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I tried a number of things to get that long shadow by only using ghost lights but never could. It became a lot of work adjusting scale, position and intensity so it took away from the ease of use and the shadow edges were always soft. The best result seemed to be adjusting a ghost light at an angle to reduce the light reaching that region.
I did try another scene, one I had given up on as the render times were so long. These are larger than the previous renders I did (1200 x 923 vs. 600 x 600). They are also GPU only renders.
10. This is lit with 5 ghost lights. It also has two of the small lantern lights that come with the set. Three are 1000K ghost lights set in the far back and in the right and left side chambers. Another is a 100K light set in upper front and the final one is a 100K positioned right in front of the face. All but the upper front one have the IGLK 3000 time of day preset added to give them an orange cast. This render took 41 min 18 sec to reach 100%.
11. This is exactly the same scene but I only let it render until the last fireflies in the ceiling were gone. It took 13 min 18 sec to reach 96% (which means it took almost another 30 minutes to reach 100%). To detect differences, I took both images into Gimp, put them together as layers, and applied difference mode which will highlight any differences. Nothing showed up, so with the big difference in time, I would stop at 95-96%. KindredArts, this is something you've already mentioned, that it may not help to go all the way to 100% as in some circumstances it adds little value to a render.
I might be mistaken, but aside from the great value of the lights themselves and nice one click solutions...they still work like mesh lights...if you want harder shadows make them smaller. It works like this for the photometric lights as well.
The larger the plane thats emitting light the softer the shadows will be.
Daniel
P.S. sorry didnt see that you tried changing the size and angle. I find for long hard shadows the best option is either linear point light..or just a point light.
..basically it comes dosn to quality. Many film studios employ CPU rendering because it tends to be better quality. The issue with GPU rendering is you are limited by the card's VRAM. The best consumercial card available has 12 GB of VRAM. To get more means paying a much higher cost for a professional grade GPU like a Quadro. In CPU rendering memory is not as much issue. as one can build a system with 128 GB, 512 GB or even 1 TB. Yes it is slower than GPU rendering as a mid to high end Nvidia 10xx series card has cores that number into the 1000's compared to even the best dual CPU workstation (88 processor threads). However all the CUDA cores in the world mean nothing if the process runs into insufficient VRAM and dumps to the CPU.
With CPU rendering, you know the performance you will get. With GPU rendering it is more "conditional" as it is dependent on the amount of VRAM available and the "weight" (Polys and Textures) of the scene being rendered. In this case physical memory trumps GPU speed. For example, with 128 GB of system memory I can render a "dirty" city street scene with no worries. Were I to try rendering that on say a GTX 1080, there is a fair chance it will dump to the CPU making that investment in the card seem worthless.
And thats the crux of the matter right there. The whole point of the nvidia iray stuff is targeting the hobbyist. Someone serious about hardcore professional rendering invests 10's of thousands of dollars on work stations and server farms. I for one probably will never be that hardcore.
Daniel
@Peter Fulford - "it's not the size mate, it's how you use it", man, i've always wanted to say that. You best start saving those pennies pete, DIY isn't cheap (at least the way i do it anyway ... which is poorly)
@dreamfarmer - "Demonic pact" I've been exposed! Great render dreamy - i think you might be falling back to cpu because of the skins, are they all unique characters? I really hope that beta drops in a general release at some point, everyone keeps talking about it and i'm getting jelly.
@RGcincy - Yes! I'm glad someone can confirm this, i thought i was going crazy. I've had scene's hit pretty much full convergence within 5 minutes, and go on to render for another half an hour just to *complete*. I understand that people tend to hit render and go out for the afternoon (or bed). If you're doing a lot of rendering though, i'd say just stick close by and eye-ball it until you get acceptable results. As for the harder shadows, i'm not sure what to suggest there. I'm doing some rendering today, so i'll see if i can come up with something. I do have idea's, i'm just not sure if i can get them any faster than standard photometrics.
