Using HDR Light Studio, we can effortlessly create highly realistic studio lighting environments for rendering our 3D geometry. HDR Light Studio version 2 includes many new enhancements that makes this process easier than ever before. Much of this course will focus on the new LiveLight feature, allowing you to view your studio lighting results directly on your mesh, and precisely control the placement of your lights in real-time. We will also explore the round-trip process of taking your meshes as well as your camera placement information from 3ds Max, Maya, and Softimage into HDR Light Studio. From there, we will learn how to properly take your studio lighting results back to 3ds Max, Maya, and Softimage for final rendering. We will also explore features such as enhancing existing HDR images, user interface enhancements and many other topics that will allow you to use HDR Light Studio to take your renders to a whole new level of realism.

We will begin this course in Maya, where we will learn how to set up an image-based lighting environment in preparation for rendering. From there, we will jump into HDR Light Studio, which will allow us to easily create high dynamic range images which can mimic realistic studio lighting. We will learn how to control the appearance of synthetic lights within HDR Light Studio, as well as discussing many techniques which can dramatically increase the efficiency of your lighting workflow in both Maya and HDR Light Studio.

In this series of lessons we will take an introductory look at HDR light studio, which includes controlling light placement and intensity, light falloff controls, adjusting background luminance, using lightpacks to achieve highly realistic lighting effects, utilizing guide markers, as well as many other topics that will be explored during this course.