Lightmap Shines with HDR Light Studio 5
May 14, 2015

Lightmap Shines with HDR Light Studio 5

LONDON –  Lightmap has made available its HDR Light Studio 5. Featuring a major redesign that includes a new, flexible UI, Lightmap’s lighting tool has been reborn with over 80 new features and enhancements for professional 3D artists working in advertising, design, animation and VFX.

HDR Light Studio’s patented “click-to-light” system dramatically reduces an artist’s lighting time. By placing lights directly into a render view, artists get instant updates on their progress, ensuring a faster, more fluid user experience. Re-engineered to handle huge images and 3D data, HDR Light Studio 5 opens up a host of new lighting possibilities to artists, while added support for Alembic, OpenImageIO and OpenColorIO makes it even more accessible to the modern studio pipeline.

Key new features in HDR Light Studio 5: 

  • Flexible UI – New full-screen user interface is customizable and includes dockable panels and preset layouts.
  • Instant Re-Lighting – New Lighting Preview Renderer provides instant updates with lighting and diffuse/reflection changes, no special graphics card required.
  • Drag and Drop – A wide range of light sources and effects can now be drag-and-dropped directly onto the render view, ensuring a fast and efficient lighting experience.
  • Image Import – User images can be loaded into HDR Light Studio, with support for LDR, HDR and alpha. For large images, the use of supported mip-mapped files increases the speed of lighting.
  • 3D File Formats – Support for Alembic, including moving cameras and time selection. FBX support (Windows only) is also available.
  • New Lighting Content – Procedural sun/sky, linear and radial gradients, secondary alpha control for lights, and additional blend modes like multiply and high pass have been added.
  • New Content Mappings – 3D, planar and spherical mappings can add content to an artist’s HDRI map for more creative control, e.g. tilting HDRI maps or maintaining verticals.

HDR Light Studio 5 is available on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux through the Lightmap website (www.lightmap.co.uk). New pricing starts at $995 for permanent licenses, and  $445 for annual subscriptions including software updates.