I’m a sometime MODO user. There is a recent MODO plugin from HDR Light Studio that is worth commenting on.
HDRLS creates a HDRI with a very cool feature called Light Paint. Light Paint lets you click on the object to tell the plugin where you want the light to appear. You can ‘paint’ highlights on objects and then adjust brightness, reflectivity, etc. with sliders. The lights appear on a grid and you can move them around. Once you’ve tried it (I only have the demo right now) it makes the traditional approach of positioning and ‘aiming’ lights at objects seem cumbersome and very inaccurate. There are a number of plugins for different software packages available (any possibility of a Rhino plugin?) plus a standalone version.
My gut instinct, after playing around with the demo for a couple of hours is that this is the future of lighting.
Sounds interesting and I’m definitely an HDRI fan. I haven’t heard of any plugins for Rhino to do this type of tweeking yet. Maybe @andy has some ideas?
Sorry for not making a proper link but when I try to use the link button on Discourse it gets confusing - anyways, this is the page that shows the various programs HDR Light Studio currently has plugins for. I’d love to see Rhino added to that list.
Thanks for the link. It looks like you could already use this with Maxwell Studio… It doesn’t however look like the Maxwell for Rhino plugin is currently supported with a live connection but @jdhill is the man to answer if that would be possible.
It looks like Vray might also be an option… and I’d ask the Chaos group if you’d like to see Vray for Rhino using this tool.
The HDR light studio folks may have to write some of the integration too though so I’d ask them directly if they plan to add Rhino render plugins or if that’s up to the specific plugin developers directly.
I’m a new user so apologies for asking some basic questions -
Can Rhino use, natively, HDRIs in the environment slot?
If not, can any of the expanded rendering options such as Neon or Brazil use HDRIs?
The ideal situation would be to have a live plugin but, short of that, one could export a OBJ of the model to the standalone version of HDRLS and light it as a grey model then bring the resulting the HDRI back.