Good CG, and especially good Archviz, depends on a few prerequisites. One of these is quality HDR skies. It’s never been a big secret that the place to go for these is PG Skies. But even if you already own Peter Guthrie’s entire sky collection, you should drop by his website, which has just relaunched.

The new site is not just gorgeous, but the updated V5 skies have been especially calibrated to behave exactly as they would if you were to photograph the scene. This means the end of guesswork as far as white balance and exposure are concerned.

Of course, Peter’s skies have unmatched dynamic range and those that feature direct sunlight are treated in such a way as to produce sharp, natural-looking shadows out of the box, obviating the need for my old HDR gamma hack, which many low-quality HDR maps still require.

On a side note, the new preview renders displayed with each sky present a good cross section of possible use cases. Peter, being a discerning man, used my Soho facade pack in one of these scenes, which turned out pretty well, if I may say so myself.

The link at the top of this post is an affiliate one, so you’ll help me by clicking it. But regular visitors of this blog know I almost never post about anything other than my work and I wouldn’t recommend a product that I’m not using myself.