Achieving accurate colors and lighting in renders is essential for professional 3D content creators. This level of accuracy is made possible by calibrating cameras, devices, monitors, and rendering tools to capture and display true colors recreated from real-world illumination.
This ensures that a project’s final visuals reflect realistic and consistent colors across all platforms.
With traditional HDRi Maps, it’s fairly easy to access image-based lighting data and tone-mapped visuals for use in your DCC of choice.
Getting light colors and intensity values right from a traditional HDRi Map, though, is an entirely different matter.
Designers often find themselves spending hours tweaking the temperature, hue, intensity, and other parameters of lighting data from traditional HDRi Maps—or even adding their own light sources—in order to achieve realistic colors and lighting values.
Even then, the results are rarely perfect. The human eye struggles to accurately perceive tint information, which means that even a skilled artist with a properly calibrated monitor will often struggle to get magentas and greens perfect in their final render when configuring color data by hand.
The result is a lot of wasted time and energy that could be better spent on the creative aspects of rendering. And even with all that time, lighting results are often less than perfect!
Our RAY HDR Color-Calibrated HDRi Maps
That’s why we developed our proprietary RAY HDR technology . The RAY HDR format is a calibrated HDRi Map that perfectly captures lighting information present in the real world.
Our HDRi Maps are available with 32 stops of dynamic range, capturing more than the approximately 28 stops present in even the brightest real-world scenes.
The result is a file that captures every piece of lighting data in the scene, from the darkest shadows to the brightest sun-illuminated areas.
We don’t stop there, though. We also calibrate our HDRi Maps so that the colors perfectly match the real-world scene, even for extremely bright, sunlit scenes.
In many cases, our RAY HDR format cuts setup time from several hours to just a few minutes—a 50x or more time savings. It also saves designers from the drudge work of manually configuring colors.
You can learn more about our RAY HDR format in this detailed explainer video from David Baylis , or download some RAY.HDRi Maps and try them out for yourself with a free CGI.Backgrounds plan.
Spend less time manually adjusting colors and lighting, and more time on the creative parts of the rendering process with RAY HDR.
