HDR Light Studio for Mac

STUDIO-LIKE LIGHTING

HDR Light Studio is an optional plugin application for Design 3D CX 8 that allows you to interactively build your lighting and reflections to achieve studio-like lighting. You can actually click on surfaces to direct where a light should be placed in order to get the reflection to appear in that exact spot!

What is HDR Light Studio?

HDR Light Studio lets you easily build Lightdomes in real-time by creating and editing HDRI environment maps. As you develop your custom HDRI map you see its lighting effect in real-time on your Design 3D project via LiveRay.

Click on your 3D model to move the active light to a new location on the HDRI map that will illuminate or be reflected in that part of your 3D model. We call this point and click approach to lighting your shot “LightPaint”.

HDR Light Studio is much more than an HDR editor—it’s a revolutionary new lighting tool that fits into your existing workflow. It’s the fastest way to get your lighting vision out of your head, and onto the screen.

Use HDR Light Studio to:

  • Create a custom HDRI map for each shot as a faster alternative to creating and moving lights or emitters in 3D to light your scenes.
  • Create complex and precise lighting & reflections for reflective objects like products, jewelry and cars.
  • Create professional studio lighting environments containing real studio light source captures.
  • Load and control existing HDRI maps and backgrounds with local adjustments to exposure, color and saturation – even adding additional lights. Re-light the HDR to emphasize the beauty of the subject, while maintaining the character and detail within the original HDRI.
  • Create convincing lighting for CG objects placed into photographic backgrounds using color matching tools.
  • Create a HDR environment as the foundation to your shot containing the majority of ambient lighting—as a result, add far less CG light sources than ever before, only where you need them.

HDR Light Studio Benefits

Light shots faster

Quickly explore and perfect your lighting by placing lighting and edits directly in your shot with instant feedback.

Increase image quality

HDR Light Studio brings a higher level of control to your lighting through realistic HDR captures and procedural lighting and effects that will bring your materials to life.

Maximize existing content

Enhance and augment existing HDRI maps to control their effect on your shot. Create plausible lighting for use with existing back-plates using powerful color matching tools.

Reduce render times

Take advantage of image based lighting to significantly reduce your final render times or to light real-time assets.

Who uses HDR Light Studio?

HDR light Studio can be used to light any 3D content and is becoming an industry standard worldwide in automotive/product visualization, photo/retouch/CGI studios and VFX studios.

Learn from an Expert

In these introductory tutorials, expert user and Strata certified trainer Chris Tyler shows you the basics of using HDR Light Studio with Strata Design 3D CX 8.


For more tutorials from Chris Tyler check out his page on the Strata 3D University.

This is a Special Plugin Version of HDR Light Studio

This plugin version of HDR Light Studio allows you to interactively place lights using Design 3D CX 8 with the new LiveRay feature. The plugin application works directly with Design 3D CX 8 to communicate the lighting information and direction with a special interface provided by Design 3D.

If you own the standard, standalone version of HDR Light Studio (available directly from Lightmap Limited) you’ll be able to build HDR images that can be used in backgrounds in Design 3D for lighting, reflections and visible backgrounds. However, the interactive placement aspect will not be available to you.

This plugin was jointly developed by the engineering teams at Strata and Lightmap. We believe you’ll find the implementation of the LightPaint feature and the Strata interface to be a tremendous boost to your creative workflow.

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