The busy first month of the new site has already passed with outstanding and unexpected success. In fact, it was so unexpectedly successful and busy that the second month is almost over too!

The first four goals on Patreon were reached in short succession: 16k versions of each HDRI were added, the first Vault was unlocked, and I promised to publish one two HDRIs every single week.

As I’ve said before, I totally did not expect this kind of support. I was fairly sure people would like the new site (who doesn’t like free stuff), but to actually throw money at me to help me keep it going was just a pipe dream. Of course I worked hard to try and make that dream a reality, but there was no way to know if it would actually work.

Well, luckily for all of us, it did 🙂 At least so far as to cover all of its own costs and provide a reasonable budget to keep producing HDRIs regularly. It’s not enough for me to live off yet, I still need to do freelance work and find other sources of income, but it is a most excellent start.

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TLDR: Having people use my HDRIs is far more important to me than money.

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.

At 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. 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.

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.

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