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@dawnblade - I personally would heavily advise against them if you don't know what they are (even i'm hazy). From what i've heard from other user tests, is that renders are generally slower. The Arch sampler was supposed to help with particular render scenarios, mostly day-lit rooms with little accessibility for light paths. There are so many caveats to their usage though, that they tend to be more far more cumbersome for relatively little pay off.
Another satisfied customer here! I switched an indoor animation from spotlights to ghost lights and more than doubled my render speed.
Now, I will say that I had to use ONLY ghost lights to get maximum speed benefit.
The drawback is 'weaker' shadow effects, but, I wouldn't go so far as to say it's unrealistic. Sitting in my kitchen right now, I cast 'weak' shadows because I'm not in the direct path of a strong light source...only ambient. So in a sense, ghost lights are even more realistic.
For still frames, I'll likely mix ghost and spotlight. But for most animations now, the speed improvement is just too impressive. Probably will do ghost all the way for those.
(btw, I agree on the metadata comment -- too me a while to figure out why the colors randomly had different 'intensity' values assigned to them. Finally figured out it isn't the intensity for the colors, but a value that corresponds to the color itself -- intensity is the separate black icons with the numbers -- all makes sense now).
Thanks for a great solution KA!!!
JPG is a lossy compression. Depending on the quality setting for the JPG, a lot of high-frequency noise in images will get 'lost' due to the compression. Small highlights and stuff can get lost. So yes, it could conceivably cause some of that 'muting' of color you are seeing.....it would depend on a lot of factors (color profiles, quality settings, original image resolution, detail size, etc.)
PNG is lossless. Always use PNG (or another lossless format) for renders. You can convert to JPG later, if needed, but always use a high (90% or higher) quality setting for the JPEG compression.
TIFF is also lossless. You can use it just as well as PNG. Same with BMP.
Thanks! Will keep it off.
@havsm Oh man, i really wish there was a way to pin some of these glorious recommendations, thanks so much! There's plenty more to come in terms of concurring tricky lighting situations - partly tacking the reflective emission issue, but also lamps/lights with integrated GLK's. The ghosts are not dead yet!
On the metadata confusion - i've probed my contacts, hopefully there should be come clarity on the issue soon. I'll let everyone know.
Maybe...
According to Nvidia it may help, but it really is dependent on the scene. There is no set formula for when to use/ not use it.
Looks like there is an update to the metadata (Connect install) I just updated metadata in DS and it now has an entry in "Light Sets" that is a bit easier to navigate.
Yay! Thanks Kat.
I usually have just saved renders using the Daz jpg choice. I haven't noticed any major issues before, but at least in this case, whatever settings Daz uses certainly degraded the saved image. I'll have to start saving in one of the other formats.
easily one of the best three products I have ever bought at DAZ. thank you!
I did some research on how to do interior lighting for architectural photography. I had no idea there was so much involved.
Though I'd rather create my own setup for Iray, this product makes a lot more sense now.
Of the other formats, PNG will give you the smallest file size. As an added bonus, PNG, (and TIF,) save the transparency information, too, complete with shadows if you have Draw Ground on in your render settings.
@mcorr You're very welcome, Thank you for picking it up ;)
It's definitely an tricky beast. I thought Arch shots were mostly point-and-shoot - but from what i've gathered, it seems to be a various array of hot lights, speed lights, bounce lights and all sorts of other gizmo's just to provide a natural ambient fill. I'm no photography buff by any means, so you're probably more aware of the intricacies of it all. Aside from render times (if that isn't important to the end user), my kit can produce a soft global fill. Even if people don't want to use my kit, i've written a DIY tutorial here if you want to try it. There's a bit of tinkering involved, but a working replicable light doesn't take long to set up.
Yeah, this is why when people resist making 'unrealistic' lighting... folks, capturing images in RL is entirely filled with setting up weird lighting and massaging images to a given effect (if only 'not looking like poo')
Unfortunately, even with extensive post-work, it's becoming a very niche art in general. Most arch/product shots you find these days are almost always CGI (looking at you Ikea).
Ok, I got the rose window light to work. There were two things I did:
1. Put the diffuse texture into the emissive texture slot as suggested by KA. This is key to get the colors, otherwise you get just white (I learn something new every day!)
2. Removed the 200K ghost light I had pointing at the rose window. I iterated the luminance value, finally settling on 250 Kcd/m^2. On revisiting the settings, I saw I previously had it on cd/m^2, an order of magnitude lower, which is one reason I wasn't getting much light output. I went ahead and illuminated the bottom window as well. For this I used a 75 Kcd/m^2 setting which gave results similar to the rose window.
With the windows emitting, the render convergence ramped up more slowly without the fast jump to 96% with ghost lights only. But the render time to 100% convergence was 29 min 39 sec, not much longer than what I posted previously 23 min 58 sec. Just for the record, the rose window glass has 36 polygons and the lower window 16.
Render is 1000x1200 saved as a png.
The non-illuminated window I posted previously would be representative of a night scene as there would be no sunlight. This version is better for a daytime render.
Oh yes, miles better. You are going to take a render time hit on the emissives, there's not much i can do about that (for the moment at least), but it's all a balencing act. As ever, a worthy effort and interesting results, thanks for your time Rich.
ooooooo...you know what's weird? i just opened up DS to check - it's not in 'updates', but when i dbl clicked on the ghost lights to open it up....it's already been updated!!!!! Creeeeeepy.
