What's New in SU Podium for SketchUp - October 2018

HDR image-based lighting (HDRI) is a versatile alternative to the two Podium skies, providing a fast, easy way to light your exterior images in a wide range of lighting conditions.

When HDRI lighting is active, the chosen HDR becomes an all-in-one solution for the sky, background, and natural lighting in your render. This streamlines the exterior rendering workflow and provides several advantages:

• Realistic reflections due to 360° sky and background.
• Never have to worry about adding a background in post-processing; shadows, exposure, and tonal quality always match.
• Ability to quickly see your model in several lighting scenarios without any extra work. Switch from clear to cloudy, from morning, to afternoon, to sunset, simply by picking a different background.
• Easy solution for product/studio rendering.

SU Podium V2.6 makes it much easier for users to take advantage of an .HDR rendering workflow. There are two changes that make this possible.

1. A set of .HDR presets are now included by default in the V2.6 installation. These presets provide a better base for rendering to the .HDR image format.
2. Podium Image Editor now fully supports editing of .HDR images, and includes a new one-click HDR tonemapping option called "Adaptive linear." This is a histogram normalization function designed to fix exposure problems without losing your highlights and shadows.
   By rendering to .HDR and selecting the adaptive tone map, a vastly underexposed render can easily be pulled into an acceptible luminance range while enhancing areas of local contrast. This provides a much better base for further post-processing and prevents the need to re-render an image that probably would not have been salvageable without the added robustness of the HDR format.