I'm at the end of my rope with lighting.
I'm sure people get tired of answering lighting questions because it's such a complex topic and you can learn more from experimenting than by reading but....
Here is my situation. I like making stories or series or comics or whatever you want to call them. So when I'm shooting a scene, I'm in an environment, posing and moving characters around it depending on the drama that's playing out. So I like to set up lighting, load my characters and do some test renders to check. All pretty standard stuff. The problem I'm having is that a lot of my environments seem to be "light resistant." And by that I mean, no matter what I try, it looks awful. The most common effect I see is that my characters skin looks "matte" and un-natural. Examples...
https://www.daz3d.com/plain-kitchen ; I got this product. Loaded a Distant Light outside the window and used maybe one or two spot lights when rendering here. Everything was crisp and clear and looked great.
https://www.daz3d.com/a-cozy-kitsch-living-room ; I am currently working with this product. When no lights are loaded, it looks okay. But I wanted to add some point lights in the fixtures. This immediatly makes those the ONLY lights in the scene and I know why, headlamp, got it. No prob. But then I loaded an Iray Interior lightset into the scene, a Distant light out the window, a 3 Spot Light Iray Rig(Main, fill rim) and a Ghost light pointing down from the ceiling. Just to have adequate light. And this makes my characters look awful. So I 86'ed the Ghost light and cranked up the lumens on my spots to make up the difference. They still looked matte and un-natural.
I am in no way complaining about the environments themselves or blaming the PA. I am 100% sure this is user error. The problem is, I can't find a fix. I just cross my fingers and hope whatever environment I buy acts like the Plain Kitchen. All the tutorials I find are old and seem to be more set up for portrait style pictures. I had resigned myself to tweak, move, adjust lighting in each and every picture but that doesn't seem realistic. I mean if I'm in my living room on an overcast sunday morning, the light coming from the windows doesn't change. Neither does the light from my lamp. How it falls on me depends on where I am. That is what I'm aiming for. I want static lighting in the room.
So my basic question is...does anyone know where I can find techniques for room lighting that will allow me to accomplish the type of work I do? If examples of the difference in picture quality would help, I'd be happy to post some as soon as I get home. I'm at work, on lunch at the moment.
Any information anyone has would be greatly appreciated. Oh and I render in Iray.
Quick edit...I have this ALR and was using the Iray Bright rig. https://www.daz3d.com/architectural-lighting-rig-for-iray and the 2nd to last promo picture is of the Cozy Kitsch Living room looking awesome so again...no way it's the environment :P
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The description does say the living room is optimized for 3Delight. But if you're saying the characters look unnatural, that would have to do with their skin shaders, not the environment. Have you tried a render with just the ghost light at ceiling and the default dome light that comes with DS.
I do have the cozy kitch living room in my library so I did a quick render. I placed on spotlight outside the window, spotlights are easier to aim than distance lights, Since the room set is designed for 3Delight, had to change the window glass material to uber iray clear thin, so it wouldn't stop the light shining in to the room. I also place a vertical 2m emissive plane behind the camera just to provide some ambient light in the room. The ceiling light fixtures and the wall light fixtures both have a separate material zone for the light bulb which is excellent because we can add a emmisive shader and turn them into proper light emitting bulbs. incandescent bulbs have 3900 color temperature and the sunlight outside has a 6500 color temperature with a slight blue tint added to the color channel. And I added a nickel uber iray shader to the mirror and cranked the refletivity to 100. I only let it render to 400 iterations, just to get an idea how it would look , so its a bit on the grainy side.
Thank you so much for going to that length and I appreciate the pointers on that envrionment! I think it's a lot of fun and has a lot of possibilities if I can get to do what I want it to. My real problem though is what you asked in your first response. It's the character appearence. I attached some pictures...the first one is a rendered picture inside the room with all my crazy lighting. The 2nd is a closer one ofher face and the third is after i dragged her outside and did a spot render on her face. In the last one, you can see color contour and the gloss on her lips. Inside on the couch, she is flat and boring. Like she's drawn with chalk. I'm more than happy to fiddle with the living room surfaces but at the end of the day, if the characters look like this...it's just not a good picture.
