As I am starting to fiddle with the latest version any questions out there on Pro lighting skies before I begin? Feel free to chime in! Here to help.
So upfront because I know it will come up no I do not work for Andrew and yes I paid for the Pro-Lighting: Skies: Review Scores:
Cycles 8/10 - Pro- Fast,easy,effective Con- $$
Add-ons 7/10 - Pro - Simple, great GUI Con - needs some effort to ad your own HRDI
Blender 7/10 Pro - meshes well into cycles Con - not for the game engine
Reviewed: 97 dollar “light option”
Author -Jeffrey Wilson 7/28/2015
Shall we get to it! What the heck is this thing anyways? Well go watch the normal style video of Andrew telling you how the last way he showed you how to something he was wrong! But this time you need to do this new amazing discovery and look at all the amazing insane renders my team made! Sorry Andrew but come on man you know it’s true. The short version is it’s a sky only HRD shared for the world nodes in blender 2.75 cycles render engine.
Pro’s
- It’s just as easy as adding a diffuse shader to a mesh!
- You can work with it in live render!
- It has Andrews support and there mores to come
- Lots of options even at the 97 dollar level
- If your crafty you can add your own HRDI’s
The bad news is I randomly choose one of the cloudy maps and compared it to one of my HRD I have it was only a ram saver on the low setting. So not all the maps are mega savers but I have yet to find one that slows down the live render as much as my normal HRDI maps. It might not be 87% like he claims for all maps but it dose clearly work better without question.
See my screen shots of my sample of one data run. I will run a complete number of tests on all the maps and post my findings.
Con’s
- Its 97 bucks, for those people on a budget it’s a bit of a punch to the face.
- Only improves render times on low level, *dose lower
- 197 dollar option makes you wonder if you are missing out
- It did not come out sooner!
- 85% for only outside scenes.
- Going to make you want the grass pack if you don’t have it already
Got a comment let me know @jeffreywvgd
Now I know someone out there is going to comment and have some input into how this works. Go for it let talk about it and inform the blender world what this is and give them both sides so they have all the info to make up their minds
Links to topics
Pro skies - http://www.blenderguru.com/product/pro-lighting-skies/
Eye ball tort - https://gumroad.com/tomnewbury
Mesh for testing - http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/4981