What else would you expect from me? ha ha!
I finally get what everyone else was talking about LOL. Now it's been updated I understand it more. Off to play!
LOL, you crack me up!
I did a setup and joking named my little setup "Boo" Lights because it's a mini setup using Ghost Lights. Not fully grown because you can add so many more lights and make things as complicated as you want.
That dress is Romance on Faith and Side Tail Hair.
These lights are SO much fun to play with!!! One suggestion- I would add a dark light (black or black cherry) in the options because my render used a dark light to help with the contrast on the right side as we look at it. It came from behind, and made a difference in her outline. (Yeah, go back and look, you know you want to now that I've pointed that out LOL) I remembered that from using 3DL and some vendors had it, and I thought "Oh, interesting." And I used it a lot to dim walls where spotlights hit (you know, when you are shining on a character and that darned wall behind him/her gets hit with it too. Put a black/dark gray/dark whatever light on it and mute it.) So a dark light option (or several) would save us the trouble of having to go into Surfaces>Diffuse.
Tried out another set, this time Tithe Barn. It has a interior lit by a lot of tiny windows so tends to being very dark. As the product was setup for 3DL, I removed the existing lights and added the Iray Uber Base to all the materials. I then added 6 lights, 3 in the front room and 3 in the back room. The front room has lights of 700L, 500K, and 400 K. The back room has a 2000K light above the door, a 50K light in the ceiling, and a 200K light to illuminate some small windows on the left. The luminance values were set by doing test renders - ran just long enough to get an idea of how much different areas were being lit then made adjustments. Render time was blazing fast: 100% convergence in 3 min 2 sec for a 1200x1000 render. I tried a few other lights (e.g., Architectural Lighting Rig) which also render fast. What I liked about the ghost lights was how easy it was to set them up to get illumination in a large space.
(Click on image for large version)
Digital Lite Design, I really liked how this turned out - lots of interesting interaction between light and shadow. The brighter light on the window sill is a great touch.
Agree- it looks ultra cozy! Very realistic.
Found this blog post by the Iray Dev Team. Here is the pertinent section on Architectural Sampler, which sounds like it should only be used for interior scenes that are primarily lit by indirect lighting:
@jakiblue - Awesome! Glad you got it sorted blue, let me know how you get on. :)
@Novica - I'll shoot over to your thread after i've done my replies. As for your suggestion, yes, darker/deeper lights sound interesting, i'll do some testing myself. In-fact, i might even come back to you later and pick your brain with the dark light setups, it's a bit alien to me.
@RGcincy - Well ... i thought i was pretty much familiar with every set on the store, i can normally spot them at a thousand paces. That barn though, that's something completely new to me. Great renders and top notch testing as usual Rich. I think the speed boost came from the shader simplicity of the scene, but theoretically, it's still a largely enclosed scene and should be super tricky for the renderer. Either way, came out great!
@dawnblade - Yep, daylit interiors are the main focus i believe. It's still a bit of a mystery to me in practice, so if you (or anyone else) has any luck with it, i'd be happy to hear your thoughts.
!QUICK NOTE! - An iray update dropped today, and i'm sure some of you already have it. Richard was nice enough to test the lights in the beta build, so there shouldn't be any drama with this release. I'm going to run some tests in the new build to make sure everything is ok - but if anyone spots any issues or conflicts, please let me know asap. Also, just out of interest, i'd like to know if there are perhaps speed improvements over the last build? Thanks guys!
I've been using the beta all along, as I needed the support for my GTX-1080. I've had no issues using the Iray Ghost Light Kit on what is now the latest release.
And I should have a before and after comparison for you sometime today.
Okay. One redone image coming up.
This is "Rise" from last July...
And this is close to the same image, (there were some changes, apparently, in the duf file,) with ghost lights added...
It turned out brighter overall. I added a ghost light to the left of the scene, tall and skinny, shining at the godrays prop, (Epic Props: Godrays & Volumetric Light for Iray,) making it more visible. There is a ghost light in front of her face to make it lighter. It also made the shadow under her chin less dark. There is a spotlight on her face, but if it gets too bright, it spills over onto the godrays prop. I also added ghost lights to the hallway-like area on the back side of the columns. There is one on the face of the acolyte and four sides around the lantern she is carrying.
I suppose I should mention, also, that the original image was rendered in DS 4.8 on the "old" HP in CPU only mode, with a lot fewer samples. I think I let it render for three days, maybe. That was about average back then. The new image was rendered using the 4.9 beta, which is the same version just released today, on the new machine using a GTX-1080. I let it render overnight: 15000 samples in just under 8 hours. It's a much cleaner image... :)
Sorry L'Adair, i completely missed your first comment! I know, i'm and awful host
Great work here - I'm most interested in your work with the godrays, i didn't expect that. That's just one Ghost light pointing at the Godray? Or did you tinker with the godray as well? Great work with the rear chambers as too, very ominous :) Are you using the beta again or have you settled with the current build?
..now that looks really good.
This is such a really awesome render. The only thing I could suggest to improve it is to maybe add some slight blue and light red color reflections from the rose on the top/sides of the dome.