HDRISKYBOX

HDRI in Blender

Blender's World shader takes an equirectangular HDRI directly, with no cubemap conversion needed. This guide covers the standard image-based-lighting workflow, then how to hand off to an engine that needs six faces.

The standard workflow: equirectangular IBL

Blender lights a scene from an HDRI through the World shader. The panorama is used directly, as a single equirectangular image, with no cubemap and no conversion step. Both Cycles and EEVEE read it the same way, and the one image supplies both the image-based lighting and the visible background.

  1. Open the World Properties tab in the Properties editor.
  2. Under Surface, click the dot to the left of the Color field and choose Environment Texture.
  3. Click Open and select your .hdr or .exr panorama.
  4. Optional: to rotate the environment, add a Mapping node, feed it from the Generated output of a Texture Coordinate node, and wire its result into the Vector input of the Environment Texture node.
  5. Render. The scene is lit by the HDRI, and the panorama shows behind it as the background.
The Blender world shader node graph for an HDRI environment: Environment Texture into Background into World Output, with an optional Texture Coordinate and Mapping pair feeding it.Texture CoordinateMappingEnvironment TextureBackgroundWorld Outputoptional: rotates the HDRI
The World shader node graph

If the HDRI lights the scene too brightly or too dim, change the Strength value on the Background node instead of re-exporting the file. Strength is a plain brightness multiplier.

When you need six faces instead

Blender itself never needs a cubemap, since the World shader is equirectangular from end to end. Six faces become necessary only when you take the environment out of Blender and into an engine that requires them, such as the Source engine, Roblox, Quake-derived engines, or custom OpenGL and DirectX work. For a full breakdown of which engines need six faces and which accept the panorama directly, see Cubemap or equirectangular?

Blender to equirectangular HDR to Source skybox

When the target is a six-face engine, the route runs through an equirectangular render. Blender produces one with a panoramic camera:

  1. Select the camera. In Object Data Properties, open the Lens section, set Type to Panoramic, then set Panorama Type to Equirectangular. This needs the Cycles render engine.
  2. Set the output to a 2:1 resolution (4096 by 2048 is a sound default) and render the scene.
  3. Save the result as a .hdr or .exr file so the full dynamic range is preserved.
  4. Open that file in the converter and export it as a Source Skybox bundle. The HDRI to Source engine skybox guide covers the export options and naming rules.

That same equirectangular HDR is the input for every six-face target, not just Source. Render it once, and the same file feeds a Roblox sky, an idTech skybox, or a custom cubemap.

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Open the converter