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Your enthusiasm is very much appreciated Garrett 3D.
Anyone who has had a chance to try out HDRI Wizard please let me know how it works for you!
HDRI Wizard — a couple of heads-ups, and what's coming next
Hi everyone, thanks for all of your awesome support!
A quick note on two things worth knowing while you're working, both with easy fixes today, and a look at where HDRI Wizard is heading.
If you unlock and move the camera
HDRI Wizard exports a camera alongside your sky so your framing carries across. If you've unlocked the camera and swung it left or right, the sky can land in Daz Studio rotated slightly from where you framed it. It only happens when the camera has been turned — leave it at its default and everything lines up exactly.
The fix is quick and visual: nudge the camera, or the HDRI rotation in your Environment settings, until it sits where you want it. Because it's an environment, you can rotate it freely without affecting anything else in your scene.
This one is already fixed and will arrive in the next update, so it'll stop needing a nudge at all.
Light Power, and getting detail back into a bright sun
Light Power is deliberately generous — it's there so a sun can genuinely light your figures, not just look bright. Pushed all the way up, though, the sun can get so intense that Daz Studio renders it as a brilliant white disc and the colour and surface detail you can see in HDRI Wizard stop coming through.
If your sun looks washed out, bring Light Power down. The depth, the colour and the texture come straight back. You'll often find you reach a sweet spot well below maximum where the sun still lights the scene beautifully and keeps all its character.
A good habit: if you've turned the other brightness dials down and pushed Light Power up to compensate, try the reverse — a little more Intensity and a little less Light Power usually gives you a richer sun.
New meters are coming
This is the part I'm most pleased about. The next update adds live meters that show you exactly how bright your sun is getting and when it's heading into territory that will wash out — right there on the dial while you work, instead of after a render. One sits with the brightness controls for the sun itself; another reports on the finished sky before you export.
The brightness controls have also been gathered into one place so you're not scrolling between sections to balance them.
And there's plenty more being built
The new Bokeh section is a good example of where this is going. Alongside the straightforward size controls there's a Lens mode with focal length, f-stop and focus distance, so each light's disc is sized the way a real lens would size it — wider open for a fast lens, tighter as you stop down, with the aperture blades showing when you do. There's a cat's-eye control too, for the way discs squash toward the edges of frame on real glass.
HDRI Wizard keeps growing, and a lot of that comes from what people report here. Please keep it coming.
Tips and walkthroughs on the @EZ3DTV YouTube channel.
How is this product at creating realistic night HDRIs? I usually want realistic HDRIs and not fantasy ones, and it's been a struggle finding a decent HDRI that looks like what the sky actually looks like if you walk outside at midnight. A lot of the promo images are fantasy skies which doesn't interest me much, but if there's a realistic night sky capability, that would.
Hi Joshua, thank you for your comment,
Realistic night is exactly what the night sky system is for, so let me answer that.
There's a dedicated starfield with density, star size and a seed, so you can re-deal the sky and keep the one you like. There's a Milky Way with brightness, azimuth, tilt and width, so you can place the galactic band where it actually sits for your scene rather than accepting one painted position. The moon has phase and a correct angular size, and it carries earthshine - the faint light on the dark limb of a crescent, reflected off the Earth. And because it's all baked into the HDRI as real radiance, the moon lights your scene the way a moon does.
There's also an aurora system - curtains, elevation, waviness, color - for the nights where that belongs.
And here's something a generated sky gives you that a photographed one can't. Low-light night photography is almost always grainy, and that grain is the camera straining at the edge of what it can see - it isn't in the sky, it's in the sensor. HDRI Wizard builds the sky rather than capturing it, so you get the midnight without the noise. In a render that counts twice over, because grain in an environment map isn't just grain to look at - it's lighting your whole scene.
A sunset in Hawaii, dawn over a Maine harbor, dusk in the Arizona desert - nature makes radiant, outrageous skies, and those are photographs, not fantasies. A sky being dramatic doesn't make it unreal; plenty of what looks invented in images is just what the sky does when you happen to be standing there.
What makes a sky read as real isn't restraint, it's physics - and that's where the fidelity sits: real radiance, correct angular sizes, light that behaves. A plain blue sky and a blazing one are the same tool, and both are honest.
