Iray with NO PAIN Advice
Fauvist
Posts: 2,290
in The Commons
Can somebody tell me if there is ONE lighting product for Iray that I can use without having to do anything myself? Just - load and render? I keep making a mess of the iray renders I've tried to do, and I really want to try and use some of these new character textures.
Thanks!
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Can you give an example?
You should be able to get a fairly 'average' render using the default HDRI...it won't be award winning, but it shouldn't look horrible.
If you load a character, in a blank scene with the default hdri (Dome or Dome and Scene in the Environment settings in Render Settings) with the camera headlamp OFF, what do you end up with?
After that...what are you looking for...mood? typical types of renders? (interior scenes have different requirements for outdoor scenes which are not going to be the same as portrait shots, that kind of thing)
If you are doing just character portraits, I can highly recommend Khory's Scintillant Portait Lights . I've used it in almost every render I've done since I got it over half a year ago. It comes with both light sets and render settings and can often be used without any, or just mininal, tweaking, depending on how much you've moved your characters about.
But unfortunately, when it comes to Iray lighting, the old saying "No pain No gain" is pretty much a universal truth.
Its supposed to be art, what would it be without pain?
that being said I recommend Painter's Lights.
It depends on what sort of scene you're doing. There are quite a few good portrait light sets out there (including mine!). However, landscapes, interiors, and, just, bigger scenes in general can be much more daunting. Interiors in particular generally require manual work (unless you're okay with long render times)
However, for general load and render-ability for all scenes, you probably want to go with an set of HDRIs. I'm not the biggest fan of HDRIs as they're not really tweakable, you can't look and go "I like everything but I want this one light a little softer" but in terms of load and go, they're the most foolproof. Dimension Theory here has a good selection, I have these and I find them good general purpose lights, They also have some sky sets if you're doing more exterior scenes and want a backdrop (the terradome 3 skydome set is also good here)
With all that said interiors can still be a pain, or at the very least not "load and go" but HDRIs and hiding walls can often work pretty well
I though about what products helped me understand iRay lighting and I realized that there were a few that were especially helpful. I would recommend you try the iRadiance series with the hdr products in particular. They render fast and the ones that have simple color backgrounds come with tone mapping settings (the middle of the second row approximate Daz Studio's default settings) so you can safely play arround with settings and get something that isn't a black screen or something blindingly bright. I would add the bargain Daz iray hdr sets if you are in Platinum Club; hdr renders really fast and shows where iRay shines in that photorealistic diffuse llight. I personally love the Light It Up, Chroma Lights, and the Promo lights... actually, I never found a set I didn't like in the store from Elaineck to Oot but the big secret is to get the concept of tone mapping and Hdr down. Once you understand that which is exactly like a camera, the rest is much easier. Finally, I should mention the Painter's Lights which are the most 3Delight-like of the lights... very painterly and with thieir own hdr backgrounds. Finally, remember to turn off the headlight of the camer when you render; it adds an unpredictable element. I wanted to give a nice render example but I chose a high difficulty example: dark skin, a newly purchased character I've never rendered before, complicated geometry in the hair so this is a render that has reached only 20% completion and her finger intersects her blouse but it gives you an idea how the hdr can give a nice even light (in this case withe the Warhol lights).
I'm fairly new at Iray and struggled quite a bit until I found Dimension Theory's Iradiance Light Probe HDR Lighting for Iray. It's very versatile and easy to use, and also provides some amazing backgrounds if you turn the "Draw Dome" on. There are many different colors and intensities to choose from (direct and indirect versions of each), and many ways to adjust them with the included utilities. There are two expansion sets as well. I used this set on my latest book cover and it turned out so well. The lighting really made it work.
Most of the time, these light probes are all I need to light a portrait or a scene. Not always, but they are a great "go to" set. But then again, just about everything I've bought from Dimension Theory has been amazing. You really can't go wrong with DT's stuff!
PS. I have a slower, less powerful computer for Iray and these probes do not bog down the renders one bit.
Render on left is iray render using something called UberEnvironment2. Render on right is a 3Delight render using 3 distant lights that took me about 1 minute to set up. I did nothing else - just loaded the character, dress, and hair, - the light, and hit render. (the Monique iray eyes wouldn't render in 3Delight - or they were taking a really really long time.)
^^This.
My universal "quick and dirty" approach:
This works in about 85% of all cases. I HIGHLY recommend any of the iRadiance products by Dimension Theory because they give such a huge array of "base" lighting possibilities.
Uber Environment isn't set up to work in Iray. It's purpose was to simulate real-world lighting by calculating ambient occlusion and a few other things in 3delight.
