It leverages the sIBL GUI standalone application to manage image-based lighting setups in the Smart IBL format. Although currently not all of the features defined by the Smart IBL format are supported, support should be complete enough for most typical applications. The following video demonstrates interaction between sIBL GUI and Maya. The sIBL GUI addon presented here makes the same features available within Blender.
More details and installation instructions are available on the wiki page. Please report bugs and let me know what you think.
Thanks for all of the kind words and I’m glad people are finding this useful. A couple issues have been raised over at the HDRLabs forum that I will be looking at over the next few days and plan to push a bug fix release after that.
Alain, I think the Smart IBL web page does a pretty good job of explaining why it is desirable to use a more complex image based lighting setup consisting of multiple environment maps in combination with directional lamps rather than relying on a simpler setup that might use just a single HDRI image. The HDRI Handbook goes in to much more detail on the topic and is well worth the read if you are interested in this sort of thing. The short version though is that you will get less noisy renders with fewer passes along with more control over the look.
Artales hit the nail on the head, it’s all about iteration time. Rather than manually setup a World node tree with 20+ nodes (plus lamps, plus drivers) for each lighting configuration, sIBL GUI plus this addon allows you to test completely different lighting setups almost instantly. The default settings won’t get you all of the way to a final render but they should get you in the ballpark.
@jedfrechette
Thanks for the explanation.
Sorry, I’m still to stupid to understand. What is Smart IBL ?
The explanation on the website is:
“…Smart IBL is not a shader or render algorithm, it’s just an idea.”
How can I work with an idea ? This definitily to theoretical and has no practical relevance from my point of view.
It would be cool if you could post an example where we can visually see the benefits of it in context with Cycles.
For me an architectural Rendering would be interesting, your example doesn’t show enough practical information.
Let’s say a simple comparison:
Standard HDRI Lightning with Cycles
compared with
Smart IBL Method with Cycles
I just tried to download sIBL GUI for use with this loader script, for Linux. Only to discover it that there is no binary available, that it must be built from source. Can anyone kindly provide a build for 64 bit Ubuntu?
Well, this is what I done to install on Kubuntu Linux 12.04
Install dependencies. I can not tell exactly what they are because I have already installed a lot of them in advance. Some that may be needed are the packages:
python-dev
python-setuptools
PyQt4-dev-tools
Download sIBL_GUI from GitHub. You can download it with “git” from the terminal, or from the “Download ZIP” link to the right:
Unzip the file to a new folder. You need to be connected to the internet because I’ve seen the installer download some components. Go to that folder from the terminal and compile and install using the next command:
When you run sIBL_GUI, it will ask you to specify the path of the two previous folders.
So now you can run the program from the terminal:
sIBL_GUI
I have not seen the installer create an application launcher. You can create a launcher pointing to “/usr/local/bin/sIBL_GUI”, which apparently is where it is installed by default.
Anyway, I have no idea how it is configured and I have not been able to export to Blender
really nice job, did a quick test with blender 2.68