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)

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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.

This has been made possible due to a large number of improvements in SprayTrace, adding support for emulating the native image based lighting found hidden in MentalRay for Maya, which gives far superior results than emit light, and due to further optimizations of the final gathering system. For the first time Maya users can use image based lighting in a totally interactive way through the combination of these tools. It’s a lighting artists dream come true!

SprayTrace version 1.2 is available now to all SprayTrace users by downloading your software again from the SprayTrace web site. Plus the new HDR Light Studio Live plugin for SprayTrace is also available now to all HDR Light Studio Pro version 3 customers if they download their installers again from the Lightmap store.

SprayTrace and HDR Light Studio are currently for Windows OS only – but they are both coming very soon to the Mac and Linux platforms.

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.

I found this out by opening the scene above created in KeyShot 2, which has an environment gamma setting of 1.0. This is the correct setting to use when using HDR Light Studio with KeyShot 2.

I then opened the same file in KeyShot v3 and in here the Contrast is set to 2.5 and real-time renders looked exactly the same. So I now know that the correct setting for the Contrast when using HDR Light Studio is 2.5. But I wanted to understand how this Contrast value relates to the old Gamma setting… where does this number come from and what does it mean?

I tried a range of environment gamma settings in KeyShot 2, and then opened these files in KeyShot 3 – to find a pattern. It turns out that in KeyShot 3 the Contrast value = 3.5 minus the old gamma value. So for example: 3.5 – 1 = 2.5.

I hope this little sum will save you some time when setting up KeyShot 3 scenes. Simple small changes like this can really trip you up and cause quite a lot of head scratching when changing over. It’s not a problem when opening up KeyShot version 2 scenes… this conversion is done for you. But when starting a new project – simply leave this Constrast setting at 2.5 when working with HDR Light Studio… and adjust the gamma of the final image in the image settings to get the look you want.

Additionally when you are not using HDR Light Studio but using HDRI content from 3rd parties, often for some bizarre reason, the HDRI gets a gamma of 2.2 applied to it to make it look nice. This leaves the image data useless for accurate lighting and reflections, as the real world brightness values have been altered. A light of 500w is no longer half the brightness of a 1000W light when you apply a gamma adjustment like this to a HDRI. To correct this and make the lighting information valid again, you would normally apply a 1/2.2 = 0.4545 gamma setting – the inverse of 2.2. So in KeyShot 3 to apply a gamma of 0.4545 you would need to set the environment Contrast value to 3.5 – 0.4545 = 3.0455… in this case I would say a Contrast setting of 3 would be near enough and happens to be the max limit on the slider also.

Happy lighting in KeyShot version 3!

Lightmap launches HDR Light Studio version 3.0

HDR Light Studio v3.0 features: Collada support, new light blending modes, custom fall-off curves and faster render times

Click here to see full list of new feature and demo videos

1st January 2012 – Lightmap today announced immediate availability of HDR Light Studio v3.0 – the most incredible version yet of their groundbreaking real-time lighting software. Packed with new features including; localized exposure, color and saturation tools using new light blending modes, custom fall-off curves, a new color system for lighting artists and Collada support.

None of these new additions are at the expense of performance; HDR Light Studio v3.0 features even faster render times with all parameters now supporting instant feedback.

“The new blending modes for lights in version 3.0 are awesome,” enthuses Bruce Bigelow, Creative Director and Partner at Electric Art, “…because you can dodge and burn huge areas of hi-res HDRI backgrounds instantly and with an incredible smoothness you can’t achieve in any other software. With the new custom fall-off curves, new light shapes are infinite. It’s a quantum leap from 2.0.”

HDR Light Studio v3.0 provides market leading, real-time non-destructive manipulation and generation of HDR environments. Significant updates to HDR Light Studio 3.0 include:

•    New Light Blending Modes: use light sources to adjust exposure, color and saturation.
•    Custom fall-off curves: fine control over synthetic light fall-off.
•    New color system: Color selection and analysis tools designed specifically for lighting artists to allow precise color matching and auditioning.
•    Collada support: LiveLight now supports Collada to allow the import of geometry and camera information from all major 3D modeling packages.
•    Increased Performance: Faster rendering times and all features now support real-time feedback.

HDR Light Studio v3.0 can slash the time needed to professionally light CG (computer generated) scenes, “Usually, when you’re updating software, you’re disappointed by a lot of features that are totally useless. But with HDR Light Studio v3.0, the team is really listening to what the users are saying,” explains Piotr Kolus, Lead 3D artist at Ars Thanea. “All the new options are boosting your lighting process. From simple changes to advanced new features – all of them are more useful than I expected.”

HDR Light Studio is a proven lighting toolkit that can be used stand-alone by importing 3D scenes into LiveLight, or used in conjunction with any number of Live plug-in partners, including KeyShot, Maxwell Studio, Deep Exploration, VRED and Patchwork3D. This helped position HDR Light Studio as a professional, world-class, image based design suite. Version 3.0 ups the ante even further, “The new blending modes in v3.0 are game changing additions to HDR Light Studio. The ability to fine tune exposure, color and saturation within the software is invaluable. It can make the difference between a nice image and an amazing one,” according to Greg Peruski, CGI artist at Mid Coast Studio. “I also appreciate the ability to place a back-plate image in the LiveLight window now. It makes the process of lighting more intuitive… Being able to see your lighting in context with the back-plate is a huge benefit.”

Typical scenarios in which HDR Light Studio v3.0 can produce incredible results whilst saving time and money include:

•    Professional Studio Lighting – design traditional studio lighting rigs using powerful Synthetic and Picture based light sources quickly, efficiently, and with a quality of output not possible in other software.
•    On Location Professional Studio Lighting -
load existing HDR environments and augment these with additional light sources to bring out the best in your subject matter.
•    Color matched lighting for back-plate images -
create lighting to bed CG objects into existing backgrounds using HDR Light Studios’ color analysis and selection tools.
•    Creative HDR location re-lighting
- artistically enhance and relight existing HDR environment maps to creatively change the feel and mood of an original HDR in a non-destructive manner.
•    Increasing the dynamic range of LDR environment maps
- extend the dynamic range of existing HDR and LDR* images using dodge and burn techniques with the new light blending modes.

*LDR images must be in exr or hdr formats.

Pricing and Availability
HDR Light Studio 3.0 is available immediately in two versions: a ‘Standard’ edition for £399 plus VAT and a ‘Pro’ edition, which includes plug-ins for KeyShot, Maxwell Studio and Deep Exploration. The ‘Pro’ edition of HDR Light Studio v3.0 is available for £599 plus VAT. Additional Live plug-ins can be purchased for VRED by PI-VR and Patchwork3D by Lumiscaphe. Purchase online, or find your local reseller, by visiting www.hdrlightstudio.com

Click here to see full list of new feature and demo videos

This is a great animation project shared with us by Robert at Visual Arts Productions (www.v-arts.ch). It’s really great to see HDR Light Studio used on animation projects… a great job and well done to the team over there.