@kyoto kid - Oh i see, so it's not necessarily a speed advantage, more of a memory advantage? That's if were talking single unit performance over farms of course? It would be an interesting experiment, because you can pick up reletively new server gear for dirt cheap. Be sure to let us know of your findings if you build a work station, that would be neat :)
That's what caught my eyes with these lights. They were up to 94% convergence in no time (5-6 minutes). There were some fireflies in the ceiling area that went away at the 96% mark, then no obvious change in the remaining 20+ minutes to 100%. I'm sure the scene has a lot to do with behavior, but usually when a light set is slow and going to make for a long render, they are slow from the start.
Since Dan asked about venezia suite, i've also had a couple of Pm's regarding the set (you know who you are!). I decided to investigate, so i picked up the set and mother have mercy! They were absolutely right. Not only is it a beautiful set, as expected, it's also uniquely tricky to render out. Perhaps it's the dark walls, the prop complexity, shader complexity or even the emissive meshes in the set - i'm not sure, but it is a bit heavy. I even noticed stones promo's were a bit fuzzy, but he does tend to use volumetrics, so it's understandable.
Anyway, with that said, i broke my cardinal rule and let the render go on for longer than five minutes, which i hate doing with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. I let it cook for a full ten minutes, and ended up with a pretty clean render. Not perfect, but more than good enough for me:
I popped the finished render into photoshop, boosted the contrast a touch and added a background. None of my usual tricks - no bloom, no flares, no noise reduction, no cheating! The biggest issue i found with this set is battling against indirect lighting. The dark walls really soak up the light, which means i had to add a few more fills than normal just to cover area's that didn't have enough light to play with. I've made a quick preset if anyone wants to try it, and if any of you have a better set up, i'd love to see it (as i'm sure many others would).
Link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/utctff4eo4uykf0/VeneziaPreset.zip?dl=0
3 horizontal ghost lights and 1 vertical ghost light, no other lighting except emissive candle flame. Rendered on an EVGA 1050 TI SE running dual monitors while watching the Outback bowl on the second monitor. 2 minutes 30 seconds to 72%. Love these lights!
3 horizontal ghost lights and 1 vertical ghost light, no other lighting except emissive candle flame. Rendered on an EVGA 1050 TI SE running dual monitors while watching the Outback bowl on the second monitor. 2 minutes 30 seconds to 72%. Love these lights!
2nd render 2 minutes 20 seconds to 72% not watching football game.
Lesson learned: don't watch football on your second monitor while rendering.
Products: Bluebird's "Quiet Nook," AM's "Wolf 2.0" (LAMH converted to fiber mesh), Khory's "Decorator Kit: Neutral Shader Presets for Iray," Wee Dangerous John/DoctorJellyBean's "Frame Studio", and Nikisetez's "Alphabet and Number Props with Lights for Iray"
Render time: 30 min.
Converted surfaces to Iray Uber and replaced a few using Khory's. (esp the floor. Her's was a much better match)
Used a resized Ghost Light in front of the window and one between the fireplace screen and fire.
There is one spotlight pointing in through the window.
Added BG image out the window in post.
Looks nice, like it was moon lit.
...well, need to hit the Megabucks lotto or have an unknown rich relative die leaving me an inheritance first, as again I am on an extremely tight fixed income which precludes even upgrading the memory and OS in my current system.
If the opportunity arises to build my dual Xeon 8 core E5 5680 with 128 GB of quad channel DDR3 beast, indeed I'll do some performance tests. I was on another thread and someone mentioned that stepping up from a 4 to an 8 core i7 resulted in CPU rendering that was about five times faster. Of course that was more SOTA gear rather than the older server components I am looking at. Still 32 cores at a turbo freq of 3.3 Ghz will probably net some nice time results. If I can just get it down to an hour or two instead of all night or longer, I would be pleased.
