LightPack 01 - Introduction

LightPack 01 - Introduction -  is a collection of lamps for Blender EEVEE and Cycles. This Introduction pack contains a range of different lamps (lightbulbs, neons, streetlights...) to help you light your scenes.

You will be getting:

• 18 lamps with high resolution meshes (Blend and FBX files)
• 18 absolute HDR lamp textures with alpha (Linear sRGB)
• BONUS: 10 absolute and not-white-balanced 360° HDRI that can be used as references for different lighting conditions and locations.

What does "absolute" mean?

Most HDR content available online has been white balanced and pre-exposed, which can make the lighting process tedious and inaccurate if you want to use a completely physically correct workflow.

The textures from LightPack have been created preserving the HDR value and color information as much as possible, to conserve proper emissive intensity and color relation between different type of lights. They will light your scenes realistically, independently of the time of day of your environment. You also get correct bloom from your light sources.

With the Photographer add-on to adjust camera exposure and white balance like with a real digital camera, the LightPack helps you render photorealistic images quick and easy.

Optimized for Cycles and EEVEE compatible

Emissive meshes can be expensive to render as sampling can be difficult. This is why LightPack uses actual Blender lights that have been tweaked to match path traced mesh lights.

This also has the advantage to make LightPack compatible with EEVEE.

Easy to control

The Light Color and Power show you the actual color and intensity of the asset. Nothing is normalized, and you can reuse this information for your own lights.

You can simply adjust the Color and Power of your lights and the emissive materials will follow.
If you are not happy with your adjustments, you can easily revert back to the original values.

Easy to use with Asset Manager add-ons

The pack comes with thumbnails that make it easy to use with your favorite asset manager. The folder structure is compatible with Simple Asset Manager.

Assets are rotated to be used with Cursor Geometry orientation, or Snap to Surfaces along normals.
Some assets contain a boolean mesh that helps you placing them inside a ceiling for instance.

Tweakable assets

There is little chance that the assets you buy on the internet are exactly what you need. Subdivided meshes, triangulated meshes, bevels... this can make it impossible to do any modification.

This is why the assets from the LightPack 01 have been built as much as possible with Blender modifiers that you can tweak to your liking.

Tiling materials, with parallax maps

Materials are compatible with EEVEE and Optix as they don't rely on raytraced material nodes. They are using tiling textures and vertex painted masks, so you can easily modify the meshes and UVs to your liking without worrying too much about the textures.

Lightbulbs and emissive sources are often hidden behind glass or plastic covers. This is why the materials support parallax shading to give a realistic feeling of depth to the emissive sources, compatible with EEVEE, Cycles (and real-time game engines using the provided parallax textures).

Bonus 360° HDRIs

You can find many great 360° HDRIs on the internet, but they are most likely pre-exposed and white balanced. While they are great for lookdev as they allow you to quickly switch between environments, they don't work in a physically based lighting and camera workflow. This is why this LightPack includes as a bonus 10 HDRIs with varied lighting conditions.

Disclaimer: Although they can be used for lighting and reflections, their resolution isn't high enough to use them as backplates and colors aren't 100% trustworthy for accurate lookdev and are not high resolution.

Licensing

All the 3D assets and HDR textures (EXR images) in the pack can be used for any commercial and non-commercial projects. However, you are not allowed to share them for free, nor resell them as is.

Tiling textures in the misc_textures folder are CC0 licensed from https://cc0textures.com and https://cgbookcase.com

If you are looking for a collection of interior lamps, check the Lightpack 02 - Interior

The best best way to use the Lightpack is with an Asset manager add-on like Simple Asset Manager.

With the Lightpack files, I am providing a free version of the add-on which includes a couple of extra fixes for Blender 2.83 compatibility.

How to use the pack?

Install Simple Asset Manager as an add-on, then in the add-on preferences, select a folder on your computer where you want to store your assets.

Unzip and copy the Lightpack folder into the folder that you selected earlier, and the lamps will appear in the 3D View panel on the right, under the Tool tab in the Simple Asset Manager panel.

Lamps that are supposed to be placed on walls and ceilings are oriented to be used with At Cursor, Rotation option (click on "At Origin" to make it appear).

Please report any issue with the Pack, I am always open for feedback and want to deliver the best product possible. Contact me through Gumroad or on Blender Artists: https://blenderartists.org/t/photographer-camera-exposure-white-balance-and-autofocus/1101721/