There’s nothing more disheartening as a creative than being limited in your expressive process, particularly when the increased cost of living is impacting us all, and It seems nowadays that we all are waking up to more economic uncertainty in this current unpredictable world. The days of endlessly feasting on the creative money tree are becoming a fading memory for our industry unless you are in the influencer game.

So how do we keep moving creatively in a world of restricted budgets and ridiculously short timelines? The answer in my opinion is to continue pushing quality and value for money. It’s difficult as a rights-managed content provider of 360° HDRIs and automotive backplates to continue to bring value to a marketplace that is saturated with low-grade free hdris that are being given away to the masses and devaluing the industry of licensed CGI backplates and automotive image domes. Quality has always been my creative mantra, and I have preached the thesis of quality and value from my Domeble soap box many times and will continue to do so.

I do believe that there is a false economy when using the same free backplates and free HDRI suppliers over and over again, as it ultimately leads to creative repetition and at a certain point becomes a limited choice of content. Don’t get me wrong, however, its vitally important to help 3D students, educators, hobbyists and CG artists by giving them access to quality assets to develop their skill set, to experiment and to push technical creativity, and we fully support the use of free content for these groundbreakers and creative free thinkers.

Supplying this group of creators with free sample sets and free non-commercial licenses is a great thing, and here at Domeble it gives us great pleasure to do so, and we love to see how our assets are used. We provide our free assets in this way for two reasons. The first I have just mentioned, and the second is to provide a gateway for the students to become familiar with high-quality, richly dynamic automotive backplates and HDRs so that when they begin their professional careers, they have a baseline of what level of content they should be using to maximise their renders or immersive scenes. It also helps them to go to the gatekeepers of the creative money tree and justify the ask for a budget to license great content, because the end result is creatively superior and ultimately delivers a more powerful image or scene, that in turn leads to better commercial engagement.

It’s fair to say that we all want value, and we all want the very best available, whatever that might be, but it’s certainly true when needing CGI backplates and 360° HDRIs. At Domeble we like to think that we are a very user-friendly company, so if you are a student that needs some help, or a hobbyist producing some great art, we encourage you to reach out to us for creative collaborations and any help you need with non-commercial image requests. Check out Scenebox 360 for more information.

We’re also realistic when it comes to producing content for the commercial public domain in advertising and marketing, that the budgets aren’t always what they should be, and we will happily look at how we can make things work for you.

There will never be a full stop to the debate between the free image warriors and the commercial licensing world, but there is room enough for both to exist and to maintain the value of image licensing in the same arena as free non-commercial content. So if you have a brief that needs amazing image sourcing, or, if you are a CGI student or VR developer, drop us a message and we’ll make sure your creative vision has the best possible chance of being fulfilled.

For free sample, packs click here

Written by Carl Lyttle – @founder at Domeble

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