Iray room lighting

music2u4u

Hi all. These commons have been so helpful to me lately, I thought I would just throw a question out there and see if anyone bites! If this is not the right place you can move me Daz! Just let me know where.

Here is my question: I have had issues with inside rooms being too dark, not well lit. I have learned about render adjustments but they are mainly for lighting coming in through windows. I see a lot of Iray lights to download or buy, but most of them are for portraits or human lighting. I want to know where there is a good lighting package for a room. I have some lamps that have come with some models I can use to get by with, but it makes it kinda superficial looking. I want spots I can place throughout the room, or ceiling lights like in real life, or just general lighting to brighten up a dark room.

Does anyone have a suggestion for a kit that does that?

AlmightyQUEST

Personally I have used:

https://www.daz3d.com/architectural-lighting-rig-for-iray

The recessed can light prop in particular is nice for ceilings.

I have not used this myself, but seems similar in idea and to what you are looking to do:

https://www.daz3d.com/ig-iray-lights-and-shaders-architectural-lights

It's got some more light props, I've just added it to my wishlist now that I've seen it :)

Also the create-a-room sets have some light fixtures as well, that can be put into other sets (I have also used these as well):

https://www.daz3d.com/collective3d-create-a-room-base-set

https://www.daz3d.com/collective3d-create-a-room-xpack-3

 

music2u4u

AlmightyQUEST said:

Personally I have used:

https://www.daz3d.com/architectural-lighting-rig-for-iray

The recessed can light prop in particular is nice for ceilings.

I have not used this myself, but seems similar in idea and to what you are looking to do:

https://www.daz3d.com/ig-iray-lights-and-shaders-architectural-lights

It's got some more light props, I've just added it to my wishlist now that I've seen it :)

Also the create-a-room sets have some light fixtures as well, that can be put into other sets (I have also used these as well):

https://www.daz3d.com/collective3d-create-a-room-base-set

https://www.daz3d.com/collective3d-create-a-room-xpack-3

 

I'll have to check these out. Thanks.

AlmightyQUEST

Also, I was mostly thinking about ceiling lights there, but if you already have lamp fixtures you want to use that don't have iray materials, setting up emission settings on bulb materials (Or a sphere primitive if they don't have a bulb or it isn't a separate surface) can work well. You can figure out settings on your own fairly easily, but I also got this set to help with quickly setting up some common types of lights: https://www.daz3d.com/real-lights-for-daz-studio-iray

marble

Most of my scenes are interior so I feel your pain.

I use a couple of methods for room ligting. Either I remove the ceiling and any walls out of camera view and use a studio style HDRI. I add a spotlight to pick out the figures I want to focus on (spotlight set to disc at 80cm diameter to soften the shadows becaise leaving it at "point" produces very sharp shadows).

If I can't hide walls, I use Ghost Lights. These can be made using a plane with emission settings (described somewhere in this forum) or you can purchase the kit that I use ... https://www.daz3d.com/iray-ghost-light-kit ... again I add a spotlight, especially as Ghost lights are poor for specularity and I want that sweaty skin to glisten.

frankrblow

I use https://www.daz3d.com/iray-light-probe-kit and https://www.daz3d.com/iray-ghost-light-kit a lot for interiors (and sometimes to help exteriors), mixed with other kinds lights, depending on the look I want.

Philippi_Child

I found these to be very heplful

http://www.daz3d.com/iray-light-probe-kit

mmkdaz

Lots of great comments here. Before you purchase anything try this:

1. Create an object: Torus (any size is fine, bigger is better)

2. Use the surface shader on the Torus: Emmisive Object

3. Use Units: kcd/m^2 , Luminance: 1000

4. Temperature 6000K

5. Use the parameters to place your light,

6. RENDER in IRAY, DOME ONLY.

See what you got. and duplicate and move the torus to other spots.

fred9803

I'm not sure about using a torus. I seem to remember a thread that mentioned that applying emmisive to an object that consists of many polys will slow down your renders. The ghost lights apparently don't do this as they are single poly meshes.

Taoz

fred9803 said:

I'm not sure about using a torus. I seem to remember a thread that mentioned that applying emmisive to an object that consists of many polys will slow down your renders. The ghost lights apparently don't do this as they are single poly meshes.

Yes, at least some of the ghost lights just use a plane. And to make it invisible set Opacity to 0.0000001, it will still emit light, but be aware that this will affect specular highlights in a negative way. There is some discussion about ghost lights here:

https://direct.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/3443536/#Comment_3443536 

AlmightyQUEST

If you only use ghost lights, you are not going to get reflections on surfaces, which is going to make everything look flat and unrealistic. Something to keep in mind, ghost lights are best to supplement lighting when visible light sources aren't giving enough light without blowing out the scene.

ebergerly

I tend to agree with magnumdaz for the most part. I find making lights to be super simple if you model them after what you'd expect for real lights. But I think the important thing is to model them after real lights.

