Welcome to my PureLIGHT HDRi Help & Feedback page. Here you will find all the information needed to use the HDRi Skydomes in your own projects.

About the PureLIGHT HDRi’s

PureLIGHT HDRi’s are a collection of virtually created High Dynamic Range skydome images saved to the .HDR format for use as a spherical environment in 3d scenes. The high dynamic nature of these images will ensure great looking realistic shadows from the sun!

The HDR’s are provided at 6000×3000 pixels resolution, and in most cases are good enough to be used as the actual background. You may also use the provided .JPG versions of the images that were filtered with a natural film response algorithm for a much nicer overall look.

How to use the PureLIGHT HDRi’s

The following description is based on the use of 3dsmax and VRay, but the same idea can be implemented on other platforms and render engines as well.

With VRay I use the special VRayHDRI Map to load the HDRi provided. You can also opt to use the 3dsmax built in bitmap loader (that is what you will have to use with other render engines)

Set the projection to spherical and you must remember to set the Gamma value to 0.454545 or you will get a washed out and incorrect coloring renderes!

The sun is always centered in the image (though it’s pitch may vray) to make it easy to control the shadows direction. To change the sun’s position, change the Horiz. Rotation value in the VRayHDRI settings or enter a value from 0-1 in the standard bitmap offset input slot.

You may use this HDRI in the max environment map slot or with a VRayDomeLight.

You can get the MS House scene (Though setup with a different LDR image) by subscribing to my blog newsletter at at the right side of this page on top of the sidebar area.

October 1, 2011 : Since this page was first published, I posted an article about HDR Image Based Lighting 3D Scene Setup that has 2 videos and a bunch of valuable followers comments that can help you a lot in getting your setup just right… do check it out 😉