Iray Ghost Light render and support thread (Commercial)

KindredArts

pkappetein said:

Dumb question..   Horizontal object and the Vertical object.   are they the same,  just  turned in the properties ?
Also.  the red arrow I can pull longer and shorter.  and you also drag it through the object and comes out the other way..   is that just the direction for the light?

AWESOME product btw.

I see that this has normal names for the sliders as well  (up / down)   (forward / backword)    I got lost with those other names all the time..

(Unless they changed that in the latest Daz version.)

Yes, horizontal and vertical are the same, they just have different pivots, so they load in different orientations. 

I think you mean you're scaling the object right? Yes, if you rescale it to a negative direction, the light will change normal direction too. So dragging the scale until the arrow flips to the other side will indeed change the light path.

Anyway, glad you like it, thank you for purchasing :)

 

KindredArts

marble said:

BTW, here's a render of a room that used to take hours but this was stopped at 90% in 4 minutes. Two Ghost Lights (one in the bay window area and one on the ceiling).

Great render. Scenes like this are exactly why i built the kit, they are so difficult to render quickly in a way that wont blow out the scene. A nice daylight background outside of the window would sell the scene pretty well.

AnotherUserName

Hey KindredArts, just dropping in to compliment you on an excellent product. I used to follow the tutorial all the time. Alas, im a lazy renderer(!?) and having a product to do most of the work for me was just what I needed. Thanks.

KindredArts

AnotherUserName said:

Hey KindredArts, just dropping in to compliment you on an excellent product. I used to follow the tutorial all the time. Alas, im a lazy renderer(!?) and having a product to do most of the work for me was just what I needed. Thanks.

Very kind of you @AnotherUserName. I appreciate you dropping by and thank you very much for your purchase 

marble

KindredArts said:

marble said:

BTW, here's a render of a room that used to take hours but this was stopped at 90% in 4 minutes. Two Ghost Lights (one in the bay window area and one on the ceiling).

Great render. Scenes like this are exactly why i built the kit, they are so difficult to render quickly in a way that wont blow out the scene. A nice daylight background outside of the window would sell the scene pretty well.

If you know where I might find an HDR of a suburban street, I'd appreciate the link. At the moment I'm using the Yosemite Park HDR set but they tend to be foliage heavy.

KindredArts

marble said:

KindredArts said:

marble said:

BTW, here's a render of a room that used to take hours but this was stopped at 90% in 4 minutes. Two Ghost Lights (one in the bay window area and one on the ceiling).

Great render. Scenes like this are exactly why i built the kit, they are so difficult to render quickly in a way that wont blow out the scene. A nice daylight background outside of the window would sell the scene pretty well.

If you know where I might find an HDR of a suburban street, I'd appreciate the link. At the moment I'm using the Yosemite Park HDR set but they tend to be foliage heavy.

Oh i would have rendered out to png and slipped one in as a background in photoshop. However! If you go here and scroll down to an hdri called willem kuyperstraat, that's a pretty good suburban street.

marble

KindredArts said:

marble said:

KindredArts said:

marble said:

BTW, here's a render of a room that used to take hours but this was stopped at 90% in 4 minutes. Two Ghost Lights (one in the bay window area and one on the ceiling).

Great render. Scenes like this are exactly why i built the kit, they are so difficult to render quickly in a way that wont blow out the scene. A nice daylight background outside of the window would sell the scene pretty well.

If you know where I might find an HDR of a suburban street, I'd appreciate the link. At the moment I'm using the Yosemite Park HDR set but they tend to be foliage heavy.

Oh i would have rendered out to png and slipped one in as a background in photoshop. However! If you go here and scroll down to an hdri called willem kuyperstraat, that's a pretty good suburban street.

I've downloaded from that site before - I probably need to check out the newer stuff. Thanks again.

fastbike1

One other comment about multiple cards and Iray. If you dissimilar cards, Iray will "throttle" the faster card to match the slower card.This might not make much difference if the card's clockrate is fairly similar but in the case of a 970 and a 1070, i would think the 1070 is beiong strangled.

@marble

If you haven't already, I'd be curious about the difference in render time using both of your cards versus the same scene with the 970 just driving the monitor and the 1070 rendering (if that causes cable changes, etc, maybe the 1070 by itself).

marble

fastbike1 said:

One other comment about multiple cards and Iray. If you dissimilar cards, Iray will "throttle" the faster card to match the slower card.This might not make much difference if the card's clockrate is fairly similar but in the case of a 970 and a 1070, i would think the 1070 is beiong strangled.

@marble

If you haven't already, I'd be curious about the difference in render time using both of your cards versus the same scene with the 970 just driving the monitor and the 1070 rendering (if that causes cable changes, etc, maybe the 1070 by itself).

