Having decided that wouldn’t work, I looked at how other sites like do it: a paid monthly subscription for access to high-res textures, but with low-res textures available in a free account. While this sounded like a reasonable idea, I was unsure whether anyone would bother to support me and I knew it would mostly just annoy people to have to manually choose $0 and type in their email address (as most PWYW platforms require) in order to download it for free. My first idea was to use some kind of PWYW (pay-what-you-want) system like Gumroad, where people could download the HDRIs for free, but have the option to donate a small amount for each one. Render by Zacharias Reinhardt using my Rocky Ridge HDRI But I didn’t want to put everything behind a paywall either. I decided it just wasn’t practical to make everything free. Flights from South Africa to basically anywhere else in the world are notoriously expensive, and the few 2k HDRIs I’d published before launching HDRI Haven had been downloaded over 6000 times in just a few months – if I were to publish the 16k versions of those as well, it would mean several terabytes of bandwidth every month. Ignoring the once-off costs of camera and computer equipment, the biggest expenses are travel and bandwidth. Unfortunately, creating and publishing HDRIs costs quite a bit of money. My dream from the very beginning when I started shooting HDRIs was to release everything for free, in the same open-source spirit as the Blender community, giving everyone equal access to the same tools and assets to achieve both creative freedom and freedom from financial constraints. But that wasn’t actually my initial plan to be honest, and while it was working pretty well, it always felt like I had taken the easy route. I’ve tried writing this post a number of times in various ways, but I don’t think it’s possible to explain what HDRI Haven is now and why it’s changed without first telling you how it began.Īt the beginning of last year I launched HDRI Haven as an online store for people to buy the best HDRIs I could make at the cheapest rates I could offer. TLDR: Having people use my HDRIs is far more important to me than money.
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