André Matos - The driving force of Porsche’s pipeline

 Jump straight to the video at the bottom of this page to watch André's presentation from Total Chaos 2019, or read on for the full background story.

This story starts at the Total Chaos event in 2018. HDR Light Studio (and V-Ray) users André Matos and Brendan McCaffrey were both presenting and talking about HDR Light Studio at this event. We were delighted to meet them both, in person, for the first time in Bulgaria and we had really some great conversations... including hearing what they wanted to see next in HDR Light Studio.

André described to us his unique workflow using soft light sources in HDR Light Studio saved out as masks that he composited with outdoor HDRI maps inside 3ds Max. It was a convoluted workflow and not very interactive, but it gave him really nice end results. He wanted to be able to mask HDRI maps with lights directly inside HDR Light Studio - so it was fast and totally interactive.

Brendan described to us his need to group lights and manage his lights better, something that had been requested by many other customers. We had not tackled grouping yet because there was more to it than meets the eye. For example, once in a group, would you want to rotate all the lights together by rotating the group? What if the lights were mapped differently to the HDRI canvas, how would one expect the lights to move when grouped?

We came back from Total Chaos 2018 and quickly got to work and realized we could create a system to meet both artist’s needs. The requirements to mask and group unexpectedly overlapped in many ways and ended up becoming our Composite light feature released in HDR Light Studio 'Tungsten'. You can read more about the new Composite feature here.

So this brings us to Total Chaos 2019 and André’s presentation – ‘The driving force of Porsche’s pipeline’ featured in this blog post. We were at the presentation and were so delighted when André explained his lighting approach and told the audience how Lightmap had listened and updated HDR Light Studio to help his workflow. It was a great explanation and really brought to life this new feature. Thanks for mentioning us in your talk André (big hugs)!

You can watch the video below to understand his pipeline, you can skip to 21 minutes 40 seconds to learn his unique lighting technique and hear him talk about how he uses HDR Light Studio to help.