...I feel there is a happy medium that can be struck somewhere in between which is sort of what I am aiming at with my "stage II" build. I'll need to learn more about networking as I actually would like to make the new system more of a dedicated render machine and use my current workstation primarily for scene creation and modelling. For that purpose I could probably get away with dual 6 GB 1060s on the main system so I can work in Iray view mode without it crashing (it won't have as super fast a refresh rate as Mec4D's triple Titan-X monster rig but it still would be a marked improvement over what I have now). It would also allow me to proof render characters and individual scene elements in GPU mode.
When I built my current tri channel 12 GB system, most people were rendering with 6 to 8 GB duo channel memory at best. As there was no GPU rendering available at this level until Iray, I had something of a monster next to my desk. Iray sort of changed that as it is far more demanding on system resources.
I actually thought you had attached a photo so you could ask for advice on how to light something like this! that is GORGEOUS!
I finished my little experiment and I thought I would share the results. I have more details on my thread about the whole experiment but here are the final results that others might be interested in. Keep in mind that I render CPU only and I don't have a really slow system, but it isn't the fastest out there either. I have a AMD FX 8350 8 core system and do pretty decently on most renders time-wise considering I don't have a nVidia card.
When Northern Terrace Kitchen came out I used it in a render and was surprised at how long it took to render my scene. It was rendering for days. I ended up doing an experiment of rendering the set out of the box to see just how long it took to render. The original render took 25 hours on my system and I stopped it early when it looked decent and had reached under 5000 iterations. I only had the lights that came with the set turned on for the experiment.
I dusted off the .duf file and loaded it up on my computer and turned off those lights that came with the Northern Terrace Kitchen and loaded up 2 Ghost Lights set at the Daylight preset. I put one in the window and one on the ceiling. I also had an HDR light set in for the dome. My final render took only 7 hours 41 minutes 38.20 seconds to get to 2761 iterations and it reached 95% convergence and finished. No stopping it early.
It's brighter but I'm not sure why the surfaces aren't as shiny or reflective. I didn't change any surface settings.
Next I kept the HDR light and the 2 ghost lights and turned back on the 2 Northern Terrace Kitchen lights back on and rendered it a third time. I expected it to run the same as the first one for over 25 hours to get to the same number of iterations. That render took 19 hours 32 minutes 35.53 seconds to get to 6973 iterations and I probably could have stopped it at 5000 iterations when it was at 15 hours because I didn't see a noticeable difference in the render in that last 4 hours.
So, using only the Ghost Lights saved me an incredible amount of time, but I have the slight problem with how the textures look. I need to figure out why that happened. I'm sure there must be something I'm missing to explain why that happened. However, using both the ghost lights and the lights from the set also saved me a lot of time. I'll take about 15 hours for a render over 25 hours for a render any day of the week. I like that it is even brighter in the images with the ghost lights too. I have to say that I love these lights! So, kudos to @KindredArts for putting them together and putting them in the store. I think I'll be getting a lot of use out of them. :)
Looks really good.
@knittingmommy.
I see what you mean about the reflections from the first render to the last one. But honestly i think the last one is more "real" looking. It looks like a picture someone took of a home forsale or some such. This first one although all shiney and new looking has a feel of artistic vision of real life. But as an aside if you tweak the shaders on the surfaces a bit i bet you could get a happy medium that achieves a nice look.
@KindredArts
Thanks for taking the time...and money to do that little set up on Stonemasons set. Like you said its truly a stunning piece, but heavy! It automatically dumps me to CPU mode for rendering so in any event it would take about 20 to 25 hours for me to render a scene using it. Which is frankly unacceptable to me. I wish there was a way to optimize it more , but even hiding all the stuff not in frame still dumps me to CPU not sure what else i can do.
I am sure i will do thing with the set in the future once i upgrade my rig.
Daniel
@nonesuch00 - Thank you. :)
@Jakiblue - Thank you :) No photos this time aroung. lol
@Knittingmommy - Nicely done!
