Oh boy, here I go, please help me as I step into Iray!
Fae3D
Posts: 2,900
Well, I've been almost strictly 3DL until recently, when I've begone dabbling in Iray because I'm tired of ajusting every single item to fit 3DL (plus SY water products look soooo much better in Iray!). Could someone please kindly point me in the direction of tutorials or tips for the following issues?
1 - Lights. I don't understand how to add custom light (not just clicking a vendor light, I don't have many at all), and the couple times I've accidentally done it, I don't know how to adjust them. Or maybe there's just 1 or 2 Iray light products I have to invest in to get started?
2 - I just rendered something for over 2 hours (accidently lit), it said it was done, but it's still SUPER grainy! How do I make it keep rendering until it's "smooth"?
3 - Eyes reflection. I added a reflection to the eyes, but they don't show any. I assume this is because of my lighting problems, but IDK.
Any assistance is greatly appreciated. I am so lost. Please send help lol!
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Comments
Here is some reading material for ya....might help :)
Laurie
1. Lights:
I recommend starting with HDRI lighting - that's a lot easier and usually faster (both in setup and render time). They're definitely superior for outdoor scenes, imo. There is even a great Iray Interior Camera that allows one to use HDRIs to light indoor scenes as well: https://www.deviantart.com/heroineadventures/art/Iray-Interior-Camera-V1-3-758604718
That's what I would start with for Iray anyway, and you can learn to add additional lighting (if you want) once you get the Iray basics down.
There are a lot of great HDRI lighting products in the store, you can't go wrong with most of them. :)
2. Graininess often comes down to inadequate lighting.
3. Eye Reflection - I'm not sure what you mean by "added a reflection". If you position the light or HDRI right you can get a nice eye reflection to the eyes. :) Even keeping the camera headlamp on can give a nice eye reflection (some people will say never keep the camera headlamp on, but personally I often keep it on - adjusting the brightness and position to suit the scene).
With Iray you don't manually add in eye reflection maps. Instead, because Iray can naturally render reflections you position lights so they reflect off the eyes and into the camera. The eyes need to be reflective to have this work. If you are using a figure that has an eye reflection surface or an eye moisture surface, you want to select that surface and apply the Iray Water - Thin shader to it. This shader can be found in your runtime under /Shader Presets/Iray/Daz Uber/
Adding to the above the camera needs to be pretty close to be able to see much of anything reflecting off the eye IME. I only bother adding the shader when I'm doing a pretty extreme closeup.
Thanks so much, everyone! That's a lot of info to start working with, hopefully I can figure out what I'm doing wrong.
If you add just a base figure to the scene and save the scene then share it with us we can take a look and make suggestions on improving your lighting. Or even just post the image/render you did and we can take a look and give suggestions from there. :)
If you have a good video card, just play with the sliders. Having an older card is kind of a restriction with iray. If you have a good card though, just experiment with the numbers. The only settings I typically carry over from render to render are Noise Filter On = 1, and Render quality On = 6. If its an outside shot, I like spectral rendering On, natural.
I wouldn't recommend setting the render quality to 6 for anything but the final render, and even then that's far too high in my book. A value of 1 is the normal setting. Each notch up takes proportionally longer to render -- 2 means about 2X longer to render, 4 means another doubling, and so on.
Sure. I only set at 6 for the final. Why do you consider that too high? Is there a technical reason why I shouldnt go that high? Im not trying to do fast in the final render and if I have a relatively simple scene, my card can do a render quality 6 in less than a half hour.
For the lights make sure Photometric Mode is selected. Select the light in the scene tab, go to the lights tab and select Photometric if it isn't open. You can then adjust the colour, geometry and Lumen (which is the brightness) of the light.
The graininess at 2 hours when the render shuts down suggest that the Render Time (secs) is set to the default of 7200 which is 2 hours, raise that by adding a few zeros to it.
No technical reason as far as I know, just the practical one that a render done with quality 1 that takes an hour, would take approx. 6 hours if set to quality 6. And in my opinion the difference between the two renders would be negligible.
Certainly deserves some experimenting. Ill run a couple renders and post the results, quality 1 vs. quality 6. It sure would be nice to have the same results in less time...
