Starting to suspect mesh lights are of the devil

Mistara

mesh lights is why my iray isnt finishing? over 24 hours, 54%, stopped rendering >.<

Fossil

pds said:

Regardless of your choice of mesh vs. photometric lights in IRay, if you're having difficulty getting lighting that you're happy with, consider watching some online photography strobe lighting tutorials. As a photographer, I really love that I can replicate real world lighting in IRay. Rim lighting, cross lighting, Rembrandt, beauty, short, broad, 3-point...anything I can do in studio or on location, I can set up in Daz using IRay, so it's all transferable knowledge. And using V3Digitimes' Light Manager Pro is like using a wireless transceiver in the real world to adjust all my strobes without having to run all around--only better, because with LMP, I can "gel" my lights too!

If you really get into learning about lighting, you might be interested in watching some of the courses on CreativeLive; they cover the gamut, and you can watch the live broadcasts for free (typically, courses loop for free the day of the live broadcast, which is great if Pacific Time in the US doesn't fit your schedule). For a reasonable fee, you can buy a course to watch whenever you wish. CL instructors are some of the top pros in the business, so it's a great centralized location for a wide variety of content (they also offer courses on other subjects, from business to Photoshop--and even do a week-long "Photoshop Week", running simultaneous tracks).

Adorama TV is another fantastic (and free) resource; the original host, Mark Wallace is terrific at making the technical bits easy to understand. 

Amen.   All that time I spent in the studio screwing with lights and reflectors and softboxes and putting tape on the floor and tripping over darned power cords and blinding myself....is now paying off  with IRay.  The only thing I'd like to see is being able to adjust exposure and each light on the fly as in Reality.   Even waiting the couple of minutes for a low-res render is a pain. 

fastbike1

@Fossil "The only thing I'd like to see is being able to adjust exposure and each light on the fly as in Reality"

While I don't think you can adjust lights on the fly, you adjust anything in the tonemapping, filtering, or progressive rendering tabs. There is flyout menu on the left side of the render tab.

See the screen capture.

DzFire

o.O

Over 100 mesh lights with textures, 27 minute render.

i7 w/ 32GB memory and a Gforce 980i

SickleYield

That's gorgeous! Wow, 32 min with haze and DOF in it too?