The HDRI Skylight Manager is a quick and easy way to place and align lights in relation to an HDRI environment.
Features
Interactively and intuitively place lights on a HDRI! No need to guess the coordinates!
Lights automatically adjust their own color and intensity to match the appropriate pixel.
You can rotate the HDRI at any time. The lights will rotate along with it.
Detect and move lights to the sun’s location with just one click
Quick Start
Select a HDRI texture
Press “Initialize”. This will generate a HDRI environment, a reference image, and empties used to control the lights. (They’re a bit hard to see, by default, they start in the center of the image)
You can position and scale the image as you want. Do not un-parent the control empties from the image. Do not delete the image or the controllers. By default, neither the empties or the reference image will appear when you render.
Move the controllers wherever you want on the image. The angle, color, and brightness of the associated lamp will be adjusted automatically.
Notes
Unlike in Marmoset Toolbag, the brightness of the HDRI does not affect “Skylight Brightness”.
The number of lights is soft-capped at 5. You can go above that by manually inputting a number.
I bought the add on. One request I have is I would like the option of being able to work with an addon like Gaffer. Currently there is no HDR Preview when selecting the HDR which makes HDR selection a bit hit and miss. Gaffers HDR handling and preview is easy to work with.
Thanks
I’m looking into compatibility with Gaffer now, and it should be possible though it’s more complicated than I hoped it’d be. I’ll see if I can get in done for the next update.
This looks dope! I’ve been looking for a Marmoset-like way of placing lights for a long time now. I’ll have to give this a try. Is there any plans to add more features to this addon?
I’ve no major plans at the moment aside from continual bug fixing, since it works for my personal needs, but please do suggest if you think there’s something that could be added. This whole rewrite was because Mash3d asked about Gaffer support ages ago after all!
I haven’t bought this (or Gaffer) yet, but these two addons might just make me want to try render my current project in Blender, to use less apps for finishing an asset form modeling to rendering
My one concern would be how seamless the tweaking of lights is - what is so powerful in Marmoset is the fact you can move lights and in real-time get an instant update on the lights moving around your scene. This is a life-saver for shiny hard-surface objects, where you can find with this method those sexy highlights to add to your asset all over it.
That’s my main curiosity with this addon (specially now after its Gaffer integration) - how fast do the lights update in real-time as you move them, and how heavy do scenes have to get for the speed to start being affected?
Yeah, that was the thing I missed most when I started trying out rendering in Eevee instead of Marmoset as well!
The updating happens more or less instantly, as you can see in this gif. You can see the lines indicating the direction of the light moving as the empties controlling them are moved.
I do check a cache to see if the lights need to be updated before I actually update them, so I imagine how many lights your graphics card can handle would be a more relevant question (the lights are just standard Sun lights). I just checked though, and the plugin (and Eevee) isn’t lagging with 30 lights, so I believe it’ll be enough for your needs.
Thanks for the quick reply - I just bought the addon because of that I assume the new Gaffer-compatible version is the V2 zip. It’ll probably take me a month or two to get my current asset to lightning it inside Blender, but once I do I’d like to report back my experience using this.
Thanks again for sharing this addon with the community
I assume the new Gaffer-compatible version is the V2 zip. It’ll probably take me a month or two to get my current asset to lightning it inside Blender, but once I do I’d like to report back my experience using this.