Perhaps not the same but one needs to ask if the final render was waiting six times longer for. I believe most people here don't even wait for 100% convergence. Personally I do in most cases.
Well, sure. But thats the whole point though isnt it? User preference? I dont mind waiting longer to try and squeek out some details so I raise render quality (I can make a sandwich in the meantime).
Heres a couple renders of a WIP. the first is noise filter 1, render quality 1, spectral rendering on natural. It finished in 3:52. The second render has the same settings except for render quality which is at 6. It finished in 16:05. Im using a 1070ti. Urguably, id have to say that you are correct. There is not alot of difference between the two renders with the exception of the hair which is somewhat less noisy in the quality 6 version. Is it then safe to presume that render quality deals premarily with glossiness, specular weight, etc? I wish I had a manual to get some answers
.. On a render with alot of shine and glosiness, I think render quality would have to be pretty high to get a smooth finish.
Edit: The 6 quality does seem to be a bit clearer.
@Faeofthe3rdDimension, It took me a long time to get brave enough to try turning off Quality, but since then, I very rarely enable the Quality settings. With Quality Off, the only settings that matter are Max Time and Max Samples. If you set Max Time to zero (0) you effectively turn off that parameter as well. Now the only thing controlling the length of time for the render is the Max Samples settings.
If the scene is too grainy when the render stops, you can change the Max Samples to something higher and hit the Resume button on the render window, provided you don't close the render window, of course. You can also adjust Tone Mapping settings to make the image lighter or darker.
To access the settings you can change on-the-fly, locate the teeny tiny arrow on the left side of the render window, half way from the bottom, and click on that. I can't say for the release version, but in the beta, most of the Tone Mapping settings work without starting the render over, so you can make adjustments without losing hours of rendering time.
The default environment for Iray will give you relatively nice lighting to learn with. Set the Dome Rotation in the 80 to 120 range for front light on the subject. I often set it to 100 when I want to check out a new figure, then move it to one side or the other to get shadows on the face.
Kindred Arts' Iray Ghost LIght Kit can help augment the lighting without adding extra shadows or reflections. I use them a lot for ambient light, indoors and out. I have all his Ghost Light/Probe products, but the original is the one I use the most. Almost every render, in fact.
I see a lot of good advice in this thread so far, but I wanted to jump in after seeing the debate on quality settings. I think you'll be a lot happier if you bypass the Quality settings altogether, as I mentioned above. Good luck, and have fun.
Interesting. Ive played with Max Time and Max Samples alongside quality but not without. Ill try that for sure as the evidence seems to be stacking against render quality. What is render quality then, just a redundancy?
I remember reading somewhere, I think it was the developer nvidia notes for the Iray renderer that acceptable values for render quality go from 1 to 3. More than that it is not worth it. I don't even know why they didn't limit the value to 3 anyway.
Render quality is useful when parts are being stubborn; generally spot render is better then.
Sometimes a whole image is more grainy, but then I usually end up messing with Tone Mapping to get a better light balance and/or more.
I have some research to do now. Im glad I dropped in, I always thought render quality was the final word. Thanks for the info all.
@Faeofthe3rdDimension , Not sure if you mentioned you have one, but the addition of an Iray-capable nVidea graphics card into the render process speeds up things a lot.
I'm not sure why Quality and Convergence settings are included, but my best guess is, by including them and setting the defaults, anyone just starting to use Iray will see some fairly decent renders if all they do is add a few objects to the scene and hit the render button. (One of Daz Studio's strengths, imo, is how little one needs to know about using the program to start making art.)
As for how long to let an image render, it really depends on the composition. Before I learned to turn off Quality, I did an image that I didn't like how the hair turned out, so I bumped up quality and rendered again. Turns out the hair was too glossy, and a longer render didn't fix it, but it did bring out some very nice reflections in the glass. (That image is here.)
