HDR Maps and Environment Settings

This release adds a number of things that make it possible to vastly improve the visual quality of your Hubs scenes!

HDR Lightmaps

Lightmaps now have the ability to use RGBE .hdr images. This allows much more accurate capture of lighting information. Currently this only works with images already in .hdr format (not .exr) but this should be easy to fix down the road. Note that HDR images must be saved before exporting or things will silently fail to export (this silent failure is currently a limitation in the GLTF exporter). Keep in mind that HDR images will be larger than an equivalently sized SDR image, so make sure to keep your texture resolution in check.

Environment Settings

An "Environment Settings" scene level component has been added to let you configure the environment lighting properties of your scene. For now this means setting a single environment map for the scene, a background color, and optionally a background image as well as configuring tone mapping and exposure. Note that this is a scene component so you have to add it under the Scene properties not Object properties.

The environment map is used both for reflections as well as applying IBL to objects that do not already have a lightmap. It is assumed to be an equirectangular image, and supports both HDR and SDR images, though it is especially useful to use an HDR image for these as the IBL applied to un-lightmapped objects will look much better. For this a lower resolution HDR image is better than higher resolution SDR image for the same memory footprint.

The background image is also assumed to be equirectangular and will be displayed as a "skybox" behind all objects. If no image is specified you will instead see the background color. It is not particularly important for this to be an HDR map since it is not used for lighting (though is effected by exposure and tone mapping). You might instead opt to have a higher resolution HDR image for the same memory footprint. Note that the old "Background" component has been removed, so if you were using it to configure background color you will need to configure it in the Environment Settings component instead. Also note there is currently a bug in the Hubs client that will cause SDR backgrounds to be upside down, this will be fixed in the client and will likely not require updating your assets or the exporter.

You can use a "panoramic" camera in blender to generate an environment map of your actual raytraced scene in Blender. We plan to make this easier to do, but is possible to do manually now. It will also likely eventually be possible to have multiple environment maps.

And More

• Thanks to @rawnsley for adding the missing Shadow and Spot Light components!
• #41 A bug where lightmap data was duplicated in the gltf file on export has been fixed. Thanks @rawnsley for the report.

As with each new release of the addon, the only supported version of Blender is the latest (currently 2.93.4) so if you are experiencing any issues, please first make sure you are on this version.