Overview

Image Based Lighting Tools for efficient illumination by high dynamic range images.

Tools currently included in the suite:

• lightMapGen - generates importance sampling light maps from HDR images
• lightMapGen_loader.mel - create a "dome" of lights from a lightMapGen light map in Maya
• sphericalLight - mental ray light shader which reads lightMapGen light maps

Online Documentation

• Quickstart
• lightMapGen documenation
• lightMapGen example
• Spherical Light documentation

Download

• Image Based Lighting Tools for Windows (32/64) - lightMapGen beta8 and sphericalLight v8
• Make sure you have the latest Windows Visual C++ libraries win32 or x64
• Maya GUI for lightMapGen.exe - by Seth Hall

IBL Tools on CGTalk (closest thing to an IBL Tools tutorial atm)

• Jozvex explains the basic IBL Tools setup procedure
• Florian Wild's lighting challenge fruit bowl thread (see the gallery below)
• Creative explains importance sampling as used in IBL Tools
• Florian Wild explains how to make a LatLong map suitable for IBL Tools

References

• Rendering Synthetic Objects into Real Scenes, 1998, Paul Debevec
• Interleaved Sampling, 2001, Alexander Keller and Wolfgang Heidrich
• A Median Cut Algorithm for Light Probe Sampling, 2005, Paul Debevec