HDR Light Studio

PRICE Indie licence £195/$250/ Pro £295/$380/Automotive £995/$1,275 COMPANY Lightmap WEBSITE lightmap.co.uk

HDR Light Studio has been around for some time now, generating quite the reputation for its intuitive lighting of 3D scenes. One of the biggest benefits has been how it communicates with just about every other piece of 3D software via its plugins, making it easy to integrate into new or old pipelines.

An intuitive workflow and efficient pipeline is so key to many projects that tools like this sell themselves. Previous versions excelled with process and results, due to being feature rich with a shallow learning curve. Preview renders look fantastic and designing a lighting scheme in little time has been a huge benefit. So what could a new edition bring to the table to make the upgrade worthwhile? As it happens, a fair bit.

HDR Light Studio is a standalone tool aimed solely at the task of lighting scenes, with a dedicated UI designed for this. The layout is clean and clear, making excellent use of space, with everything falling neatly where you would want it. There are procedural lights that can have many attributes from shape, intensity and gradients, all adjustable on the fly, with real-time results shown in the preview window.