...I remember when using a Stonemason set on my old 32 bit system in Daz 3.1 usually ended up in a render crash. Even then the texture details were more than 2 GB of memory could handle, and that was in 3DL without UE.
I adore Stonemason's work, but I don't think I can reasonably fit most of the larger scenes in Iray.
@artd3D - Sorry buddy, i'm from jolly old England and you posted just after bed time. Glad you're liking the set, and many thanks for dropping by! I have to admit though, i did have to google what the Outback bowl is - i could have sworn it was bowling :)
@Digital Lite Design - Before i start, i'm bad at forums! How on earth do i @ people who have spaces or full stops in their names? Beautiful render as always Kat! Did you notice any issues with the LAMH splines? I don't own it, so it's not something i checked for issues. He looks like a happy chap to me though!
@kyoto kid - Oh i know the feeling. After paying for my licenses, subscriptions and a goliath power bill, it doesn't leave many pennies for scooping up titans. The couch has been given the shake-down for loose change on more than one occasion. If the you get the chance though, let me know :)
@Knittingmommy - Thank you for posting as always KM, it's appreciated. The reason you're not getting any neat reflections on your second render is because they are diffuse lights. They are invisible and thus give nothing for the surfaces to reflect, which is why the result looks matte. This is my worry with people using a *GLK only* approach to light characters, since there is nothing in the scene for the eye's to reflect. Your third render is exactly how i'd do it - keep your light set up and have the ghost lights act as an ambient fill. On top of that, i'd set any other lights in the scene to have just enough emissive power to produce balanced reflections, but not enough to cause fireflies. Again, thanks for the tests KM, it all helps!
@D.Robison - No worries, it was an interesting test. I think most scene's can benefit from GLKs but at the moment i'm interested in investigating the more challenging scenes - and this was definitely one of them.
@timmins.william - Yup, it's the price you pay for such scale i suppose. I think with enough tinkering, the sets can be brought under reasonable control, but i don't like sacrificing quality. Swings and round-abouts!
Ah, thanks KindredArts! I knew there had to be a reason for that. I just didn't know what it was. I learn something new about this 3D thing all the time! :) Thanks for the explanation. That will certainly help me in the future.
One thing I've sometimes done for outdoor scenes is make a low poly sphere and surround the subjects, and use it as a ghost light.
Provides good ambient fill for night time scenes without creating distinct shadows or gleam.
How about, if one wanted reflections and shiny bits but very soft light to use the Ghost Lights as the main lights and then set all other lights in the scene to just Specular?
this is what i needed on my renders...still have to experiment..but i´m happy with it!
Hey tim, this sounds good but wouldn't it produce a circular halo of light on the floor, since the sphere would intersect?
Iray is an unbiased (or unbiased in theory) render, meaning you can't really choose between specular and diffuse lighting. The only reason ghost lights work is because it's cheating. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, we can't cheat in the other direction and produce specular lighting without biased rendering. For glossy effects, there has to be some sort of visible emission in the scene, whether it's from an HDRI or mesh lights.
Now, i'm very aware that a lot of stock mesh lights cause time delays because of their complexity. I am working on ways around this - but for now i recommend using either a low-intensity hdri or at least one geometrically simple (low-poly) mesh light so the path-tracer has something to bounce. Provided you have enough ambient light (GLKs) in the scene, it shouldn't impact on render times too much. Let me know if this helps, or if you need further advice.
Thank you mini, you keep experimenting and be sure to drop by with your results :)
OK, thanks so much. Looking forward to your next set of lights!
Thanks KA! I didn't have any issues with the LAMH. It didn't render any slower than before I added the figure to the scene. :)
There's something strangely ironic about your having tested your product on a set that Stone likely didn't use anything similar to, just to recreate the same quality of lighting shown in the promos.
Ah. I think I understand now. Ghost Lights are for people who don't want to wait more than a few minutes for a render to finish converging, or don't have a suitable GPU for faster rendering.