What's your favourite HDRI or light set, and why?
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I know this conversation has been done many times before. But I always learn so much from people's opinions and why they favour certain lighting sets or HDRIs over others. I thought maybe to update the conversation and find out if there are any newer products out there that are people's 'go to', or do they find their tried and tested favourites still hold their own? Personaly, I am most fond of the BOSS Pro Light Set for Portraits & Promos ( https://www.daz3d.com/boss-pro-light-set-for-portraits-promos ) and use it for many of my renders. It is usually my 'go to' because of its versatility and functionality. I know the set-ups provided are meant to be tuned for optimum performance, but I love moving things around to get some amazing lighting effects. I must admit I really don't like setting up lights. I find it tedious. I'd rather have many lights appear at the click of a button and then just adjust as needed. I also find the Iray Ghost Light and Probe Kits by KindredArts to be a godsend and use them in abundance (https://www.daz3d.com/kindredarts).
Over to you...
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Comments
All time favorite? Easily Age of Armor's Advanced Light sets. Just brilliant and a joy to work with. Of course, those are for 3DL and therefore rarely used any more.
For Iray, I'll have to break it down into types. For exteriors, there's no doubt that Dimension Theories Skies of Iradiance bundle is the set that I've USED the most. It's just a good, all around basic kit of everything you need from Day to Night and what's in between. For interiors - some will say this is a cheat since they're not really a stand-alone set, but it's got to be Kindred Arts' Iray Probe and Ghost light sets. I always try to light my interiors practically, using light emitting props like lamps, windows, computermonitors, etc,wheneer possible, and these little gems are constant lifesavers when everything is almost perfect except for the amount of fill. If you want the name of an actual HDRI set, then Colm Jackson's Render Studio HDR is a great set that covers most needs.
All that said, my experience has been that there are very few BAD lighting sets being sold out there, but none of them are perfect for every situation... which is why I've picked up a copuple of hundred different sets over the years.
My favorites are: the entire Colm Jackson's light sets, in particular iRay Studio 2.0, Ultra Genesis Iray light sets, J.Cade now gone Painter's Lights, and BOSS Studio Portrait lights.
I'm getting better though at just adding lights where I want them from the DAZ Studio menu.
I use Colm Jackson's PRO-Studio HDR Lighting System 2 more than any other set of lights. Versatile and easy to adjust.
..for 3DL, a toss up between AoA's Advanced Light sets and Parris' IBL Master.
..for Iray a dead heat between Denki Gaka's IBL Skies and valzheimer's Fast Production lights.
Inane Glory and Elianeck for light sets and mesh lights also those by DimensionTheory, for HDRIs Orestes Graphics or DT's, but I do find some of DT's HDRIs give hard shadows which personall I'm not too found of.
I use Painter's Lights a lot but not much point recommending them as they have been removed from the store. I've just started using some Paper Tiger sets (Rendo) which are proving very useful and versatile.
I do a lot of dark city scenes and PTF Neon Splash Lighting Suite and Skyewolf's Luminosity sets are great for that.
My "if you can only buy one light set to start with" recommendation is Fast Production Lights. Using that set basically taught me how to get the effects I wanted from HDRIs and tone mapping.
My favorite Ligh set is just the plain 3 point basic light I set up for all scenes 3delight and opengl. For Iray it is a homemade HDRI made of the background scene with the close stuff kept and the distant stuff out of focus and part of the HDRI. I should add this is really not a true HDRI but a Photoshop fake HDRI light created to speed up renders of sets that I render often. My problem with commerical HDRI lights is that the author of them makes the background so you have to use that. For beach and highway scenes these HDRI's are fine but I can't always find something to work with interiors spaces so I use Photoshop to fake the lights and speed up renders. Also I do composite everything in Photoshop or if you don't want to pay for it GIMP.
Not Daz products, but still very much worth mentioning.
https://www.hdrihaven.com has some amazing FREE HDRIs mixed in with some more 'typical' ones. Definitely worth a look, and you have a variety of settings/locations to choose from. As mentioned, the HDRIs are free, but donations to 'the cause', while certainly not required, are appreciated.
I'm also pretty impressed with this product:
https://www.daz3d.com/red-planet-for-iray
It's usage case is very specific and limited in scope, but I'm hoping that Aako does a few other planets along these lines. The other 'planets' products in the Daz store are nice, but this one in particular is just exceptional for what it does. I love that you can rotate the 'sun & stars' hdri, hence changing the shape of the 'phase' shadow from a thin crescent to a full sphere.
I also need to figure out the 'viewport trick' Aako uses where the viewport is rotated 90 degrees. I didn't know you could do that with the Daz viewport. It's not something I'd use often at all, but it's interesting to know about nonetheless.
He's done the Earth as well. I'd be pretty excited if Aako did a couple of the more interesting Gas Planet moons, like Enceledas, Titan, Io and such. With Jupiter, etc. in the background, either as part of the HDRI or even better as a separate movable sphere. And of course the other planets. For those of us that like to dabble in space art occasionally, yes more please!
