New Interface Emphasizes Speed, Customizable Workspace, and Ease of Use

Lightmap released HDR Light Studio 5, an overhaul of its 3D lighting software with a new full-screen user interface and support for Alembic and FBX files, OpenImageIO, and OpenColorIO. Lightmap said the software has been redesigned and re-engineered to deal with larger images and 3D data and better fit in studio pipelines.

One of the key features in the new HDR Light Studio is a drag-and-drop approach to lighting. The earlier Picture Lights dialog has been replaced by a presets panel offering a library of presets that can be dragged into the render view to easily light a model, with additional click-and-drag options for adjusting brightness and scaling and rotating the lights. In addition, LDR and HDR images in a variety of formats can be loaded and used as lights, with the ability to adjust saturation or colorize the imported image, as well as to specify a LUT for the image.

The new Lighting Preview Renderer updates without restarting as lighting, diffusion and reflection levels, and more are changed on the fly. In addition, the new UI is customizable; panels can be moved around the screen and redocked to configure the workspace in a variety of conventional and unconventional ways—making the most of the drag-and-drop interface.

HDRI image output options now use EXR 2.0, with the option to choose 32-bit floats or 16-bit half-floats.

For a complete summary of new features, see the list at Lightmap's website.

HDR Light Studio 5 is available for Windows, Mac OS X and LInux. Permanent licenses start at $995, with annual subscriptions, including software updates, running $445. The company said it is ushering in a "continual software development model" to accelerate the rate of feature additions to the software.

Plug-ins are available separately to hook HDR Light Studio directly into 3D apps. The plug-ins for Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max, Maxon Cinema 4D, The Foundry Modo, and NewTek LightWave 3D are $145 each, while a plug-in for Autodesk VRED is $295. Plug-ins for Dassault Bunkspeed and DeltaGen, Next Limit Maxwell, Side Effects Houdini and McNeel Rhino 3D are listed by Lightmap as coming soon; third-party plug-ins for Luxion KeyShot and Autodesk Softimage are available but unsupported.