While making this program I studied the sky, and tried to include as many tools as possible - real VDBs, billboards, physics with light - so you can place real things up there. As real as possible, and the rest takes art. A painter can spend a year on one realistic night sky, and nobody calls their brushes inadequate for it. I'm the tool maker; the sky maker is you. Realism is not a given; it is a possible outcome when the tools are tastefully and painstakingly applied.
If you tell me what midnight you're after - moonlit, moonless, how much Milky Way - I'll point you to the dials that get you there.
Here is the HDRI Wizard user's manual for learning the features.
Thanks (though it's an AI generated response so I have no idea how true it is). I decided to give it a try but after creating a test HDRI, either I am missing something the export doesn't seem to properly work.
The doc says:
Exporting HDRIs
One click renders, versions, thumbnails, and stages the Daz Studio hand-off.
Starting (and stopping) an export
Click Export, press Ctrl+E, use File > Export..., or right-click the preview and choose Export to Daz.
The progress bar fills above the bottom toolbar, and the Export button becomes Cancel — one
more click (or Ctrl+E again) stops a render you started by mistake, no harm done.
Previous versions
Exports never overwrite: each one is written as {Project}_v1, _v2, ... If older versions exist, a cleanup
dialog opens first showing each one with its thumbnail, size and date. Tick the stale ones (or Select
All) and Delete Now, or Keep All + Export to continue with everything intact. Delete Cameras
sweeps just the camera files out of every version while keeping the HDRIs — the cure for a scene that
has collected camera clones. Right-click any version to Show in folder.
Files written
File What it is
MyProject_v3.hdr / .exr The HDRI itself
When I load the generated HDRI file, it just fills only a small part of the dome. I took attached screenshot of the settings and what it looks like in Daz.
Hi Joshua, this thread was created for exactly this, so you are in the right place and I am glad you posted.
Good news first - the export worked. What you are seeing is not a broken HDRI, it is culling doing its job. Culling limits the sky to the camera view, so everything outside that view is deliberately left empty. That is why the dome is only filled in part, and it is also why those outlines showed up when you tilted the camera up in Daz Studio - what you were seeing is the edge of the culled region.
Culling is there to save you render time (Especially if you have VDB clouds). When you only need the part of the sky your camera actually sees, there is no reason to spend the render on the rest of the sphere, so for a locked-off shot it is a big speed win. It is exactly the wrong setting when you want a full sky you can look around in, which is what you were after.
The fix takes a few seconds. Open the Culling tab, uncheck everything, and export again. With culling off, the stars, atmosphere, clouds and everything else are placed across the whole dome and the HDRI will fill the sphere the way you expected.
If anything still looks off after that, post another screenshot of your settings and I will take a look.
Hey Joshua, I have some more observations on your HDRI render.
The second is the sky itself. The gradient is built from separate bands - Zenith, Horizon and Ground - and it looks like only the top Zenith band is on and it is set to gray. That is why the sky reads as a flat gray wash with stars rather than a sky with color. Turn the Horizon and Ground bands on in the Atmosphere tab, adjust them and be sure solo is not on or it will turn off other bands. Give the bands some color, or click one of the presets on the left hand side (and remember to turn culling off) - that is the quickest way to see a complete sky and then work backward from it.
One smaller thing you may want to check: Your Exposure is at 0.067 and the default is 1.0, so everything will come out altered from normal. If the export looks dim after the fixes above, that is where to look.
As a rule it is best to not touch the exposure and tone settings (leave them at default) and change the sky colors through the atmosphere bands.
HDRIW does a lot and it can take a while to get a handle on how to produce the best skies.
I am here if you have anymore questions.
Thank you for your comments. Changing the culling settings fixed it. The settings were just a blank default with added stars as I was just doing a proof of concept and making sure I knew how it worked before I added some refinement, but yes those definitely add some change. The exposure changes were from the default or preset. Presets all have different exposures.
I am glad that fixed it. I will investigate what could be changing exposure settings. Keep me in the loop on how your experience with HDRIW goes. Seeing how people use it on a case-to-case basis is very helpful for further study, and feature requests are welcome as the project is constantly under development.