My favorite HDRI is one called Aristea Wreck from HDRI Haven. I think it provides the most even, natural light at the default settings. And it makes most of my characters look as realistic as I've seen them. I also like one called Green Point Park, also from the same source and almost as good I think.
..I used to use to do a 3 point setup with an ambient in 3DL but with Iray it didn't work well. As I don't have photography equipment or the appropriate software, creating my own HDRIs is out of the question. ALso, I am interested in HDRIs that have scenery included. as it looks like using someone else's photo. That is why I mentioned Denki gaga's IBL Skies as my "go to" HDRIs. .
See this by SecondCircle >>https://www.deviantart.com/second-circle/art/Quick-Tut-Make-your-own-HDRi-with-free-samples-576276387
I actually render background scene spherical and add light via photoshop creating fake HDRI for my Iray renders. Then I use this for my Iray renders.
...I don't have Photoshop.
BOSS, Pro-Studio (see this Gallery render) , both already mentioned. Many of the rest of my gallery use BOSS or Pro-Studio.
Here is also Dumors Apocalyptic Plant Outdoors Set Gallery
And this is DA Real World Lighting, one of my favorite renders. Gallery. Another: Gallery
Thought it would be good to show as well as tell :) My gallery is mostly portraits when I was showcasing people for my Art Studio thread, so there are many examples of the above light sets. I use them all equally.
@kyoto kid
There is some free software out there that you can use to create .hdri's. The latest version of GIMP supposedly can do this to some degree as well, but it might not be as straightforward as photoshop. There's a guide on hdrihaven.com which talks about creating HDRIs as well. Looks like it's a bit of work to do, and I've never tried to create a 360 degree panoramic image in Daz Studio, so others should comment on that. That should allow you to 'skip' the whole multiple camera angles then stitch together afterwords thing.
Anyways, others that are 'in the know' can comment on this further.
As a total cheapskate, I have really only used the HDRI's that come with DS in the starter pack. Of the 5, the Desert Sunset one is the one I prefer. 'Tis a bit limiting in some ways, but the gentle light it casts is quite flattering on tanned/darker skinned models.
Most of my 'external' renders use sun/sky lighting within DS. My preferred locations being high latitude (70-80 degree north/south), date 21 June and time 18:00 to 23:00 depending on the exact lighting I want. This usually gives a low, yellow, gentle light that flatters the model and enables appropriate curves to be emphasised by skin glossiness highlights.
For studio portraits, it's a set by Fabiana on Rendo. For pretty much anything else, it's HDRI Haven. I would, however, also recommend the sets by Cake and Bob on the marketplace. I'm also a fan of PTF's Neon Splash Lighting Suite. I've purchased many a light set and those are the ones I keep coming back to. I've also learned that (for me) mesh lights are the devil (not spot lights turned mesh lights which are awesome...I'm talking about light sets that use emissive planes...just why omg why).
I love Sickleyield's Good to Go light set & HDRI, sold in her store on Rendo. Why? Because it is very easy to use and comes with one of her great tutorials. Just right for someone just starting to get serious about lighting
...the reason I prefer the IBL over other HDRI sets is they are just sky HDRIs with no ground scenery which also have different sun angles from sunrise to noon (sort of like the old LDP2). As I tend to build the foreground settings of my scenes using geometry and/or an occasional photo backdrop (which I create a mask out of to just have the elements in I need) I find those with ground level scenery to be useless.
In this old scene I used geometry for the street level setting, a photo backdrop mask for the city skyline in the background, and one of the HDRI Skies spheres,
Fpr studio type light setup: Incandescent portrait lights. Fast to render, lots of option and good for close-ups.
Set with individual setup of lights: Colm Jackson's Render Studio 3. Lots of options, but not every light type us self-explanatory. Lots of options for experimenting but not for one-click-load-render solutions.
I have more, maybe too many but these are the sets that I use the most, probably.
I second the Dimension Theory HDRIs as being very good. And not everyone wants direct sunlight in their outdoor scenes. DT has a MauiB HDRI that has beautiful ambient light which I use for my starter scene... 110MB.
If you want serious high dynamic range with image based lighting they will have to be big files. At least 100MB IMO.
For me it's Sun/Sky mode with one or more ghostlight globes... But I'm not an artist, so it doesn't matter anyway ^^
It is possible to create them using Gimp or Photoshop only.
..but to get "real skies with "real" sky/cloud conditions takes 360° photography, and a lot of it if you want different sun altitudes. The downside of Iray compared to 3DL is any skydome you use blocks out the Iray "sun" so it's either a clear cloudless sky with little depth to it or depending on the "sun" in the HDRI being just as accurate. I notice that in some HDRIs, shadows are sharp edged throughout unlike how the Iray sun works and others, the cun doesn't have the same intenisty as natural sunlight.
The image I posted above was actually rendered in 3DL using one of the IBL Skies spheres and Parris' IBL master. using a photo filter to give it an old 1960s magazine colour photo look.
I couldn't and wouldn't live without them! 3dl and I are old, close friends and that new kid on the block just ain't cutting it. When you live off the grid, huge GPU's use too much power, even on a sunny day, whereas 3dl chugs along nicely though the sky be overcast.