Not every release needs to reinvent the wheel. Sometimes the most valuable updates are the ones that remove friction from your daily work - the small refinements that add up to a noticeably smoother experience.
HDR Light Studio 9 Drop 3 is exactly that kind of release. We've been listening to how you work with HDR Light Studio, and this update addresses several workflow pain points with thoughtful improvements that feel immediately familiar.
Ever wanted to soften a shadow without completely rebalancing your lighting? Now you can. Hold Shift while resizing a light in the Render Views or Canvas, and its intensity automatically adjusts to maintain consistent energy output, keeping illumination levels stable throughout your shot.
When lighting diffuse objects, you're constantly balancing three critical qualities: how the light wraps around your subject, the hardness of the light-to-shadow transition, and the sharpness of the shadows themselves. Harder, more defined shadows reveal surface textures with greater clarity, while softer shadows create smoother, more forgiving illumination.
Traditionally, adjusting light size to control these qualities meant constantly fighting a secondary problem: the larger you make a light source, the brighter it becomes, and vice versa. This forces you into an endless cycle of tweaking both size and intensity, making it difficult to isolate the creative decision you're actually trying to make.
By holding Shift, the software handles the technical compensation automatically. As you scale your light larger to soften shadows, the brightness decreases proportionally to maintain the same total energy output. Scale it smaller for harder shadows, and the intensity increases accordingly.
This means you can explore creative lighting choices purely on their artistic merit - experimenting with shadow hardness, wrap, and texture reveal - without the overhead of simultaneously managing exposure levels. The illumination stays consistent while you shape the quality of light, letting you focus entirely on the look you're after.
Our Blender plug-in now supports Blender 5, keeping pace with the latest release.
The small things matter. The Project Menu now includes "Open Recent Files" for quick access to your recently saved HDi project files. In the Render View (HDR Light Studio), your middle mouse button now pans and scroll wheel zooms - controls that should feel second-nature if you've used any professional 3D application.
We've aligned keyboard shortcuts with industry standards:
Copy: Ctrl+C (Cmd+C on Mac)
Cut: Ctrl+X (Cmd+X on Mac)
Paste: Ctrl+V (Cmd+V on Mac)
Delete: Delete key
Less to remember, more muscle memory working in your favor.
Light names can now contain up to 63 characters - double the previous 31 character limit. Name your lights as descriptively as your project requires: "Rim Light Stage Left Warm Fill" instead of cryptic abbreviations to fit 31 characters.
Under the hood, we've updated to OpenColorIO 2.5.0, bringing support for both ACES 1.3 and ACES 2.0, along with improved error handling for missing configs. Your color pipeline stays current with industry standards.
Optimized texture updates to eliminate redundant HDRI map refreshes, resulting in a smoother and more responsive rendering experience with fewer unnecessary render restarts.
The philosophy behind Drop 3 is simple: professional tools should get out of your way and let you focus on lighting. These refinements won't make headlines, but they'll save you small moments of friction dozens of times a day. And those moments add up.
Existing customers with active subscriptions can download HDR Light Studio 9 Drop 3 and updated plug-ins from their account at www.lightmap.co.uk now.
For a full breakdown of supported features and plug-in compatibility in HDR Light Studio 9 Drop 3, visit our Compatibility Chart.
This entry was posted in HDR Light Studio News and tagged 3D Software: Blender.
