HDRI Plus! (for Unreal Engine 5)

HDRI Plus is a plugin for Unreal Engine 5 created by Light Sail VR.

*We recommend buying directly through the Epic Marketplace

HDRI Plus allows you to drag and drop 20 HDRI worlds into your scene, ready to go with God Rays and everything! It's very customizable and you can add your own HDRIs as well.

Each Blueprint has a directional light (sun), two visible HDRI skyboxes (one for Lumen, one for Path Tracing), a sky light, an exponential fog component, and a post process volume component all in one Blueprint.

One of the key features of HDRI Plus is that each one has a sun manually aligned and locked to the HDRI, so as you rotate the HDRI, the sun follows perfectly along!

Another feature is that you can easily change the HDRI, Sun, Sky, Fog and Post Process volume settings all from one details panel of the Blueprint.

God Rays can easily be turned on or off, and adjusting them is also a breeze.

This plugin also works with Path Tracing (unlike HDRI Backdrop plugin).

I've also created a similar default sky. With this blueprint, you have a directional light(sun), Sky, Sky atmosphere, Volumetric Clouds, Exponential Height Fog and Post Process Volume all in one Blueprint. In the details panel you can control all of the most important settings.

The Background

I made this plug in because I use HDRis in a lot of my projects, and the existing plugins for HDRI were not good enough for us. I needed to find a way to make HDRIs work with Path Tracing, so I solved that problem and kept going!

I realized to get the most out of lumen, you need to have a directional light and it needed to be manually placed in the same location as the sun in the HDRI. So i found a way to offset the sun to match, and then quickly rotate the whole world together!

Then I thought, I always forget how to make God Rays work, so I found a way to easily incorporate that into this plugin, so all you have to do is search God Rays and you have all the sliders you need.

From there I added just about every feature I use again and again, from Path Tracing Samples, to Reflection type, so that with one Blueprint, I can control the entire look of my scene.

Overall, HDRI Plus is an excellent plugin for Unreal Engine 5 that can help you create stunning and realistic lighting for your projects. Whether you are working in Virtual Production, game development, architectural visualization, or any other type of project, HDRI Plus can help you take your lighting and background to the next level.

You can check out the initial beta video here (before many features were added):

https://youtu.be/cnk7UabWRzE

I have tested this plugin on 5.1.1 and it works great, older versions do not work, let us know if you need to me to develop it for a specific version and if you have any feedback.

Installation

If purchases outside of the Epic Marketplace, the easiest way to use HDRI Plus!, is to simply open the HDRI_Plus.uproject file and build your project from this project.

You can also add HDRI to your Engine, so it will exist in all your projects.

To do this, you can open the project, make sure "Show Engine Content" is enabled.

Then create a new folder in your Engine>Content folder called "HDRI_Plus".

Drag the Blueprints only, one at a time into this folder, and do Advanced Copy. Then open all the drop menus and make sure to check all of them to be copied.

The files are very large and it can be taxing on your system, this is why I recommend just bringing one blueprint at a time over.

Technical Details

Features:

• 20 HDRI Blueprints
• Default Sky Blueprint
• Green Backdrop Blueprint
• Directional Light matched and locked to the HDRIs
• Each Blueprint has been brightness and color balanced for Sun/Sky/HDRI
• Works with Path Tracer (Unlike HDRI Backdrop)
• Details panel with most useful parameters exposed
• You can use your own HDRIs
• Default Post Process Volume settings for Maximum Quality

Other Features include:

• Quickly Adjust God Rays
• Quickly Adjust Fog
• Use different HDRI for Backdrop and for Lighting

Number of HDRI Textures: 40 (20 normal and 20 Blurred)

Number of Blueprints: 28

Supported Development Platforms: Windows/Mac

Windows: Yes

Mac: Yes

Documentation: https://lightsailvr.notion.site/HDRI-Plus-LSVR-Plug-In-for-UE5-594fc43c972b48b9b86e224943a99507

Important/Additional Notes:

HDRIs are 8192x4096 and can be demanding for your PC.