Thursday, September 4th, 2014 Posted by Jim Thacker

Knald Technologies releases Lys in open beta

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Game tools developer Knald Technologies has released Lys, a new GPU-accelerated app for converting HDR images between common formats, and generating radiance, irradiance and specular textures from them.

The software provides a companion product to Knald, the developer’s existing tool for generating common games texture maps from 2D source images.

Convert HDR images and generate specular and irradiance textures
Lys, currently in free open beta, converts HDR images between panoramic, spherical and horizontal cross formats, handily allowing users to adjust orientation of the axes independently, and in real time.

Once formatted, an HDR can be used to generate specular, radiance and irradiance textures, with a bunch of options aimed at artists working in physically based shading pipelines.

Specular convolution supports cosine weighted, GGX and Gaussian specular terms, and Lys automatically generates BRDF convolved mipmaps with custom levels of roughness or specular power.

The software also generates irradiance for a chosen image, with options to tweak hue, saturation or exposure, exporting spherical harmonic coefficients in text-based format or as a floating-point TIFF.

Lys operates in single-precision floating point, so it works for 8, 16 and 32-bit image pipelines; and supports BC6H and BC7 Direct3D 11 texture block compression for games running on DirectX 11+ GPUs.

It also includes a toolset for generating physical skies procedurally, with options to adjust camera altitude, azimuth angle, zenith angle and luminance.

Pricing and availability
Lys is available now as a free open beta. It’s Windows-only.

Read a full list of features in Lys on Knald Technologies’ website (Includes download link)