For example, rather than just adding a torus, I tend to decide what type of real world light I want to model, such as a regular incandescent lamp bulb, or a fluorescent tube light, or one of those groups of fluorescent tube lights in a big square ceiling fixture with big diffuser panels, or an outside sunlight, etc. For that reason I tend to avoid "fake" lights that don't mimic real light sources, cuz it's too easy to get off into some fantasy land of strange lights that make no real world sense and the scene starts to look "off". 

So I'll generally do the following:

1. Add (under "Create/New Primitive") either a sphere (for incandescent bulb), or a cylinder (for fluorescent tube), or a flat plane (for office ceiling light), and scale/resize them to look like the real world equivalent.
2. Then it's important that you select the object and add the Iray Uber Base shader (for me it's under "Scripts")
3. And as magnumdaz suggested, under Surfaces go to Emission, change the color to white
4. Change the "Emission Temperature (K)" to something between 2500 and 6500 or more, depending on what type of light you want to emulate. The low end is for a standard, indoor incandescent bulb (which runs more towards the yellow colors) and the highest (6500+) value is closer to the more bluish daylight. Do a quick google if you want the correct "color temperature" for any particular light source. 
5. Using the default Luminance Units (cd/m2), I've found that you may need to crank up the Luminance to something in the 50,000 range or more for a bright light.
6. I also tend to turn off any environment values unless I'm certain I'll actually want to emulate an outside sunlight or other environment.   

music2u4u

marble said:

Most of my scenes are interior so I feel your pain.

I use a couple of methods for room ligting. Either I remove the ceiling and any walls out of camera view and use a studio style HDRI. I add a spotlight to pick out the figures I want to focus on (spotlight set to disc at 80cm diameter to soften the shadows becaise leaving it at "point" produces very sharp shadows).

If I can't hide walls, I use Ghost Lights. These can be made using a plane with emission settings (described somewhere in this forum) or you can purchase the kit that I use ... https://www.daz3d.com/iray-ghost-light-kit ... again I add a spotlight, especially as Ghost lights are poor for specularity and I want that sweaty skin to glisten.

Just bought this this morning. Thanks.

music2u4u

dragonfly_2004 said:

I use https://www.daz3d.com/iray-light-probe-kit and https://www.daz3d.com/iray-ghost-light-kit a lot for interiors (and sometimes to help exteriors), mixed with other kinds lights, depending on the look I want.

Have this already!

music2u4u

Gonna try to make some lights. I have copied your instructions, lets see how it works. Later.

music2u4u

I played with the ghost light kit a bit. I used two dome lights on this scene, one on each side of the room. You have to hide the lights or they will show in the render. If you hide them in the scene, they won't work in the render! This render would be otherwise completely dark. This is with just the two dome lights. No environment adjustments at all. These ghost lights work pretty good.

frankrblow

You hid the lights? Wouldn't it be better to use the "Apply before presets" icon (Under "GLK materials" for Kit 2)? That makes the lights invisible in the render. Or are you using Kit 1?

ebergerly

One thing to consider with your log cabin interior...generally if you look at a foto of a real log cabin theyre fairly dark inside, with maybe a couple of yellowish incandescent bulbs to give that warm, homey mood. Which is why I tend to steer clear of bright and/or fake environment lights unless absolutely necessary. And especially with dark wood walls theres far less bounce light from the window sunlight to brighten the interior.

miladyderyni_173d399f47

"You have to hide the lights or they will show in the render. If you hide them in the scene, they won't work in the render!"

IME, Hiding in Scene Tab doesn't work. Do this:

1) Select the light in the Scene Tab

2) Go to Lights Tab (Editor, not Presets) > Display > Rendering

3) Under Rendering, there's a Visible in Render option that toggles between ON and OFF. When toggled to OFF, scene will be lit by that light but it won't show in the scene.

I think you have to do this for each light separately.

 

ebergerly

By the way, for those interested in what the "cd/m^2" values are in real life, attached is a chart from Wikipedia that gives some typical figures of different types of lights. These values of "luminance" kinda describe how bright something is, and like I said they typically range in the thousands, like 12,000 for a fluorescent light, 130,000 for a frosted incandescent bulb, and 600,000 for the sun at the horizon (btw, the "k" is times 1,000). 

marble

music2u4u said:

 

I played with the ghost light kit a bit. I used two dome lights on this scene, one on each side of the room. You have to hide the lights or they will show in the render. If you hide them in the scene, they won't work in the render! This render would be otherwise completely dark. This is with just the two dome lights. No environment adjustments at all. These ghost lights work pretty good.

