Notice: Pro-Lighting: Skies 1.4.3 is fully compatible with Blender 5.0

What if you had a tool that allowed you to instantly change your outdoor lighting to any time of the day, any weather, and be completely realistic?

The flexibility to choose any lighting style. The confidence to know that it will render. And the freedom to do what you do best: create art.

That’s Pro-Lighting: Skies: the fastest, easiest and most realistic outdoor lighting available for Blender. An all-in-one solution with:

Easy one-click outdoor lighting
Realistic lighting that’s accurate to the real world
HDR quality lighting, optimized for Blender

Realistic Outdoor Lighting in an Instant
Notice: Pro-Lighting: Skies has been updated to version 1.3.2, now compatible with up to Blender 3.6

What if you had a tool that allowed you to instantly change your outdoor lighting to any time of the day, any weather, and be completely realistic?

The flexibility to choose any lighting style. The confidence to know that it will render. And the freedom to do what you do best: create art.

That’s Pro-Lighting: Skies: the fastest, easiest and most realistic outdoor lighting available for Blender. An all-in-one solution with:

Easy one-click outdoor lighting
Realistic lighting that’s accurate to the real world
HDR quality lighting, optimized for Blender

Why Lighting is Important
Just like a movie with bad audio, a scene with bad lighting is a waste of time.

All the effort you’ve put into modelling and texturing won’t matter, if the lighting is horrible.

Bad lighting undermines all your other effort and makes the whole render look amateurish.

“I can’t tell you how many demo reels I’ve reviewed where the artist’s models are beautiful, but the lighting is flat, unrealistic, and uninteresting—essentially an afterthought.” –Jeremy Vicker, Lighting Technical Director, Pixar

Good lighting on the other hand helps tell the story, effects the mood, and helps the viewer relate to it. If your lighting is good, the scene becomes significantly more believable to the viewer.

Why You Shouldn’t use Sun lamps
Many schools teach the “sunlamp” method for outdoor lighting.

But while this sounds logical, real lighting isn’t a single light source. It’s millions.

Step outside and look up at the sky, and you’ll see shades of blue from the atmosphere, reflected light from the clouds and a horizon gradient. It’s a dome of lighting in an endless variety of hues, saturations and values.

A sun lamp is only one light source, when you should be using closer to a million.

The “better” solution: HDRs

HDR lighting uses a single 360-degree photograph to light your scene instead of lamps.

This gives you that infinite dome of lighting needed to create realistic lighting. And because it’s based on a real photo, it’s accurate to the real world. Not surprisingly, this has quickly become a standard for the industry.

However, as much as I love HDR lighting, it causes a list of problems:

Problem #1: Frequent Crashes
The average high-res HDR ranges from 200-400mb in size. Which is huge!

So when it comes to rendering, Blender frequently crashes:

While rendering an animation once, a scene repeatedly crashed despite our best efforts to optimize it. It was only when we looked at the lighting that we realized a single HDR sky was spiking the memory usage by a massive 4GB!

As an artist you shouldn’t have to worry about whether your lighting will kill the render or not.

Problem #2: Frustrating to Use
Due to their large size, HDRs can take over a minute to load their own thumbnail.

So unless you’ve memorized what each hdr looks like, you’ll need to wait for each one to load. Few things are as tedious as waiting for 30 hdr thumbnails to load.

It’s also a burden to do even simple tweaks. Want to change the direction of the lighting? You’ll have to dig around in the nodes and try to remember that one field that allows you to do it.

All these technical burdens take you away from what you should really be doing: creating art.

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