My impression is (not very scientific because I have not run tests) that using the two cards is still faster than the 1070 alone. Of course, this might mean that the 1070 alone is not very much slower than both cards. Anyhow, it is what I have and I decided to keep the 970 rather than try to sell it.

I also decided to run the monitor from the 1070 to allow IRay to access the maximum available on the 970. In any event, according to GPU-Z the monitor takes about 500MB of the 8GB so no big deal.

Novica

This is showing you one Ghost light along with the Pro -Studio HDR Lighting System  for portraits. Ghost lights work wonderful with that product. Each render (600 px) only took 4 minutes 14 seconds.  Love it!  To see Luminance of 30, 60, 90, 125, 150  click here. I posted it in my Art Studio thread then remembered about this one. See which Luminance you like best.

Here it is without the Ghost Light. Remember, only ONE Ghost!

KindredArts

Novica said:

This is showing you one Ghost light along with the Pro -Studio HDR Lighting System  for portraits. Ghost lights work wonderful with that product. Each render (600 px) only took 4 minutes 14 seconds.  Love it!  To see Luminance of 30, 60, 90, 125, 150  click here. I posted it in my Art Studio thread then remembered about this one. See which Luminance you like best.

Here it is without the Ghost Light. Remember, only ONE Ghost!

Great work Novica, i'll pop over to your thread :)

Knittingmommy

I was playing with these lights earlier in the week.  I thought I'd share.  The only lights are two ghost lights in the windows and two point lights off camera to the right.  I think I could have gone just a little bit darker, but I'm happy with it overall.

Gallery Link

edit: I mistakenly thought I was rendering with just the ghost lights! I was WRONG! I also had two point lights in there.  Aargh!

KindredArts

Knittingmommy said:

I was playing with these lights earlier in the week.  I thought I'd share.  The only light is two ghost lights in the windows.  I think I could have gone just a little bit darker, but I'm happy with it overall.

Gallery Link

Great work KM! Thanks for sharing 

marble

Knittingmommy said:

I was playing with these lights earlier in the week.  I thought I'd share.  The only light is two ghost lights in the windows.  I think I could have gone just a little bit darker, but I'm happy with it overall.

Gallery Link

Very nice. I'm interested how you managed to get the sharper shadows? Also, which windows are the Ghost Lights in? The light seems to be coming from inside the room and the windows are black.

Mardook

I just want to say Thank You for this product. It really lights up a dull render! :D

KindredArts

@marble - I can't speak for KM here - but if you want sharper shadows, you need smaller lights at a higher intensity. For softer shadows you want a larger light with a lower intensity,

@Mardook - You're very welcome! Thank you for purchasing 

Knittingmommy

marble said:

Knittingmommy said:

I was playing with these lights earlier in the week.  I thought I'd share.  The only light is two ghost lights in the windows.  I think I could have gone just a little bit darker, but I'm happy with it overall.

Gallery Link

Very nice. I'm interested how you managed to get the sharper shadows? Also, which windows are the Ghost Lights in? The light seems to be coming from inside the room and the windows are black.

This made me go, hmm, what did I do?  So, I went back to look at my scene file.  That will teach me to look at my scene file on an image that is already several days old when I'm trying to post at 3 am my time!  Turns out that I had more light in there than I thought I did.  The set comes with two point lights.  At one point, I had turned these off by hiding them in the scene file.  I didn't want to delete them in case I ended up needing them.  I thought that I wasn't using them, but it turns out they were on when I just loaded up the saved scene file for my final render.  The point lights are off to the right just off camera, one near one crib and the other near the other crib.  The window isn't actually black, though.  At full screen you can see a little bit of the environment I put outside.  The ghost lights are positioned just inside of each of the two windows. 

I'm sorry about the confusion.  Apparently, I wasn't paying as close attention to detail as I should have when I was rendering.  This image ended up crashing on me several times and it took way too long to render on my system.  I was just happy to finally get something I really liked when I was done.  I thought I was rendering with just the ghost lights.  Still, the lights definitely added to the image.  I like using them.

marble

Thanks. The point lights explain the sharper shadows. I did know about smaller light = sharper shadows but those are, forgive the pun, pin sharp :) I'll remember to try them when I want to achieve that effect - sometimes I use photometric spots but, as I mentioned in an earlier post, they seem to multiply the render times significantly.

fastbike1

Basic rule of shadows and light sources: bigger and/or closer = softer, conversly smaller and/or farther = sharper.

