Hyperfocal HDRI Skies: Best Sellers

At Hyperfocal Design, we’re so confident of the quality and ease of use of our product that we’re certain you’ll see there is no better, easier, or more effective way to increase the quality & professionalism of your projects. If it is not completely up to your highest expectations, just return it at any time for a no questions asked refund (less postage when shipping required).

"You can never have enough HDR libraries, but now a days, what makes a good HDR is not only its technical quality but its artistic merit as well. The HDRI skies from Hyperfocal Design shows great technique, high res, great dynamic range, and high quality photography, with a wonderful aesthetic eye that will offer the users a great lighting resource." - Christopher Nichols, Author of Global Illumination: Exteriors and Interiors from The Gnomon Workshop

Image Courtesy Archangel Visual
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High Dynamic Range Skies
Each HDRI Sky can add instant, super realistic lighting to 3D scenes, with accurate reflections and a dynamic background that reacts realistically with semi-opaque surfaces such as tinted glass or atmospheric effects such as dust and smoke. Each HDRI Sky contains a range of exposure values from extremely under exposed to over exposed, allowing artists to choose precisely the exposure or "shutter speed" required.

Quality
Our sky HDRIs use only the best quality digital optics for crisp, clean images - we don't use mirror balls or distorted, low quality fisheye lenses. Due to the huge resolutions achieved, these images are amongst the only HDRIs available that can be used for background images & reflections as well as lighting. They provide maximum flexibility for your virtual camera and scene, allowing long zooms and extreme detail in reflection close-ups.
* Three HDRI Skies with "Clear" in the file name are computer generated

Sky HDRIs, Advantages
Using Hyperfocal's hemispherical HDRI skies has advantages over using full spherical environments, which can include unwanted trees, buildings & other objects. Hyperfocal's HDR skies can be used in any scene, and once set as a background or environment, they will create super realistic lighting and accurate, bright contrasting reflections and highlights. Our HDRI skies come in high and medium resolution options as follows:

High Resolution HDRI Skies
For use in projects requiring high resolution or quality, next-gen game titles, print applications, or for more creative freedom and virtual camera flexibility. Use high resolution HDRI skies for lighting, backgrounds and reflections.

Medium Resolution HDRI Skies
For use in realtime, or low to medium resolution projects. Real-time HDRI skies for games allow the use of dynamic exposure adjustment, which can mimic the human eye adjusting to different light levels. Also useable for lighting and for lower resolution backgrounds and reflections.

"The sunset HDRIs are simply gorgeous, I now use the HDRIs on all my architectural viz stuff. It makes the lighting so much more simple!" - Matt Lester, 3DViz

Usage

Sky backgrounds: When used as a background, HDRI skies allow for dynamic, changeable exposure with enough resolution to allow long camera zooms and top quality prints. HDR backgrounds react realistically when viewing through tinted glass, smoke, fog and so on. Or convert to an LDR image such as tiff or jpg and choose exactly the exposure level you require. HDR images have such high bit depth and are so editable that you can heavily alter the original HDRI sky with minimal quality loss. Create moody, colourized, contrasty skies with no fear of grain or banding artifacts.

Photography: HDRI skies are much more flexible than ordinary LDR skies. Simulate whichever shutter speed you require for your sky replacement - blown out and overexposed, or greatly underexposed for silhouettes.

Lighting: If your software supports it, use the HDRI at full size for maximum sharpness in your shadows. Or down size/blur to any level you require. HDRI lighting provides accurate color representation that matches the sky image for super realism.

Reflections: If you've got a close-up of a car body or if you're looking through a reflection in a window, or if you are working to a high resolution output, the high resolution HDRI skies are for you. Lose the flat look that low dynamic range reflections produce, and see how much pop, realism and contrast your reflections achieve with HDRI.

Time of Day and Weather Conditions
Browse through an ever increasing collection of HDRI Skies featuring a variety of time and weather conditions, including sunrises and sunsets, cloudy days and stormy skies. Each sky is named according to the time and weather condition.

Choose Your Exposure Level
You don't even need to be using HDRI lighting to benefit from Hyperfocal's HDRI skies - one of the drawbacks to traditional sky textures is that you are limited to the low dynamic range of the single exposure level provided. HDRI sky textures allow you to perfectly match the exposure level and mood of your 3d scene.

Hyperfocal Resources
Check out our resources and stay tuned as Hyperfocal adds loads of content including tutorials and reviews covering all the major 3d software applications.

Compatibility
Hyperfocal design's HDRI Skies are compatible with any application on PC or Mac that supports .hdr or .exr files. This includes all major 2d and 3d applications such as HDRShop, CS2, 3dsmax, Lightwave, Softimage and so on.

System Requirements
- High Resolution Skies: The 10,000X5,000 skies are taxing on older systems and software. Some software applications also feature memory and texture size limits that may cause problems when using the full size skies. We recommend that owners of systems with processors slower than 2.6ghz with 768 RAM size down the full resolution skies.
- HDRShop: Please note that HDRShop has some problems working with the large sky HDRIs on slower machines. Operations on HDRIs at 10kX5k in HDRShop can require up to 1.2 gigs of RAM, and since windows can take half the available memory, you may need at least 2gigs of RAM.
- Photoshop CS2: No known problems loading or editing any size HDRI (resize using bi-linear filtering).

HDRI Tutorials
Follow the tutorials supplied below for help using your Hyperfocal Sky HDRIs in any of the following 3d programs.

Vray: Paco Morales teams up with Hyperfocal Design and Vismasters to bring you this tutorial
3dsmax & Brazil: A HDRI tutorial by Gabriele Protti, featured on Splutterfish's Brazil site.
Cinema 4D: From Maxon
Lightwave: Hyperfocal Design's tutorial, "HDRI in Lightwave"
Maya/Mental Ray: Wiki Tutorial
Modo: Mov file from Luxology (we suggest you right click -> save as)
 

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