It might take a few tries to get used to the way Ghost Lights work. For a discussion and tutorial, see this thread (started by the vendor, Kindred Arts):

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/127056/ghost-lights-interior-lighting-tutorial

And just to reiterate, you will need some other type of light to give you specularity (light reflections such as you get on wet surfaces, etc.). This is why I always add a spotlight.

sapat

I own most of these light packs, but a couple of them are confusing to me. Not the brightest bulb in the room (pun) 

Ghost light 2 and the Light Probe pack. I guess I'll have to follow the link for the lighting tutorial.

Ghost light 2 has those things that look like lamp shades and balls, and not sure what to do with them. Also the light probes pack. They have so many setups that it overwhelms me about which one to use for say an average size living room, or inside a portion of a spaceship like several Petipet packs.  Too many options about which ones to leave on, which ones to turn off, what preset will work for the size space I'm trying to light. I'm not lighting the inside of a huge space, just mostly room size stuff. Not easy for me since I had a small stroke and it affects memory things.  If things are written step by step as a couple are in this thread, I can follow those with no issues.  Enough about me, but will have to look at the other thread. 

Glad I found this one!

 

music2u4u

miladyderyni_173d399f47 said:

"You have to hide the lights or they will show in the render. If you hide them in the scene, they won't work in the render!"

IME, Hiding in Scene Tab doesn't work. Do this:

1) Select the light in the Scene Tab

2) Go to Lights Tab (Editor, not Presets) > Display > Rendering

3) Under Rendering, there's a Visible in Render option that toggles between ON and OFF. When toggled to OFF, scene will be lit by that light but it won't show in the scene.

I think you have to do this for each light separately.

 

I did this but as you can see, there are no lights listed in the lights tab.

music2u4u

dragonfly_2004 said:

You hid the lights? Wouldn't it be better to use the "Apply before presets" icon (Under "GLK materials" for Kit 2)? That makes the lights invisible in the render. Or are you using Kit 1?

I pushed them outside of the scene border then rotate them to shine where I want them. If I turn them OFF, the light goes away.If I hide them in any tab, the light goes away. (Kit 2).

AlmightyQUEST

There should be presets to apply the material settings. Don't turn them off or manually set the surfaces to 0 opacity, use the materials included. This keeps them almost completely invisible, so you don't really see the objects in the render, but still allows them to cast light. And the "light" tab only applies to the built in lights, not emissive surfaces.

music2u4u

OK...Here is what I got with the "hide" lights.

This render has two dome lights up at the ceiling. They are both turned OFF in the show in scene display tab (hidden from view). They are both turned ON in the show in render tab.

this is the result. Look at how dark it is.

marble

AlmightyQUEST said:

There should be presets to apply the material settings. Don't turn them off or manually set the surfaces to 0 opacity, use the materials included. This keeps them almost completely invisible, so you don't really see the objects in the render, but still allows them to cast light. And the "light" tab only applies to the built in lights, not emissive surfaces.

Precisely.

Don't use the Lights Tab, go to your Content Tab and look for Light Presets (IIRC). All the controls and options are there.

AlmightyQUEST

To simplify things, just turn them on completely first and see how they render. Two things to try next, for the lights, either apply a preset if you are using ghost lights that is a higher strength, or go to the surface for the lights in the surfaces tab, and find the emission surfaces and increase the strength there. Also, go to your render settings tab, go to tone mapping, and for the value near the top that is probably set to 13, lower it to something like 11. It should adjust other values when you make that change, leave those to whatever they adjust to. Now try another render and see if it's getting closer to what you want to see.

AlmightyQUEST

Sorry for not having all the correct labels handy for settings, I'm on my phone at the moment. If anyone had the correct labels for the items I mentioned, please don't hesitate to correct me :)

music2u4u

Next, the same two dome lights, pushed up just outside of the top border. They are both turned ON in the show in scene display tab (You can see them, thus pushed out of the border area). They are both turned ON in the show in render tab. Now there is light.

So...if I turn them OFF in the scene, I get no light. Like turning off a light switch. This is what I was trying to explain.

BTW...I found the "display" tab in the Parameters tab, Not in the lights tab.

marble

music2u4u said:

 

Next, the same two dome lights, pushed up just outside of the top border. They are both turned ON in the show in scene display tab (You can see them, thus pushed out of the border area). They are both turned ON in the show in render tab. Now there is light.

So...if I turn them OFF in the scene, I get no light. Like turning off a light switch. This is what I was trying to explain.

BTW...I found the "display" tab in the Parameters tab, Not in the lights tab.

I think there is some confusion here about "turning off" Ghost Lights. These lights are really just primitive objects with emissive surfaces, not "lights" in the sense that a DAZ Studio spotlight is a "Light". So you won't find them in the Lights tab. The parameters for them are applied in the Surfaces tab and the way to get them to light the scene without being visible in the scene is to use the controls I mentioned in my last post.

Go to the:  Content Tab>Light Presets>IRay Ghost Light Kit