When you look at a video of a studio photoshoot, you will see large softboxes very close to the subject.

marble

marble said:

KindredArts said:

marble said:

On another note, i'd be careful about using your 970 and 1070 together. Provided your scenes are under 3.5/4gb you should see decent performance, but beyond that it will fall back to cpu. Iray uses parity across both memory buffers, meaning the same scene is loaded into both card. If you want to render anything over 4gb, i'd disable the 970. You might already know this and i'm just harping on for no reason, i just wanted to make sure. :)

Thanks. Suffice to say that I managed to get the effect I was hoping for with just the Ghost Lights. 

Yes, I am painfully aware of the 4GB limit - that's what prompted me to get the 1070. However, I believe you are wrong about falling back to CPU. In my experience (and I do monitor this with GPU-Z), exceeding 4GB falls back to the single 1070 not all the way back to CPU. It is probably 30% slower than both cards working but I'm fine with that for larger scenes.

Another odd thing I've noticed and reported in another thread: according to GPU-Z (and MSI Afterburner) IRay seems to take advantage of more of the VRAM in the 1070 than in the 970 during the same render. I can only assume that it automatically adjusts compression according to what's available.

 

I now find I need to qualify my previous post. Today the behaviou contradicted what I wrote in that post. A scene went over the GTX970 VRAM limit and the fall-back was to CPU, not the 1070. I ran it again with the 970 deselected in the render settings and it sailed through on the 1070 alone. Not only that but there was no noticeable difference in the render time between the 1070 alone and a similar scene rendering with both cards.

So now I'm wondering if my fairly expensive, year old 970 is redundant. Maybe one day NVidia will think of a way to fix the fall-back issue which, in my view, seems very inconsistent.

pkappetein

Is it possible to have presets lower then 10K ?   like 1,3,5,7 ?

Some scene's is still too bright, and trying to make it darker.

Kinich

pkappetein said:

Is it possible to have presets lower then 10K ?   like 1,3,5,7 ?

Some scene's is still too bright, and trying to make it darker.

Just manually edit the settings, select the Ghost Light, open Surfaces tab, open the emission section and change the Luminance setting to whatever you want, if you want then you can then save out your own personalised preset, by going - Edit, Save As, Depreciated, Material Preset, then deselect everything apart from the Emission Luminance setting, then save the preset where you want it, in the original folder or a personalised one.

pkappetein

Kinich said:

pkappetein said:

Is it possible to have presets lower then 10K ?   like 1,3,5,7 ?

Some scene's is still too bright, and trying to make it darker.

Just manually edit the settings, select the Ghost Light, open Surfaces tab, open the emission section and change the Luminance setting to whatever you want, if you want then you can then save out your own personalised preset, by going - Edit, Save As, Depreciated, Material Preset, then deselect everything apart from the Emission Luminance setting, then save the preset where you want it, in the original folder or a personalised one.

Thank you

pkappetein

Been playing with this,  but all th presets are DUF files..  and the one i created is a  Dsa file.  so it doesn't whos up in the list

Richard Haseltine

Use File>Save as>... Preset, not File>Save as>Deprecated> ... Preset - though both DSA and DUF files should show in any Daz Studio Format list.

pkappetein

LOL, yeah I had figured that one out,  and had put the Duf file in the same folder as the application,  but it didn't show.

So copied one of the icons, and changed the number in it,  but still didn't make it show  :/   

 

AndyS

Sorry,

KindredArts said:

marble said:

BTW, here's a render of a room that used to take hours but this was stopped at 90% in 4 minutes. Two Ghost Lights (one in the bay window area and one on the ceiling).

Great render. Scenes like this are exactly why i built the kit, they are so difficult to render quickly in a way that wont blow out the scene. A nice daylight background outside of the window would sell the scene pretty well.

but are you serious about it?
It misses any athmosphere. There's only pure bright light in the room without any physical source.
Normally there should only be the natural daylight entering though the windows.

Example done with my own really old setup, since I began with DAZ:

Used UALs in the good old 3Delight area; now (almost) invisble emissive planes in the windows.

pkappetein

Hey .. got that scene too..  how did you add the water too it?

and this was the scene I was talking about, that was rendering fast for me again.

I did notice that the Ghost lights don't do anything if it's set to Dome and Scene.   If I change to to Sun and Sky  then the lights work ?

Is it suppose to be that way?

 

Richard Haseltine

pkappetein said:

LOL, yeah I had figured that one out,  and had put the Duf file in the same folder as the application,  but it didn't show.

So copied one of the icons, and changed the number in it,  but still didn't make it show  :/  

The same folder as the application? That is not right, especially on any version of Windows post XP.

pkappetein

Correct. 

It was by default in a Public User folder,  so I moved it to the application folder where all the other presets are.

idk if I need to add it to the Smart content database?

Although I checked the folders structure, and nothing is showing there either