HDRi Lighting Tricks

Gleb Alexandrov shares 4 tips for lighting with HDRi maps in his rapid-fire format.

Modern render engines like Vray and Cycles make believable lighting extremely easy to achieve with environment mapping. This means we can plug in an image to A) contribute a large amount of ambient light to our scene and B) provide a world of reflections for our reflective objects. Without such a texture map we would need to model and light a huge scene to get the same ambient light and reflection contribution. Generally the best environment mapping results are achieved with HDRi images. Unfortunately they tend to slow down render times and increase noise. In this video, Gleb shows you how to use and tweak non-HDRi images (like .jpg, and .png) to light your scene secondarily and primarily.