Another thing I noticed early on, which may no longer be true, was Iray's tendency to give light areas priority. Back then, if you watched the render window, you could see this. Using the Architectural setting would force Iray to give equal priority to the entire image. I haven't seen this behavior in a long time, but I also don't use the Quality/Convergence settings. What is definitely still true, however, is the longer the image renders, the lighter the dark areas get. I've had images that had great contrast in the WIP renders need postwork to put that contrast back into the final images, which I let render several times longer then the WIPs.
In the end, it depends as much on personal preference in the final image as it does on hardware and patience. And if you're rendering CPU Only, you'll need a lot of patience.
Wow, thanks everyone, this has been really helpful! I'm currently "baking" a render right now, but I can already tell it looks 1,000 times better! (An extra thanks to Divamakeup for the free download, that's making a huge difference since I'm rendering an indoors scene). I now know what a bunch of those settings do, so I can have more control over my renders!
Another question, if I may:
I apparently have 2 graphics cards:
NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 2048 MB
Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB
How do I find out if I'm using them to render or just using CPU? My renders seem to take several hours to get most of the pixelation out, and I know a lot of people find Iray to take less time than 3DL. So I just want to make sure I'm using all my assets.
Excellent advice and musings. Very helpful.
When I got started with Iray in May 2016, I decided to forget EVERYTHING I learned from 3Delight and Firefly. I morphed my G3F character, put hair on her, framed a mugshot, and rendered. HEADLAMP ON, DEFAULT HDR, NO ADDITIONAL LIGHTS. I was amazed at the results! Stunning! (from a childlike perspective) Mind you, I was using one of Raiya's skins. Later I discovered that rotating the default HDR to 90 degrees gave even better results. But that initial thrill of victory strengthened me for the long journey ahead, (and also gave me insight as to how/why other more experienced artists were making poor renders).
With that boost of confidence, I entered the morass of info available, attempting to improve on these results. I'm still not where I would like to be, but I recommend starting from scratch, and adding things (lights, parameters, elements) ONE AT A TIME to test what they do so you know for yourself why you are getting results.
The intel integrated graphics won't be used as iRay only uses Nvidia graphics.
The reason your renders are taking a long time is you're using a very old very slow card. Only very small scenes will even be able to fit on the card and not drop to CPU.
To clarify, Iray currently uses the CUDA cores of your Nvidia graphics card. The 750M has 512 CUDA cores. Not a lot, but better than nothing. The real problem is the 750M has only 2GB of memory, some of which will be reserved by Windows. If the scene uses more than is available, your computer will bypass the video card and use the CPU instead.
One way to speed things up is to use more light in the scene. Iray responds better with well lighted scenes. Then go into the Tone Mapping, unlock the Exposure Value setting and adjust the value. The higher the EV, the darker the resulting render. It will help to have the viewport Draw Mode set to Nvidia Iray when you tinker with these settings. But you'll probably want to not use that Draw Mode most of the time.
Another trick from the early days of Iray in DS is to render the image twice as large as you need, then size it down in Photoshop or Gimp, (or other imaging program,) Not sure how long it needs to render, but the idea is you can stop the render while the image is still grainy and the process that sizes the image down will get rid of the grain.
My advice? Start saving now for your next computer…!
I'm glad you found the indoor camera helpful - I love it and use it all the time. HeroineAdventures is very generous to share it with us! :)
Before this thread came up I was thinking about Dreams & Reality pack and wondering how to use it in Iray. Since the idea of this set is to replicate the light in the 2D background so the character fit I need to get the Lumens right. Anyone got any quick conversion trick (like '3DL converted photometric X lumens needs to be XYX lumens in Iray for the same light intensity'). Could mean some 3DL light sets could have a new life in Iray.
I believe this wil work in Poser only, not 3DL (or Iray). And the "high res" backgrounds are small .jpg files:) Wouldn´t recommend it;)
It worked in 3DL, and it seemed to work in Iray with the changed to photometric when I was testing yesterday, but I just tried again and though the viewport takes on the colours, the render doesn't. I was looking to use the backdrops composited with rendered people. Looks like I'll have to try and duplicate them with Iray lights
Hmm I stand corrected then:) I don't use Iray but, as a rule of thumb, first select your renderer, then create your lights! Maybe you could copy a light, delete it and create a new, then paste?