iRadiance - HDRI Variety Pack Two Now Available [Commercial]
DimensionTheory
Posts: 435
My second HDRI set for Iray is now available in the DAZ Store! Click on the product image to be taken to the store page with more information and examples.
Promotional Video : https://www.youtube.com/embed/t1UFqodPhM8
Details
This brand new set of high quality HDRIs contains a wide variety of fresh locations to easily place your characters in real world locations, with presets designed for Iray making it easier than ever to get amazing renders out of DAZ Studio! Each HDRI has a very high range of lighting information with as much as 13 EVs worth of exposure information for hard shadows and accurate reflections. The 8192 x 4096 resolution makes sure there is enough detail for each location to be used as backgrounds as well as lighting. Separate presets for loading 5 different cameras will help you instantly render great angles at your character's default loading location.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2026 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
really dumb question time but I have the Yosmite sets which I love but haven't gotten to work in iray, seeing these are made for iray was wondering if the backgrounds load from the smart content menu as enviroments and can be seen before doing a render so you can position setup characters in the scene/background correctly like with the Yosmite sets because I also have the DAZ Studio Iray HDR Outdoor Environments and well I've seen what others have done with it and gotten different views rotating the background but I haven't had same results as do with Yosmite as it turns out according to tech support only way to use the bsackgrounds is to import the image via render settings in the enviroment map section and can only be seen after rendering which makes positioning of characters/objects matching up to the background kinda hard so again and I'm hoping it does does this set and previous one work like the Yosmite sets? and also is there away to get the Yosmite sets to work in iray or do you plan on updating them and your other early sets to iray?
Image link not working here.
They are right in saying that the background can only be seen during rendering but Iray works as an interactive renderer. It is able to constantly render while you manipulate things in the scene when you set your 3D View setting to "NVIDIA Iray". If you add an Aux Viewport pane (or use the one that's available by default), you can use "NVIDIA Iray" in that 3D View as a smaller resolution preview which renders faster and makes adjustments a bit easier. Once you are using Iray in interactive mode it is easy to rotate the background or move the camera to position your subjects. Often it is good practice to turn everything in your scene invisible while rotating the background and finding an interesting location just to make things faster (select all objects and create a new group then turn visibility for the group off to do this quickly).
Updating my previous sets for Iray is something I've thought about but would take quite a bit more work than it would initially seem in order to do it in a way that I'm happy with. The maps would need to be modified since all those sets were designed to used distant lights for hard shadows in order to keep things faster and more customizable, Iray would work best with all that information contained within the HDRI.
...as an experiment, went into a scene I did using one of the the Yosemite HDRIs added a photometric distant light for the sun but that doesn't work. In photoreal mode it produces a hard dark black featureless shadow (like a Deep Shadow Map in 3DL). There are also no shadow adjustments in this mode either. In interactive mode the shadow looks fine with the right amount of softness and there are controls for adjusting it, but the entire backdrop and ground is slightly blurred.
It should be possible to set the meshlight up in a way the renders properly, any overly dark shadows like you mention should be adjustable by changing the brightness of the background/IBL in relation. It's just not ideal because it will render much slower than a properly setup HDRI.
If you want a quick (yet not as accurate) solution you can always manually specify the Yosemite HDRI files in Iray's render settings. The ones with HDR in the actual file names are the ones to use (DT-YosemiteHDR11.hdr), not the ones labeled with ENV (DT-YosemiteENV11.hdr). When I made the original set I used the HDR named files for reflection domes and the ENV for lighting in DAZ Studio, you can use the ENV files for interesting lighting effects but the HDR ones are best for lighting + background.
None of these will be calibrated for Iray though and wont have bright enough suns etc, which is what the meshlights were for. Each of the new sets I've been making for Iray are calibrated to work properly with default settings, with the sun bright enough to properly affect the rendered content and match the background.
so this and variety pack one loads via enviroments in the smart content menu as a prop/scene just like the yosmite packs and be seen prerender
The video here should explain what I'm talking about. If it hasn't finished processing yet please give it some time and try again.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/Yssfr4gqhxY
I've used the Yosmite ones, the shadows are subtle but they work fine. This set is on my list, it looks fab.
I GOT IT TO WORK :) :) :) THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU
I have used the Yosemite sets quite successfully just by using the HDRI file in the environment, but I agree it would be nice to see that set brought up to date and made fully iRay compliant.
As for the new set. Great work. It really couldn't be simpler to knock off a quick scene using these and then refine from there. About the only confusing thing is that the supplied camera presets all load with the Headlamp off so you just get a silhouette in preview. Couldn't these be set to load with the Headlamp mode set to Auto - or am I misunderstanding the Headlamp Auto setting?
That was a very useful video. I knew about using the aux viewport but it never occurred to me that you could also set the main viewport to use NVidia IRay!
You're probably not going to want to use headlamps 90% of the time, the HDRIs are calibrated to make the characters match the backgrounds without any additional light sources so they should only be used if your specific render calls for it. That said the included cameras shouldn't be rendering black unless you don't have an HDRI properly loaded, have you loaded one of the presets along with the cameras?
Try turning the preview light on by hitting Control+L
just some quick rough renders first two using the outdoor enviroments set and the third with the dragon lady using hdri variety pack 2, that was a very fast rendering usually few hours and I have a pretty good laptop V17 Nitro, but this rendered really fast this time with the v pack 2 only took around 22.5 minutes to render
this one uses the desert b background + lights, another fast render under 25 minutes not only the background looks nice but the lighting and shadows are great really enhances the scene
Please pardon the newb. Maybe I'm obtuse. I'm certainly ill-informed. I picked up a couple sets of the HDR packs. I start with a new scene, add a figure, give one of the presets the old double-click. surround-select a snapshot render, everything is blown out... insanely overexposed. So I know I must have something (or multiple things) set incorrectly. I'm sure I am using the wrong render settings. is there a guide on the basic set-up for this scenario IBL in DAZ. I'm sure there is, so please permit me to rephrase that... could someone kindly direct me to a good starting point. Much appreciated.