Lighting projects now live inside their product groups, and each one shows its status in the Connection panel.
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Cinema 4D 2027 Support, Plus New Tools for Team Workflows.
Build 2026.1029, adds support for Cinema 4D 2027 and brings new tools that let large teams manage complex Takes and Layers projects with confidence, with clear status and locking for finished lighting. It works with Cinema 4D 2025, 2026 and 2027.
Critical notice for Cinema 4D plugin users: Cinema 4D's new built-in MCP server can clash with HDR Light Studio's port. It's unrelated to this release, see how to fix at the bottom of this page.
What's new in Build 2026.1029
Lighting that stays with your geometry
Select a group before you click Create New Project, and the project is created inside it, named after the group, and placed on its layer. With nothing selected, it’s created at the root of the Objects panel as before.
Right: Lighting Project created inside group and inherits Layer
Visibility is in your hands
Switching the active project no longer changes visibility or overrides the current Take. Lighting projects light the scene until you turn their visibility off, so you can use several environment lights at once.
Final lighting is protected
Previously, opening HDR Light Studio, moving a light or changing a parameter could silently switch a project back to temporary proxy lighting. Not anymore. Each project now shows its status next to the Active Project dropdown:
- In Progress: temporary textures, deleted when HDR Light Studio closes.
- On Disk: final HDR textures are saved, and the interface stays locked until you click Make Editable.
Project Status: In Progress and On Disk
New Make Editable button unlocks the HDR Light Studio project and interface
Check every lighting project at a glance
Project Status Summary, in the Connection panel, shows the status of every lighting project in the scene, so you can confirm everything is final before you share or render.
Project Status Panel - View states for all Projects in the scene
Also included
- Faster LightPaint with heavy geometry
- Alembic by default for export into the internal render view, as it’s more reliable than Collada
- Fixes for lost project data when the UI is hidden, and for render views not using the active Take’s camera
See the release notes for every change
Critical Notification for Cinema 4D Plugin Users: MCP Port Conflict
Cinema 4D’s new built-in MCP server uses port 5556 by default, the same port HDR Light Studio uses. If the MCP server is turned on HDR Light Studio can't start.
The fix: Change the MCP port in Cinema 4D's preferences to anything other than 5555, 5556, 5557 or 5558, which HDR Light Studio uses. If you use an AI app with Cinema 4D, update it to the new port too. Full steps in the release notes.
Get the update
Build 2026.1029 was released on 6th November. Log in to update the plug-in.