Sunday, March 14th, 2010

sIBL Questions

What is sIBL?

sIBL stands for Smart Image-​​Based Light­ing. It is a com­pletely free, cross-​​platform, stand-​​alone appli­ca­tion writ­ten by a com­mu­nity of 3D pro­gram­mers and vol­un­teers which helps orga­nize your High Dynamic Range libraries and sends them to a 3D appli­ca­tion for quick and easy setup.

sIBL GUI HDR organizer.

sIBL GUI — Thumb­nail Browser Interface.

sIBL GUI software interface.

sIBL — Send­ing an HDR to your soft­ware package.

Why use sIBL?

There’s sev­eral dif­fer­ent reasons:

  1. First of all, it is a great orga­nizer of your HDR libraries. If you ever tried view­ing a HDR library, you’ll know that it is dif­fi­cult because of a gen­eral lack of thumb­nail sup­port and plus HDR files tend to be very large in size. Load­ing each one just to pre­view it can take a very long time. sIBL “cuts” the HDR down in size sig­nif­i­cantly and allows you to eas­ily sort HDRs via loca­tion, time, key­words, author, and thumb­nail previews.
  2. Sec­ondly, it is highly opti­mized for Image Based Light­ing ren­der­ings and pur­poses. Large HDRs are truly unnec­es­sary. sIBL auto­mat­i­cally splits a HDR into sev­eral com­po­nents — a thumb­nail for a quick pre­view, a very low res­o­lu­tion blurred HDR for envi­ron­men­tal light­ing, a medium-​​sized non-​​blurred HDR for reflec­tions and refrac­tion, and a tonemapped back­ground image so that a back­ground image appears to look more cor­rect than an unmod­i­fied HDR alone. The file size and effi­ciency is so effec­tive, that a 80 megabyte HDR can be con­sol­i­dated down to roughly 20 megabytes instead. A .jpg thumb­nail pre­view can be less than 100 K mak­ing? it very effi­cient to browse.
  3. You’ll gen­er­ally obtain much higher qual­ity 3D ren­der­ings. sIBL files are auto­mat­i­cally pre­set for high-​​quality set­tings and opti­mal light­ing conditions.
  4. sIBL auto­mat­i­cally adds a sun or mul­ti­ple lights within your scene to match the loca­tion of light sources within your HDR envi­ron­ment and back­ground. This gives you greater con­trol over light­ing and shad­ows. If you ever used a HDR by itself, it gen­er­ally doesn’t give you accu­rate and sharp shad­ows due to some tech­ni­cal lim­i­ta­tions. Some HDRs by them­selves may give you sharper shad­ows, but they gen­er­ally are “faked” into doing so. This is a proper method often used by movie studios.
  5. Last but not least, once sIBL is installed, it is very easy to use. You sim­ply select the HDR pre­view and hit “send” then it sends the HDR sIBL auto­mat­i­cally to the appli­ca­tion of your choice.

Why does HDR­Source pro­vide sIBLs?

Quite hon­estly, I didn’t have to as it takes a lit­tle more work to have set these up. But, I really believe the pos­i­tives far out­weigh the neg­a­tive (setup time being the only neg­a­tive.) For now, it def­i­nitely is the best sys­tem for easy HDR orga­ni­za­tion and qual­ity light­ing setup. Pro­vid­ing this for­mat may also encour­age some peo­ple to pur­chase the HDR­Source HDRs that may oth­er­wise not. Plus, I am using the sIBLs myself. I can’t imag­ine not using them. I really feel it’s the best HDR light­ing sys­tem out there.

Which 3D pro­grams are sup­ported by sIBL?

Most major 3D appli­ca­tions and third-​​party ren­der­ing solu­tions are sup­ported. Other 3D appli­ca­tions are con­stantly being added by the vol­un­teer community.

Cur­rently, the fol­low­ing pro­grams are supported:

  1. Light­wave .
  2. 3D Stu­dio Max — Men­tal Ray, Maya, and Vray. Some sup­port for Final Ren­der and Brazil.
  3. Maya — Men­tal Ray, RFM, Tur­tle, and Vray.
  4. Modo.
  5. XSI — Men­tal Ray.

There’s dis­cus­sion of adding sup­port for the following:

  1. Cin­ema 4D
  2. Other 3D appli­ca­tions and ren­der­ing pro­grams pending.

Since the sIBL com­mu­nity is a vol­un­teer group who pro­gram this in their spare-​​time, they are actively seek­ing addi­tional vol­un­teer coders that can help improve sIBL and add addi­tional pro­grams to its sup­port list. Your par­tic­i­pa­tion and con­tri­bu­tions to the com­mu­nity is welcomed!

How do I set up and install sIBL?

I’ve writ­ten an easy-​​to-​​follow instal­la­tion guide as an exam­ple for users using 3dsmax and Vray here:

http://www.hdrsource.com/vray-hdri-tutorial/sibl-installation/

Sim­i­lar steps may apply to your spe­cific application.

Where can I find out more infor­ma­tion regard­ing sIBL and where can I down­load it?

www.smartibl.com
HDR­Labs Forum