One of the great features of the Iray is the ability to add realism to your renders by using Image Based Lighting (IBL). In many cases, using one of these High Dynamic Range Image (HDRI) environments provides all the scenery you need for great renders of your favorite characters. The only drawback is that the environment is projected from the original camera’s position, no matter how you move your camera in the scene. That means that means that most IBL products are great for portraying a human-sized character in a human-sized world, but they leave all our fairy-sized favorites with nowhere to pose.

Introducing Fairy Scale IBL! Thanks to miniaturization and dual lens technology, it is now possible to capture all the magic and wonder that waits a little closer to the ground. Now we can capture High Dynamic Range Images up in trees, under bushes, deep in the grass, or hidden under a rock. This entire line of products is shot with an actual camera height between 11 cm and 43 cm, with most of them taken at 19 cm above the ground. You can now pose your fairies and creatures in their natural habitat, not just flying high above the ground in front of some distant trees or bushes.

We are thrilled to present Fairy Scale IBL – Forest Pixie HDRI Environments! This unique collection features twelve beautiful 14 Megapixels environments for your Iray renders. Each environment was composed from five individual shots taken with a dynamic range of 5 f-stops of exposure, so you can push and pull the exposure as much as you please. They look good without using depth of field in your camera settings, but turn on a little depth of field to separate your subject a bit from the pleasantly blurred background and they look amazing. Each environment comes complete with an add-on scene subset that includes a camera centered at the proper height of the original camera, a “sun light” directional key light that is properly aligned with the environment and balanced with the IBL default settings, and an environment visualizer sphere that is mapped with a 3Delight texture that by default will not render with your Iray renders. That means you can easily pose and position everything using the “textured” Open GL setting and then render with full Iray quality even if your machine isn’t equipped with high end video cards with thousands of CUDA cores.

Due to the dual fisheye lens technology, some images have minor blurring near the image seams. Most people never notice it, and it is nearly undetectable when using even minor DOF effects, but I believe in full disclosure. Furthermore, occasionally the brightest areas may have slight chromatic aberration due to the nature of fisheye lenses, or a leaf may have shifted a tiny bit between frames, leaving very minor ghosting. And while the images are 5376 x 2688 (14 Megapixels) that is a bit smaller than some of the HDRI sets that are available here at DAZ. However, these images are shot near to the subject, so you are often getting more actual pixels from the environment in your render than if you were zooming in in a distant feature in a higher resolution environment. So if you are looking for the absolute highest resolution HDRI environments, this product isn’t for you. If you are looking for environments that look amazing when rendered and provide a unique perspective at a great price, then you will love all of the Fairy Scale IBL products. Ultimately, you should look at our detailed promo shots and decide for yourself. Enjoy!