Building sets for IRay
tring01
Posts: 305
Just an idle observation here as I while away the day trying to get a scene to work for me.....
I'm starting to believe I have to fundamentally change my approach to sets and scenes in IRay. I have a ton of full room and building scenes that are enclosed on all four sides and have a roof and floor. In the old 3Delight days these types of scenes were boss because all you had to do was load one up and throw in AoA's Advanced Ambient Light and you were just a few accent lights and a camera or two away from rendering.
With IRay these enclosed scenes are just a huge pain. The IRay environment light is completely blocked out by the box. I find myself wasting silly amounts of time fiddling with different interior light setups (harsh shadows everywhere!) and never really getting what I want. Today I had sort of an epiphany about the whole thing.
Since IRay treats lights as if they're real - I should create my scenes just like professionals do in the real world of film and photography. Outdoor, "on location", scenes are just fine. Indoor scenes are much easier to work with if I just create three walls, a floor, and dress it up with some furniture. I can almost throw together some primatives with textures and get a better result faster than spending $20 on someone's fabulously detailed room (that takes hours just to render the base geometry because it's chock full of complex geometry emissive lights).
The only thing missing from the simple, "sound stage", scenes is nice touches like doors, windows, fireplaces, etc. Those I have to scavenge from somewhere - or just go without. I have all the furnishings I could ever wish for. Takes a while to dress the set - but it turns out just like I want and I can use the IRay environment light to great effect. Back to just adding a few accent lights, cameras, and away I go!
I really wish some of you very talented vendors out there would start making IRay optimized "soundstage", style creation kits for different genre's instead of the endless enclosed box rooms that are so hard to work with.
Just a thought.
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Comments
If you don't have the option to "hide a wall, you can use the geometry editor to select the wall polygons and then hide it.
Or, easier, the Iray Section plane which hides everything on one side of it. Perfect for this.
Yes, if you have the patience to go through all the elements in the geometry, figure out what is what, turn off what you don't want, edit what you can't turn off - after a day or two you might have a usable scene. Not being critical. I tried this approach. It worked with some sets, but for most it is far too tedious to bother with.
This was suggested to me before. It does work - but not as well as just being able to turn off the roof that's blocking the ambient light. I've gotten some good results with IRay section planes - but never without a fair amount fo fiddling. It also falls victim to content creators that try to provide a "complete", IRay product by loading it up with complex geometry emissive lights. Those lights jack up render times right off the scale - and using a section plane only partially solves that issue. Thanks for the comment though. Appreciate any input.
I've got this one. http://www.daz3d.com/idg-portrait-studio-2
It is a huge room and a small side room, both fully textured, with working doors. Every single wall, door, floor, ceiling can be hidden, or removed from the scene. Yeah, it's spendy if you were just looking for an empty room. All those "complex geometry emissive lights" that "jack up render times right off the scale" are included at no extra charge and completely optional to use. You don't even have to load them up.
I've seen quite a few of I13's sets recently that are only 3 walls with optional ceiling.
Search the store for the word "vignette." Lot's of good stuff.
http://www.daz3d.com/collective3d-portrait-vignettes-contemporary-3
http://www.daz3d.com/collective3d-portrait-vignettes-horror-2
http://www.daz3d.com/collective3d-portrait-vignettes-contemporary-2
One tip to creators is that geometry emissive lights should be a separate object(s) that can be set to Basic resolution. That way your votive holders and whatnot can be high resolution without cranking up light calculations from emitting complex surfaces.
Another trick I've done in an enclosed room is to make the ceiling an emissive light source. Works pretty well. Add your accent, rim and fill lights and you have a really good start. The ceiling light gives a pretty even lighting throughout the whole room allowing your extra lights to cast the shadows you want. YMMV.
If you want to treat the interior like a photo studio shot, don't forget that the photometric ights can use geometry and will calculate much faster than emissive lighting. You can give a spot an unlimited geometry so that it could be your "ceiling".
So of the issues people have is that they still think in terms of 3DL techniques when they are using Iray, thus th eobsession with emissive lightin when it's not used to mimic a real fixture.
I ended up doing a little bit of all your suggestions in a kit bashing exercise. The result, as you can see, is not perfect but it should work for my needs. Yes, I ended up abandoning the IRay environment and/or HDRI approach and going with a massive 10m by 10m emissive plane above the whole scene as my area light.
The best thing about this set is it suits my vision for the scene and it renders to full 95% convergence in about 10 minutes. Most of the set products I've bought recently only render to 2% to 5% convergence after a full 2 hours. I admit my system isn't that strong - but this whole thing is about how to make IRay work with my limited resources.
There are too many products here to link them all, but if anyone would like to know where I found any particular bit or bob in the scene just ask. Would be glad to give the content creator credit.
@tring01 "going with a massive 10m by 10m emissive plane above the whole scene as my area light"
If you want to try an experiment in render times, replace the emissive plane with a spotlight. Change the geometry to rectangle and change the dimension to your 10M x 10M. Remember that Studio dimension are in cm so you would input 10000x10000. You may also need to adjust the lumen value, since it is really luminous flux (i.e. per unit area).
The spot should be faster. Will try myself since I rarely use emissive lighting for anything but surfaces like monitor screens.
Tone mapping may also help. You can change the tone mapping while the render is in progress by clicking the small arrow on the left of the render window.
I've been making 3d content for 14 years now, and I've made plenty of rooms - every one of which has separate body parts for floor, ceiling and all four walls. Even in the days of 3Delight, I considered it essential to be able to hide walls so people could put a camera anywhere.
I'm experimenting with that now. First results are that the spotlight renders quite a bit faster, but it leaves a lot more noise (fireflies) in the scene. That might be something I did though. Working on it. Thanks for the suggestion.
Yup. I've been at this for only a year or two now and I've reached the point where I'm building my own sets. I'm amazed how easy it really is. All I really needed to buy are furnishings and architectural details like door knobs and such. Every day I learn something new in this hobby.