When we launched CGI.Backgrounds in 2004, we had a simple goal: provide the highest quality HDRi Maps and Environments for professional 3D artists and designers.
Nearly 20 years later, the technologies for 3D design have changed dramatically. Today’s image-based lighting, real-time rendering at 2k+ resolution, and exquisitely-detailed digital twins would have seemed almost magical back in 2004.
Yet our main goal hasn’t changed; we’re still completely devoted to helping designers access the best possible virtual environments for their renders.
That’s why we were so excited to collaborate with NVIDIA to provide detailed feedback during the development process of the NVIDIA Omniverse foundation application, USD Composer , as well as contribute 10+ real-world HDRi environments that designers can use right in the application. The Omniverse platform offers foundation applications, which are fully customizable reference applications, including: USD Composer and USD Presenter .
Creators and developers can use these as a starting point to customize and turn them into their own connected workflow applications.
Using a foundation application dramatically reduces development time for building custom applications for 3D workflows . USD Composer enables artists to accelerate advanced scene composition, as well as assemble, light, simulate, and render 3D scenes in real-time.
CGI.Backgrounds is focused both on creating revolutionary tech and on building a passionate and engaged community of artists, designers, and developers in collaboration with NVIDIA.
Today, we’re sharing an inside look at who we are, what we do, and what our collaboration with NVIDIA means for the 3D design community.
The Need for Premium HDRi Maps
When 3D designers create renders of vehicles, buildings, products, and other subjects, they often need two things: a visual background for their render, and detailed lighting data to ensure that their scene looks as realistic as possible.
To get either (or both) of these essential elements, designers often turn to HDRi Maps. These virtual environments include both high-resolution, 360-degree imagery and the complex lighting information required for Image-Based Lighting (IBL).
The challenge is that creating good HDRi Maps is hard. The best ones are often captured from real-world locations, using medium-format digital cameras and advanced editing software. That requires sending a person into the field in order to capture a specific real-world location and transform it into a virtual environment.
Several companies in the HDRi Environment space do this through crowdsourcing. They act as a portal, allowing professional and amateur photographers to post and share their own HDRi Maps with the design community.
These portal companies serve a valuable function. For one thing, their HDRi Maps are often free! That’s hugely beneficial to students and beginning designers. And with a big enough community, they can create decent-sized collections of virtual environments.
There are several challenges with the crowdsourcing approach, though. Often, the quality of the resulting HDRi Maps is variable. Some maps might have stitching or perspective issues, they might be low resolution, or their lighting data might be inaccurate or incomplete.
Legal rights can be a challenge, too. With free HDRi Maps from many popular sites, designers have no guarantee that the photographer who uploaded the map actually owns the rights to it.
Our History
That’s why we launched CGI.Backgrounds. We wanted to provide high-quality, professionally-shot HDRi Maps with consistent, accurate lighting data and clear legal rights. We saw a need for this kind of premium imagery and built our company in order to meet it.
To capture our HDRi Maps, we send our own photographers into the field all over the world. One of our photographers might be in Taipei one month, California the next, and Dubai the month after that! Juggling multiple time zones and travel schedules is just part of our day-to-day life.
No matter where they travel, our photographers capture real-world scenes using medium-format digital cameras, combining hundreds of still photos into HDRi Maps that can be 500+ megapixels. Our photographers often stay in a single location for a full day, capturing the same scene in various lighting conditions from dawn to dusk.
To better serve pro designers, we also invented our own proprietary RAY.HDR format. The format, which is based on decades of feedback from the 3D community, includes fully-calibrated IBL data (with lighting standardized to the 3rd gray patch on the Macbeth chart). This consistent lighting data makes it possible for designers to light a scene accurately in a single click.
It’s challenging (and more expensive) to send professional photographers into the field than to crowdsource. But we feel that it results in the best and most consistent HDRi Maps. It also means we control the rights to our images, which is often essential if they’re used in big campaigns.
Building production-ready renders and realistic virtual worlds is hard. CGI Backgrounds provides ultra-high-quality virtual environments that enable users to achieve the best possible outcome.
Over the last two decades, we've been privileged to work with BMW, Honda, Aston Martin, Merkley+Partners, and more.
Collaborating with NVIDIA
Today, we’re excited to add NVIDIA to our list of collaborators. As part of our work, we’re constantly evaluating and testing the latest 3D production technologies. When we saw USD Composer for the first time, we were blown away.
Still, even today’s best digital content-creation (DCC) tools often take seconds–or even minutes–to render a high-resolution scene. Creating a quality vehicle render, for example, is often a matter of setting up your DCC, starting the rendering process, getting a cup of coffee, and returning several minutes later to check your results.
USD Composer is totally different. Drawing on NVIDIA’s deep background with 3D rendering in the gaming and visualization spaces–as well as the company’s leading GPUs and other hardware–USD Composer renders scenes up to 20 times per second at 2K resolution and with full IBL.
To render a scene at full resolution and to talk about framerates rather than minute-long render times? That’s revolutionary.
Over the last several months, we’ve collaborated with NVIDIA to help make USD Composer as beneficial to the 3D design community as possible.
We’ve had a continuous back-and-forth dialog with Josh Bapst, an art director at NVIDIA, and the NVIDIA Omniverse USD Composer team, providing feedback on the application based on the insights we’ve gained from thousands of conversations with pro designers over the last 20 years. We hope that these insights will help make the application even better for the community of developers who build on it.
We’re also thrilled to contribute 11 of our premium RAY.HDR Maps, so that designers can use them for free within the USD Composer interface. You can find our premium maps in the Environments tab within the USD Composer interface.
Again, these premium environments include fully-calibrated IBL data, as well as high-resolution visuals from several real-world locations, including
We truly feel that the core technologies within USD Composer enable a quantum leap forward in terms of rendering quality and speed. NVIDIA is on the cutting edge of real-time rendering, and we’re excited to put 10+ of our environments into the hands of NVIDIA’s user community via the app.
Learn More
Of course, the 11 Environments you’ll find within the USD Composer interface just begin to scratch the surface of what’s available for 3D designers. If you find our sample HDRi Maps helpful, there are many more options you can use in future projects.
To see our full range of HDRi Maps (as well as visual backplates), you can visit us at CGI.Backgrounds.com . We just re-launched our website and added new capabilities like AI visual search to help you find the perfect virtual environment for your project.
In the past, we’ve worked mainly with large brands and professional agencies. This year, though, we’ve started to branch out, offering our imagery to a broader range of designers.
To that end, we’ve launched low-cost subscription plans for students and freelancers. We even have a free tier that lets you sample our HDRi Maps for non-commercial uses like building a design portfolio or completing class projects.
With any of our HDRi Maps, you can easily download a full-resolution file and import it right into the USD Composer interface. That means you can render your 3D models using imagery from nearly any place in the world–from the streets of Tokyo to Bixby Bridge–with accurate lighting and visuals.
Even if you don’t use additional premium environments, we encourage you to try USD Composer and to check out our 11 sample environments in the interface. Especially if you’re used to traditional 3D rendering workflows, we think you’ll be amazed at how fast and accurately USD Composer renders realistic, well-lit scenes.
We’re excited to continue our collaboration with NVIDIA, and to continue providing technical feedback about Omniverse USD Composer. But we’re even more excited to see how you use our environments–and to see what you use the application to create.
