What is the Environment project setting?

The Environment project setting allows you choose between 4 different light setups.

None

The legacy light setup, usually used in combination with 2 directional lights in the Step Hierarchy, to add contrast.

Studio

Our new suggested default light setup. It shows the reflections of a photo studio, showing high contrast areas, which will help you better evaluate the properties of a correctly set up PBR material.

Inside

This environment lights and reflects an interior room. Could be helpful to mimic office environments for better compositing in the app.

Outside

This environment lights and reflects a sunny day with a blue sky.

Preferences settings

As a user you are able to determine which environment will be used when creating a new project.

For users created before July 2024, this will default to "None" when using this feature for the first time.

For new users, this will default to our new suggested Studio environment.

Do note that projects created with a "None" environment, will be created with directional lights in the default state. For the other 3 environments, no directional lights are added, as they are no longer needed for those environments to create sufficient contrast.

How does Studio compare to the legacy default (None)?

Comparison

None environment (+ default directional lights): Porsche + chrome sphere.

Studio environment HDR (without directional lights): The same Porsche (and materials) + chrome sphere.

"None" light setup

The current "none" legacy default light setup in Create consists of 2 primary light source types:

• An hdr that consists of a gradient from dark to light grey
  
• 2 directional lights that are added by default to a new project

The 2 directional lights were originally added to add contrast and highlights. But as you can see in the Porsche example above, featuring a sphere that has the physical properties of chrome, there is room for improvement for the general perception of reflective materials.

Studio hdr light setup

• The studio hdr features an image that reflects the interior of a studio, with a dark floor and flood lights on the ceiling, the front, left and right of the scene.
  
• As the HDR is balanced to perceive diffuse colors correctly, we recommend to use this setup without directional lights. In other words, to test this light setup, delete the directional lights in your step hierarchy. Generally when creating more realistic light setups, using directional lights is not ideal, as the only directional light (parallel light rays) we approximate on earth is sunlight.

FAQ

My scene looks brighter than before, why is that?

As mentioned earlier, the new Studio HDR is balanced to function without the default directional lights in the scene, this for performance and realism reasons.

My material still doesn't look realistic, why is that?

Realism is a subjective matter, but from a theoretical point of view, achieving realism in computer generated images is done by multiple factors which play equal roles:

• Start with a physically plausible light setup. Often this is started by using a physically plausible hdr, ours is reflecting the interior of a studio with flood lights. In the future we potentially would add more hdr options, for example reflecting a sunny sky, or even allowing you to upload your own hdr.
• Next, tweak your materials to be physically plausible. Our current implementation of our standard material is based on a PBR model (physically based rendering). Additionally, adding realistic textures that simulate imperfections of materials can be a great way to add realism (eg. trough diffuse, normal, ... textures). More info can be found here.
  Some examples on how to achieve certain properties:
  • Chrome:
    • Color: White
    • Metalness: 1
    • Roughness: 0
  • Solid red carpaint
    • Color: Red
    • Metalness: close to 0
    • Roughness: 0
  • Black plastic
    • Color: Very dark grey (in theory, true black or white does not exist in reality)
    • Metalness: close to 0
    • Roughness: around 0.5
• A next step could be to add shadow casting, which is currently not supported (yet) by default in Create. We are considering to add an ambient occlusion setting in the future, but it could come with performance expense. A work around for now is to manually add baked shadow. A great first step is to add a transparent .png that shows the floor shadow of an object. Blender is a great software to bake a realistic shadow in case needed.