Caetano Brasil

Automotive vizualisation perfection

We caught up with Caetano Brasil, a HDR Light Studio user and freelance CG artist from Brazil, to see the impact HDR Light Studio had made on his 3D work.

 

Caetano, Why did you decide to choose HDR Light Studio as your lighting solution?

I always wanted a tool to create my own HDRI maps, but there weren’t any decent tools for this task. Then HDR Light Studio came along and filled this gap for me. It’s a tool to create a 3D lighting environment in a very easy and intuitive way.

Why didn’t you stick to creating your HDRI maps in Photoshop, or use the lighting in 3DS Max?

I tried to use Photoshop some times. Photoshop is still a great tool for manipulating HDRI photos that already exist. But it’s not an efficient tool to create, from scratch, an HDRI environment. And it’s very hard to control how it will work on my scene.

That’s the great productivity leap with HDR Light Studio; because now I don’t need to worry about weld seamless borders and I have a real control of the lights.

My direct lights in the 3D software are still useful, but for specific purposes. Now that I’m using HDR Light Studio, I wonder “How could I do it before?” Now with an HDR map prepared exclusively for my scene and already tested, it’s a real-time experience, facilitating to change position, intensity, color and the size of the lights. In just a few clicks I can obtain great results the with LiveLight real-time preview. It’s a much more spontaneous working process; I know exactly what I get. A car’s shot, for example, needs total control of the scene lights, to highlight my object. It’s amazing how much time I’m saving today. It’s much more fun and pleasant to light my scenes! 

So HDR Light Studio is saving you a lot of time in creating your photo-real images?

Absolutely! Not only creating, but also rendering. When I want to illuminate an object (it doesn’t matter which one) it’s important to focus on its design, how to highlight its shapes, volume, colors and materials. So it’s important to have a tool that let me focus on it and forget about complex procedures. And the best thing is that image-based lightning technique is much faster than lighting on 3DS Max.

As a percentage, how much time would you say you are saving in the lighting of your renders?

70% at least, but in fact it’s difficult to measure. Because I’m not sure how I could achieve before the results that I’m getting now. 

What for you has been the best feature of using HDR Light Studio?

LiveLight and seamless borders are the best! I just need to worry about where to put my lights, how many of them, which colors, which shape, harder or smoother borders… totally artistic work! We already have enough technical work using 3D software; it’s great to work just seeing what you are really doing.

 

To check out more of Caetanos work, visit: www.caebrasil.com

 

 

Caetano Brasil

Peugeot 408 visual

Lighting design

Another shot