This image was set up as described. The cone emitter you see is something I whipped up in 3DS Max, but it's literally just a cone with a sphere in it. (I made it so I could "point at" something and have the light shine there, lol.) The sphere emits light via the Daz Uber Iray shader. If anyone really wanted it, I'd happily share it as a freebie
I used this one primitive emitter and one of the iRadiance probes from this set. Final render is also shown after some minor postwork to "make it pretty." :)
When I click on Smart Content, then on Lights, I get hundreds of lights. How do I know if they are for iray or not? When I type the word Iray to filter the results, nothing shows up. There must be iray lights in there somewhere.
If you want brighter lighting than what you're getting, change the Tone Mapping settings. Change the shutter speed to something like 18 or 20 and the F/Stop to something like 14 or 16.
Laurie
EDIT: See Khory's post below about finding Iray lights in Smart Content.
If you've used UberEnvironment in 3Delight or if you've used IBLs in Poser, then it's easiest to think of the Environment Map in the Iray render settings as the image-based HDRI light used in either of those aforementioned light setups. If you've always just used point or spotlights, then the conversion to Iray is *mostly* seamless, except that real-world point lights don't have "falloff" settings because we can't ACTUALLY adjust physics.
All of the products mentioned in this thread -- Khory's Scintillant Portait Lights, Dimension Theory's Iradiance Light Probe HDR Lighting for Iray, and j.cade's Painters Lights are all excellent starting points.
UberEnvironment2 is a 3Delight environment light. It is completely wrong for Iray...it won't work properly and may actually hinder proper lighting. Since it loads with the skydome off, it's probably just not doing anything in that scene.
Remove it from the scene and go to the Render Settings (in Iray mode), under Environment, make sure it's set to Dome or Dome and Scene. This should be the default setup looks like:
On the flip side, Iray textures won't work correctly in 3Delight...so that's why the eyes were not rendering properly.
So you really need to match textures to the renderer to get the best out of the lighting that does exist.
In smart content there should be a subsection called Iray and then the Iray type lights will be inside that.
I guess that could be done in Daz studio itself using a sphere primitive (with d-formers or scaling) with emissive surface and the cone primitive with black diffuse.
I often use an emissive torus for very soft shadows.
The question is - Since the sphere/torus emits light in all direction, does the emission behind the camera (off subject) impact rendering speed (basically, is that cone necessary)?
I wanted to mention that there are no iRay lights in the Daz Studio default set but there are scores and scores with a lot of products so, if you expand the lighting section in the Smart content, yo should see the category called iRay. 3Delight lights will not work.
Here are two of the same image: one with Tonemapping settings and one with none. The effect may be subtle in this particular render, but in some it makes a huge difference. I use free HDRI all the time and see no difference between those and anything I've paid for. THIS you can get away with for free. Plus the tonemapping settings can be set during the render so you can see what they're doing. You can even make it look like it's getting dark or like moonlight when the HDRI is really sunlight.
Laurie
One thing you have to remember about emissive surfaces in iray, and most other renderers, is that the more polygons you have in the emissive surface, the slower the render will be and most likely the noisier it will be.
Think of it as if each polygon was its own light, so a low resolution sphere could easily have a few hundred or more than 1,000 polygons in it. That is almost guaranteed to slow your renders and introduce more noise.
Use emissives, but keep the polygon count as low as possible.
Depends what you mean by 3DL Lights. UE2 will not work in Iray, but most of the "normal" older lights do work, ie : distant, point and spot lights. However I find I have to massively increase the light intensity of the primitive lights to get them to show any light at all.
The default "ruins" HDRI is quite versatile. It's a cool light source, and can be spun around quite easily instead of setting up portrait lights.
If you're looking for warmer lights, you can easily make your own "HDRI" by drawing a gradient inside an image-editor and selecting that?
Probably not. I just use it as a tool to help me keep light directed at a subject and estimate shadow projection. Depending on scene complexity, my sinlge GeForce 970 stutters in preview mode. :)
I never saw that before!! I wonder if I was "filtering by context" and missing it? Thank you!
If you are doing portrait style renders I recommend j.cade's Painterly Lighting product or I really like the default DAZ Studio iRay environment for portraits (it's the one that's loaded when you start DAZ but before you have opened a scene or some preloads). Those are best for evaluating the 'look' though of an individual face and not really meant to distract with lots of environmental pizazz. I also own a DAZ Original iRay Studio lighting set and like j.cade's set it is best for portraiture emphasis of a character but can look inappropriate when you try to use them outdoors or indoors scenes to add more light to a scene.
For doing outdoors I find that can use the light from Sun-Sky & freebie HRDis much easier than indoor sets and so they aren't much worry.
