Stonemason Urban Future 5 dark as heck
Griffin Avid
Posts: 3,838
I don't see a skydome. I checked render Sun and Sky only.
I added a lighting set from another a bright desert product.
Still, it's dark as all.
And even using ghost lights doesn't help much.
Any ideas. I want it to be daytime. Lol
I'm sorta assuming, the height of the buildings kill any light from getting into the alleyway, but dang. Every render looks like night time.
The building details and lighting is FANTASTIC, but I want to save the nigh time look for another usage and get it for daytime.
Any ideas?
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2026 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Oh and I did load the iray version of the set.
Which is made stranger by the scene being bright and I can see the change when i turn the sun on and off, but soon as I hit render.....darkness.
...what are your tone map settings?
default. Haven't messed with that AT ALL.
..OK that should be Shutter speed 128, F Stop of 8 and ISO of 100. You mentioned you are using the Sun/Sky setting?
Yes, this is what it looks like.
Yes, it looks the same whether or not I choose Dome and Scene or Sun Sky only
..OK I loaded the scene in trund the deacult camera 180° to face the intersection with the vido billbaord Added the Sun Dial set, rotated the Sun Chain to 0° Azimuth and 60° elevation then launched the render. after Optimising, I get a well lit image in the render window..
Where is your camera?
...kmm never thought to ask about that, though he said he sees the set fine in the cviewport.
...did you check your default render engine? I just set it to 3DL and got a black render.
It's iray. I turned the gamma up to 5 and it's better.
I need to find someone who rendered this set as daytime.
Probably no one has. Stonemason- might have a hidden node or whatever that would be called that helps him make his sets night time for the film noir look.
I bet he knows what's going on. lol
oh snaps. I do have iray rain going but it was dark before that too.
...currently rendering with the Sun/Sky setting iusing the Sun Dial and Sun Chain. I have all other render settings at default including Gamma.
Again tI amd seeing an image rendering in the window amd am getting a nice daylight scene that looks about like it is near noon in summer (set the Sun elevation to 75°)
Are you possibly using a skydone?
Can you post a screenshot of the scene in the viewport before rendering?
...here is a quick test I ran usign the Sun Dial settings I mentioned. I stopped it at 76%. Small size but should give the idea.
Kyoto Kid had the same idea as I, here is a quick render (grainy, but you can see the overall lighting).
I loaded the iray version of the set and added a camera, then didn't touch the tone mapping settings, just turned the environment settings to sun-sky only, and set the time to be during the day. I did test a few different times to find lighting that was hitting the area the camera was looking at, often most of the camera view was in shadow where the sunlight was down the street, or cast behind the camera, or things like that.
Couple of other things that I have had an issue with on sun-sky in the past, make sure to set your UTC offset when you set coordinates as the coordinates don't adjust the UTC, which means your 2PM setting could actually be 4AM for the location. I have run into that before. Sorry if you know this already, but just throwing out possibilities without seeing what you are seeing.
...yeah I rarely if ever use the standard sun/sky settings, too much calculating location, time of day, month, etc to mess with.. I find the Sun Dial to be much simpler, especially when I need to match the sun angle to photo backdrops
Gamma is something you shouldn't need to adjust,..I've never changed it from the default.
when using Iray you need to remember your basically using a real world camera,and just as with a real world camera you need to change exposure settings depending on the lighting in the environment,if the lighting is too bright then you'll want to turn exposure up,and if it's a dark environment you'll need to adjust it down,remember in the real world your camera settings for a dark scene will not look correct in a brightly lit scene..
There are no hidden nodes being used for a film noir look,but I do make use of white point, burn highlights and crush blacks.White point I use to add a color tint to the image,crush blacks I use to adjust how dark or bright the blacks in the image are..and burn highlights controls how bright or dark the bright parts of the image are
I would recommend you work with a very basic scene with just a couple primitives,set your viewport to Iray and you should be able to see in real time what the settings can do.now play around with environment sun/sky lighting,dome rotation,lat/long settings..and at the same time adjust your tone mapping settings to work with each lighting scenaraio.this should give you a better idea of what settings do what..and will work faster than waiting on a big set like UF5 to render
attached a couple lighting/tone mapping presets for day and one for night,and attached images show what setting we're used for the images
*note,when referring to camera /exposure settings etc I am talking about the tone mapping options found in render settings
...I did a render with the "out of the box" default sun/sky only settings (using the default tone map settings) without any adjustments, and yes, it looks fairly dark.
The default latitude and longitude used for the basic Sun/Sky mode are for Draper Utah. The default time used is 6:00 PM March 10th which would be shortly before sunset and the onset of twilight (not adjusted for DST). With this setting, the sun would almost be directly inline with the main central street behind the camera in the test scene below if the set is not rotated after loading.
Is this what you are seeing? Again excuse the graininess, I stopped it a 52% this time as I am rendering on the CPU and it takes a bloody long time.
Thank you all!
I downloaded those presets (It loaded as 1 iray preset) and then I set the settings as you have detailed for the day set and it's rendering, um bright as heck...lol
Awesome, thank you! Way better than the gamma settings I changed. You are still the man.
59 products of yours and counting. I wonder if there's someone who has every single one and your store is empty when the page loads. lol
@Stonemason: Man you do like the ultimate level of tech support. Now, if only you'd let me write your product descriptions and let me be your hype man.
Let me be your Gaff and twist tantalizing text tid-bits to tempt a terrific tally of traded tenders.
Quest, I thank you for your input !
KyotKid , I can't believe you took the time to make test renders to help.
I'm going to mess with those sun dial settings too. That's unexplored territory.
You guys are awesome.
the presets change those settings for you(you should see 3 of them in your library) ,so no need to adjust anything after applying,just click render!..these presets are adusting the lighting (sun/sky) and also the tone mapping settings.
Well I put them in the iray folder.
I probably scewd that up too. lol
It shows up as just one preset....
This is what your unzip looks like and I put all of those in the iray presets folder
There's probably more than one presets folder for iray.
Maybe I'm supposed to put them in your product's cloud folder.....
Some of the other presets are in the individual product's main folder..
maybe try loading from the library?,only the ones with the prefix uf5 are what I included
They showed up- right there!
Thanks.
I'm rendering Daytime 01-
See what I'll get.
...yeah the Sun Dial is as easy to use as old LDP2 for Daz 3.1 was. No messing with calendars or global coordinates. Don't know why they even included teh Lat, Long, Date and Time setting as it just makes things more complex than they need to be unless you are rendering actual "real life" world scenes.
Do bear in mind that the tone map default settings are Studio's defaults and not a products, unles specifically stated. Depednign on your choices, they will persist from render to render unless changed.
In real camera space, F8, 1/128, ISO 100 is going to need fairly bright light to avoid being underexposed.
Thanks again, all.
It looks awesome, but it's a 3 hour and change render.
I was doing fine 'stop-the-render-and-save' at 20 minutes with some really dark scenes at the end.
Your steam (background effect) just showed up. lol
Didn't know what that was until we got the better settings going.