Lightmap are inviting customers to submit their images into this year’s Lighting Contest. We are looking for creative and inspiring images showcasing the power of HDR Light Studio lighting. The subject matter is not important… it can be a car or a bumble bee, a studio shot or within an environment. We are looking for images that ooze the quality required for high end advertising imagery. It doesn’t need to be new work made for this competition; past projects can be submitted… as long as HDR Light Studio has played a major role in the lighting of the final image. Read more

Posted in HDR Light Studio News | No Comments

Enhancing HDRI environments in real-time

April 13th, 2011

Florian Petersen is an expert user of VRED software by PI-VR. In this recent project Florian has skilled fully placed this Mercedes C class car onto a photographic background image with lighting and reflections provided by a HDRI captured at the location. Both backplate and HDRI are provided by courtesy of MAGROUND, a stock photo agency specialised on high-quality urban and landscape photography with matching HDRI-domes. The location was shot by Christof R. Schmidt exclusively for MAGROUND.

But to bring the car to life then extra lighting was required to make the materials come alive and look more dynamic.

Read more

Posted in HDR Light Studio plug-ins, VRED | No Comments