It's cleaner and more production friendly to keep the Film and Color management exposure settings at the default (for consistency between shots), however it's still useful to be able to adjust the brightness of all lights at the same time.

The feature will look at the exposure values and adjust the strength of all lamps appropriately before setting the exposures back to 0/default.

Some kind of gimbal widget ball thing to drive the rotation of the environment texture.

Automatically enable the environment preview in the viewport and switch to a lower-res HDRI if one is available for better performance.

Let users choose more than one folder to load HDRIs from. Maybe they have some locally and some on a network or different drive.

Sometimes you'll have several lights that need to have the same colour, and you'd like to be able to adjust that colour only once instead of for each light.

The idea here is to allow you to link some settings of two or more lights, so that adjusting one of them will adjust the other as well.

The relationship doesn't have to be equal either - e.g. for strength, one light can be set to be 25% brighter than another.

Some way of storing and loading a bunch of lights.

Would be nice to have thumbnail previews using a demo model (auto generated).

Slider to shift the horizon up and down. Useful when HDRI only has top half, and bottom black half needs to be hidden.

Here's an enhancement idea. Select a light in Gaffer and have a function that switches a viewport to that light's view angle in the scene. And switch back, of course.

Thanks,

-Mitch

The world rotation value seems to be from -180 to 180 degrees. In an ideal situation angle between 0 to 360 degrees is considered. Does not matter much but just a suggestion

Little 3D manipulator widgets for specific light controls (e.g. size, spot lamp angle & blend, strength).

This is something that's supposed to be done officially in the wiggly widgets project by Julian, but that will only be ready in 2.8 which may not be production ready or stable for at least a year (my guess).

http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/17844/aliased-edge-around-light-source-in-cycles

Make the mesh light appear pure white (or just a teeny bit brighter than white) to the camera (not affecting actual light emission) so that there is no aliasing around its edges.

Just do the math and set the Backgroudn strength directly, no need to have a fancy node group.

Make an easy UI to add/remove tags to/from multiple HDRIs at once, and delete tags altogether (remove from all HDRIs).

Force absolute when it's set

Add a button called "Set current settings as default for this HDRI" or something.

Some HDRIs are too dark or bright to be useful without adjustment, or need contrast adjustment or saturation changes. Each HDRI is different though, so it would be nice if the use could make the adjustments once, and then save that so that each time they load that HDRI their adjustments are applied automatically.

There may need to be additional options like "Reset adjustments when switching HDRIs" - the next HDRI probably doesn't need the same adjustments as the previous one and may end up overexposed.

It would be really handy if the directory of the hdri specified by the user remains there till the user changes it next time.

Essentially save the path so that it is setup automatically next time

I think it would be useful that when the HDR is disabled, the world material is brought back to how it was before

Much of the time seems to be spent loading and reading the hdr file, which uses only one thread. Multiple thumbnails could be generated simultaneously.

I think that some properties in the add-on should have support for animation

For the thumbnails displayed for each HDRI, let the user choose between a normal preview (the HDRI itself) or renders of diffuse/glossy/plastic balls that show the lighting and reflections better than a normal preview.

Will definitely want to store thumbnails on a server to save people time rendering.

Add portal lights to all the holes/windows of selected geometry.

Since the add-on has started using many custom icons..... it adds up to memory usage, and therefore I was conducting a small test of activating-deactivating add-on too many times, fast and continuous.... and Blender crashed.
This is because custom icons are not properly loaded. I checked retopoflow add-on which also uses custom icons, and this problem does not occur there.

Really minor thing just thought to inform you 😃

Filter light list based on text input. This could be used to find a particular light, or set of lights with similar names (e.g. all fill lights).

Let the user add actual 3D models for typical photography/film lights like a softbox, umbrella, reflectors, barn doors, etc. for more realistic lighting and reflections.

Have a search box above the HDRI picker that matches both name and tags.

Tags for each can be inputted manually, or in the case of HDRI Haven stuff just downloaded.

https://medium.com/cg-cookie/new-version-available-update-now-8872869c3168#.t8me1vggu
https://medium.com/cg-cookie/blender-updater-tutorial-3509edfc442#.qbt38e6fg

Area lamps usually render faster and with less noise, so it would be nice to be able to convert any geometry with emissive materials to an area lamp to speed up rendering.

Lamps are not visible to the camera, so there should be an option (enabled by default?) that keeps the original mesh light but makes it only visible to the camera - so the area lamp does the actual light emission, but the mesh light can still be seen.

Should work for any mesh object, but of course it'll only be predictable for squares and rectangles. There could also be an option to create an area light for each face of the model.

Support and simple UI for importing IES profiles.

Basically Pro-lighting Skies type of UI with some more features like resolution switching, darkened JPG backgrounds for memory optimization, direct link to download from HDRI Haven.

• Interface
• Operators
• Functions

When first implementing the radius drawing feature I decided to ignore area lamps since they already show a dotted outline of their shape, but it would still be nice to show it in pretty colours to match all the other lamps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobo_(lighting)

A simple way to add a texture to lamps with 3d widgets for positioning the texture.

Would be nice to have options for blur, tint, etc.

User clicks on the model in the viewport, gaffer does the math of moving and rotating the selected light so it's specular highlight will appear at that point from the camera view.

If it's not a sun lamp, it should maintain the same distance to the point clicked.

It looks crap with the default theme, doesn't match other icons.

Currently just shows filename of hdr file.

Allow adjusting of the HDRI white balance.

A simple button to render the scene with all materials (except mesh lamps) as a (customizable) clay material, with optional wireframe.

After the render, the scene will automatically revert back to exactly how it was.

At the moment it asks hdrihaven.com for the list on startup, which slows down blender's startup by quite a bit, especially if there's a dodgy internet connection.

Rather store the list in a file to use frequently, and update it in the background (modal timer) once per session.

Instead of each user generating the thumbnails themselves, try to download them from a server to save time.

The thumbnails are tiny low-dynamic-range previews of the HDRI, so it is considered fair use in the case of copyrighted content. The actual HDRIs will of course not be distributed.

Let the user store the current settings of all lights so that they can mess around and experiment destructively, but easily return to the previous snapshot if needed.

Only where necessary.