Indoor sets, I turn on the emmissive lights and change them to reflect realworld values for lights in Watts so that when I adjust again and again tone mapping until I get the lighting I want I'll gain experience in what tone mappings work for what lighting mood. Take note that most indoor lighting in western culture are at 2700K while in the the far east it is usually at 5000K. 2700K is similar to light from a campfire, sunrise, or sunset while 5000K is similar to broad sunny daylight. It's a real hassle for me to & those that don't have nVidia video cards to adjust the tone mapping setting so often to get lighting as we want but worth the effort. One thing though about using these emmissive lights is that actually aren't generating the amount of ambient light in a room as they would in real life so to 'prelight' the room with a believable amount of ambient light before turning on your emissive lights and adjusting your tone mapping I recommend BeeMKays's tutorial in this thread:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/110771/natural-iray-lighning-for-rooms#latest
However, take note that you can save much of the effort of creating planes in a room and distributing them and making them emmisive as done in that thread if the ceiling in your indoor set is closed and not visible in the render you can turn it to an emmisive surface to create a more believable amount of evenly distributed ambient light in your room before you turn on the emmissives from the actual lamps in the room. Like the top of a wall at night though you will notice the wall getting brighter as you look higher up the wall near the ceiling. I can see that effect even in the room I'm in now at 16:30 daytime with the light on. You can't turn the ceiling to an emmisive surface if the ceiling is visible in the render and you can't turn up the amount of light from an emmisive ceiling too high.
For all iRay characters I'm learning to turn up the 'Top Coat Strength' to maximum, delete the top coat map, and then adjust the 'Top Coat Roughness' for only the skin portions of the various Surfaces in the Surfaces tab to 0.3 to 0.6 according to if I want to make them look wet or just mearly not so flat at Top Coat Roughness of 1.0 can do. I'm not sure I would make that adjustment for all characters rendered using iRay Studio Light sets but would for some of them.
It can...if there is something behind the camera for it to bounce off of. In a completely closed environment, a spherical or two sided emitter will figure in completely, even if there is an 'off camera' part.
So if the the 'inside' of the cone is reflective, then the light from the back side of the sphere is being calculated and bounced out the front (maybe...it may not go anywhere, depending on whether or not there is a way for it to get out). If it's only part of sphere and the 'front' is a signle sided emitter, it would probably be faster.
I'm going through everyone's posts and trying out some of the advice. Thank you all for responding. I bought the iRadiance light probe product, and tried it out. I got a pretty good render. Other than using iRay purposed textures on everything, is there anything else that's important that I should know? Using these light probes, and the iRay renderer, is the light going to bounce off everything when I add other objects? Do I need an Uber product?
Thanks!
No uber products required, aside from the free, built-in "Uber Shader" that applies the Iray shader to 3Delight material zones. (found in your content library here: shader presets/Iray/Daz Uber/!Iray Uber Base) If you think of setting an Iray scene more like setting up a photo shoot, you'll be fine. HDRI environments like the iRadiance probes or the built-in Iray sun/sky system can be thought of as daylight. It doesn't go through walls. And lights in Iray will act like lights in the real world. You can't fudge them, so its just a different thought process.
Render looks great!
By default, Iray does full environmental lighting...bounce, AO, color bleeding, etc with all lights.
Fauvist - check your PMs :)
I did a step by step tutorial that also explains the sliders in Tone Mapping here. For daylight scenes with side lighting for interest.
Another Iray tutorial on use of point lights and a spot light for a soft portrait is here. Both show you the finished product so you can see if it's what you'd like to learn. Very easy, step by step. (I was a training professional so I baby-step things for folks.)
To get this second look without the work, I would recommend Painter's Lights. Don't let the yellow promo fool you, there's natural light, blue light, etc. Great variety. Different positioning of lights. For outdoor lights, the Skies of iRadiance (I linked the bundle. If you only get one, I recommend the Sunny Skies.)
Overlooked as excellent portraiture lighting are HRDi freebies, especially HRDIs of bright sunrises and sunsets (there is a thread in the freebie section) and you just render with the Dome turned off and then paste the results to a typical portrait background.
One thing I've found about the HRDi enviroments is that even if an HRDi is claiming to be a 3K or 4K HRDi you usually can't get a decent non-blurred render out of them in DAZ Studio above 720p or 1080p. The best two HRDi for UHD renders are the Pixar Studios (Luxo-HRDI) freebie and the French golf course (Annecy-HRDI) freebie.
Also, HRDIHaven.com has about 10 free large free HRDIs you can download and a couple of them are at sunrise or sunset.