Hotel Indoor Pool - has anyone rendered it successfully?
barbult
Posts: 26,514
in The Commons
Hotel Indoor Pool renders very dark for me with default Daz Studio render settings. Adjusting the tone mapping just blew out some areas but did not make the render look anything like the promo images. The product has no Render Settings presets. Has anyone rendered this product to look anything like the promo images? If so, what did you do to achieve that?
Hotel Indoor Pool default Iray DS 4.10.jpg
1000 x 750 - 594K
Hotel Indoor Pool Iray Shutter Speed 8.jpg
1000 x 750 - 643K

Comments
hmmm, didn't realise I owned it.
Will let you know.
Edit:
... after it's downloaded.
Edit:
Loaded a scene and it rendered; needed some lights perhaps but I could make out stuff.
just adjust a couple of settings to get a better look in Tone Mapping.
I expect that 4.11 will be quicker to render it in.
Yeah something is up with this. Thought it might just be having a very bright outside HDRI, but even that isn't helping without blowing out everything. A lot of the emissive surface settings are default settings, could be something got saved incorrectly. I'm trying out changing the light surfaces to see if I can get something closer to the promos.
Otherwise I'll just use the props with other pools, got this one free.
Your render tonemapping adjustment looks very much like mine. It still has blown out areas and dark shadowed corners. The promo images have much more uniform lighting. I think the promos must have been rendered with different lighting than the product was delivered with.
I see the forum is still buggy with hiding the images attached to the first post, so I am showing them again here.
Default Render Settings - Way Too Dark!
Tone Mapping Shutter Speed 8 - Blown Out with Shadowed Corners
Ok, it's grainy but you can get the idea. This was just changing all of the emissive surfaces (except the exit sign) from cd/m^2 to cd/cm^2. If I wanted I could make some more refined adjustments (including warming up either the lights or the overall tone mapping a little bit), but much closer to the promos. Oh and exposure value of 12 in tone mapping.
Again, I got it free so I don't mind it much, but I'll probably put in a ticket later since it's still in the store as a product.
By the way, given the look of the cast light from the light fixtures, I'm very confident it is not a matter of tone mapping. The light just isn't there.
@AlmightyQUEST we may have gotten it free as PC members, but it costs $17.95 in the store. I think it is fair to expect a working product. I have an open ticket with CS, too. Thanks for your description of the changes you made to improve it.
Oh for sure, the free part was just why I hadn't noticed it before and hadn't spent much time on it. Actually just noticed another product from the vendor with a similar issue, will open a ticket for both and probably just avoid them in the future if it's not something I want to put the extra time into fixing myself.
Being picky about it, the product page doesn't list any lights preset.
Of course not, in iray for interiors it is typical that the lighting is handled by emissive surfaces. There isn't a separately loaded "light preset" because iray doesn't rely on that the way that the way 3delight typically does.
It says it comes with an iray preset, it shows iray renders of the preset, but what was rendered doesn't appear to match what was delivered in the product.
I know interiors lighting is often handled by emissive surfaces; and I also know that a lot of interior products come with a preset with all those emissive surfaces set at the right luminance and temperature values.
It says it comes with a preset with all props loaded in one scene; and that the product is optimized for both Iray and 3DL; nothing else.
And you can't rely entirely on the promo images as they are often postworked.
It looks like the image has been rendered with the camera light left on. I changed all the lights to cm^2 and made the ceiling emissive to get the lighting close.
Lighting issues aside I really appreciated this as a freebie. Just want to say that
I love that it has modular walls, at the moment I'm working on turning it into something completelly different from a pool lol. I didn't render it as it was, only after having changed shaders and the like, so can't say anything about the lighting issue I'm afraid
I tend to find most Iray interiors problematic as far as adequate lighting is concerned.
...which is kind off odd, considering it's supposed to be a physically based rendering engine
I have dozens (hundreds?) of interior scenes, and never found their default lighting very realistic, so I always do my own interior lighting (Iray or 3Delight). As soon as I load a 'Ready to render' scene, I delete the lights, and start from scratch.
And I like the free pool, not that I used it more than a couple of times.
The pool water does not look convincing to me. It needs some depth and darkness, and most pools where I live are aqua in color with details like lines, numbers to indicate depth etc. Light could've easily been introduced with a skylight, which might have added interesting shadow. It has an architectural drawing quality that doesn't resemble lived in functioning environement.
Agreed! Personally I find this set much more interesting. https://www.daz3d.com/public-indoor-pool
(awe render)
That doesn't help if the settings haven't been adjusted for the scene. Looking at the ceiling and wall lights, I've noticed that:
Changing these settings as listed upthread should at least get you into the right sort of range for light values; after that you can try a different HDRI and tweak parameters, especially Luminance, to get closer to what you want. (FWIW, the exit sign light is properly set up; tweak it too much and the red light dominates that end of the room instead of just lighting the sign itself.)
I've seen this sort of thing in so many of the DAZ environments — Emission Color is set to pure white to activate the light parameters, but nothing else is touched.
I'd love to know the method for "deleting the lights" and starting from scratch in an iray interior preset.
Anyway, the last few indoor sets from the vendor seem to have the same issue of default emission settings which aren't bright enough to light the scene or match the promos. However, going back a little bit further (including the Public Indoor Pool) the settings that load up look like the lighting you see in the promos, which is what can reasonably be expected. So it's not a problem with all their products. Will see what support says, I'm wondering now if some change in DAZ Studio save settings has caused a problem with the proper surface settings not being saved in all cases. Or if it is just the wrong version being shipped.
Customer Support says they will ask the vendor about what lighting was used for the promo images. My request is on hold pending a vendor response.