Again, thank you for your help and hopefully I'm not the only one that see's the problem I'm having :P
Alright questions to start would be, who is the character figure, what generation, and does she have default iray skin shaders in her package?
Bottom line, not everything available in the store or other sites are designed for Iray renders. So if not optimized for Iray, then work arounds have to be onsidered.
Second question, more of a troubleshooting base setup, how does she look rendered is a new empty scene; that is just her in a basic outfit, in an empty default DS scene. And place one of the Daz Default Genesis 3 Female or Genesis 3 Male (which are included free in Daz Studio) beside her in the same render.
Try taking out the furniture, except the items that ae casting light, and putting a smallish sphere in where the character will be - if you render that it will be quicker than the full scene and will give you an idea of how much colour and tonal variation there is. If all your lights are white and of similar intensity then the result is goign to be flat.
Bear in mind that ghost lights provide light but don't produce highlights, since they are invisible and so there is nothing to reflect.
Thanks for that tip Richard. I don't think I was ever really clear on Ghost Light properties. So they are pretty much just to augment other lighting then?
FirstBastion: The character is the Gen3 Base Female with Brenna Materials ( https://www.daz3d.com/brenna-for-ophelia-7 ) and a face morph. I find myself using Brenna a lot specifically because her skin seems to react so well to light. Except for this time. I attached a picture of her, unfettered by my maniacal lighting attempts.
Nice character choice. So we now know both the environment and the character are probably fine. Which leaves the lights. As a general rule, just like in real world photography and cinematography if you move the camera, the lights have to adjusted for the new setup. No such thing as a one setup fits all scenario.
I'd remove the lighting rig for starters. Just render the scene with the ghost light plane near the ceiling, which should be providing diffused ambient light, and one strong light coming in from outside through the window to emulate sunlight. And see what you get.
Now you might eventually add a rim light specifically to highlight her dark hair get a little bit of sheen happening and if positioned right it'll skim over her nose and cheek to add some highlights, This rim light should be coming from the same general direction angle as the windows, Every light should have a rational source just like in the real world. It's what our eyes expect to see.
It's easy to create your own individual lights in DazStudio, simply by using prespective view to move around, and then using the drop Edit menu, create light with current view.
Thank you so much for your input. I'll do what you suggested and see what shakes loose. One more quick question...I have a tutorial I bought from Dreamlight and in it, the tutor is moving lights around and you can actually see where the light is affecting the character and scene. That seems like it would be a great help too. Is that still a function in Daz? I think his version was Daz 4.5 so it was a few iterations ago.
You can indeed choose to view through any camera, or spot light you add to the scene. And you can simply move them around while in the corresponding view to position them exactly where you need them. Very useful function. Just select the drop down and select which ever camera or light you need to have a look at. That way you can lock your camera angle for your shot, change the view to another viewport to have a look around to do final tweaks, all the while your camera angle stays framed on the shot. Some scenes come loaded with 20+ cameras.
Oh sure, I knew that. I guess what I mean is, he'd be in perspective view and moving a light around in the scene like it was a figure and you could see where the light was hitting the character.
Right, you can move around in prespective view, and then create a camera or a spotlight at that exact view, and then continue on in prespective view, the light or camera will stay at the location it was created. . Comes in handy and save time. This video shows the technique.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYJ0DGPnofo
lol Yes, I understand what you're saying as far as placement. What I mean is in the tutorial. He would make a light and move it around the scene in perspective view and you could see the way the light was hitting the character. i.e. more to the left created more of a shadow on the face. Center on the face lit up the face entirely. When I make a light, I don't see any light hitting the character, only in spot/test render. Do you know what I mean?
Could be a couple reasons, the preview will only show a certain number of lights based on the size of your graphics card (check current hardware under preferences) , or the illuminance of the light isn't sufficient to show up hitting the character. Increase illuminace on the light.
If it's too many lights, adjsuting the Render Priority setting for the light you want to see in the parametrs pane should help. Or use nVidia Iray preview mode or the Aux Viewport in IPR mode (for 3Delight).
Ahh, good tips. Thank you both for all your help and answers on this. I have a little more rope after all.