HDR Lightstudio connection

[puyopuyo]

Dear Luxion Team,
any chance the connection to HDR lightstudio will make a comeback? Don´t get me wrong the updates you´ve made to the HDRI editor are all awesome and super useful, but it was was just really nice to have the additional option to use HDR Lightstudio for some projects in Keyshot 6.
Plus I´m having a hard time selling the transition to Keyshot 8 to the management in my company, when after the last uprade to K7 our sets of permanent HDR Lightstudio licenses just became obsolete. They will probably tell me to just use Arnold which is integrated in our modeling package Maya already.

Keep up the great work on Keyshot.
Claudius

[PerFotoVDB]

Hi

I asked for that a short while ago.
The hdri editor in Keyshot is good but HDRLS is better.
Especially support for moving the lights in 3D space as opposed to only on the sphere would be a great addition to Keyshots lighting tools (which I still feel a bit 'ancient').

[puyopuyo]

Hi

I asked for that a short while ago.
The hdri editor in Keyshot is good but HDRLS is better.
Especially support for moving the lights in 3D space as opposed to only on the sphere would be a great addition to Keyshots lighting tools (which I still feel a bit 'ancient').

So that´s a +1? 

[DMerz III]

I cannot speak for Luxion, but I feel like the severing of the relationship between HDRLS and Keyshot was initiated from the HDRLS side.
I could be wrong.

[Eugen Fetsch]

Maybe it is better to point out the missing features from HDRL and forward them to Luxion so they can improve their tool instead of implementing real time linking.

[mattjgerard]

Yeah, I don't think it will go back to the way it was, so put your wishes on the wish list and see what happens.

[puyopuyo]

I cannot speak for Luxion, but I feel like the severing of the relationship between HDRLS and Keyshot was initiated from the HDRLS side.
I could be wrong.

Thanks David- you think so? It would be cool to hear from Luxion.

Maybe it is better to point out the missing features from HDRL and forward them to Luxion so they can improve their tool instead of implementing real time linking.

Yeah, I don't think it will go back to the way it was, so put your wishes on the wish list and see what happens.

Yeah, I can write about that. First of all the Keyshot HDRI editor is my top choice if there is need for great lighting in the smallest amount of time. It´s awesome for that purpose and gets lots of use from me and the other 3D artists in our daily work.

Only for a few projects I like to spend much more time on tweaking the lighting of a rendering though and then I prefer HDRLS because of the fluidity- it feels like the equivalent to a video game with a steady 60fps framerate if that makes sense?
For example in a highpoly KS scene with many transperencies the framerate can drop alot and that affects the of pins in the HDRI editor as well as everything else in the scene which is breaking my flow and giving me grey hair!  It is very convenient that the HDRLS app which can be maximized on another screen doesn´t drop its framerate at all in this situation and led to a better experience when lighting complex scenes for me.

Have a look at the amount of screenspace dedicated solely to lighting when combining Keyshot 6 with HDRLS.
The canvas in HDRLS can always be zoomed in/out or lowered in exposure with a move of the mouse to better gauge what´s going on with small and often very bright lights. There are a ton of light presets like softboxes or studiolights like from a real photographer that can be dragged and dropped from a library that is visible on the screen at any time and just look very nice.

These are some features for lightpins I miss in the HDRI editor:
-The ability to scale round lights in x and y independently
-the ability to control the falloff of the lights with curves
-more blendmodes when layering lights like amplify to create shiny gradients within a light
-individual sliders for the light brightness and its opacity which is helpful if you want to keep the exact shape of a ligth on the model and just dial down its opacity

I will write up a more detailed description if it helps anyone, but I´d really prefer to be able to use HDRLS which I already own together with my favorite rendering software Keyshot, preferable the newest version. You know right now we´re using a mix of 30% Keyshot 6 for the ability to use HDRL and 70% of Keyshot 7 for everything else and as you can guess this is less then ideal because files from a higher KS version are not backward compatible and right now this is influencing our descision to upgrade to KS8 in our company.

I´m sorry I am clueless as to what amount of work is required to implement the plugin like in KS6 but I guess there are some other studios and artists in a similar situation that would like to benefit from the Keyshot 8 features and use HDRLS at some times in their workflow?

In short my company is eager to upgrade to KS8 and will even pay an extra fee if there was an official HDRLS connection with lightpainting and arealight functionality as for the other industry renderers- but even the simple functionality from KS6 where you can launch HDRLS from the KS environment tab without lightpainting on the model directly would be very appreciated.

[DMerz III]

  Great write-up. I have never used HDRLS extensively, I remember discovering it and thinking, wow this is cool but it was shortly after the plugin stopped being supported, and I just never went back to it, but definitely saw the potential. I am an avid HDRI editor-user. I pretty much create custom ones on a daily basis and more tools and capability there is always a win in my book, so I fully support adding functionality there if it's possible, but I also think Luxion does a great job of keeping the interface approachable, and that's always a sacrifice with more features. They do a pretty good job of striking the balance in other areas, so I have trust the developers can figure it out.

Your work speaks for itself, I always admire the detail you achieve through lighting, consider me a fan.

In regards to screen space, you are able to 'pop-out' the editor into its own space, but I assume you already know about that.

[puyopuyo]

Great write-up. I have never used HDRLS extensively, I remember discovering it and thinking, wow this is cool but it was shortly after the plugin stopped being supported, and I just never went back to it, but definitely saw the potential. I am an avid HDRI editor-user. I pretty much create custom ones on a daily basis and more tools and capability there is always a win in my book, so I fully support adding functionality there if it's possible, but I also think Luxion does a great job of keeping the interface approachable, and that's always a sacrifice with more features. They do a pretty good job of striking the balance in other areas, so I have trust the developers can figure it out.

Your work speaks for itself, I always admire the detail you achieve through lighting, consider me a fan.

In regards to screen space, you are able to 'pop-out' the editor into its own space, but I assume you already know about that.

Glad you like my write up and work! 
I trust Luxion too.
I create alot of custom HDRs too- at least 5 per day.