IRAY Rendering inside a house, are there any tricks for lighting?
donte4011
Posts: 74
in The Commons
When I have a scene inside a house it does not matter where i place lights, when I use IRAY the lights are not there and it is using only whatever sunlight coming through the windows to do the lighting. Please let me know if there are any tricks to light my scene inside a house while using IRAY renderer. Thanks
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Check the render settings, and make sure Environment is set to Dome and Scene.
The DS built in lights by default put out next to no light as far as Iray is concerned. Try increasing the lumen output of every light by a factor of maybe 10. You can also make every light bulb in the scene an emmissive surface, or bump up their lumen output if they already are.
In the event that the image is too dark, drop the Exposure Value (Under Tone Mapping) down from 13.
- Under Render Settings -> Environment, make sure Dome & Scene is selected and not Dome Only.
- Increase the Lumen of your lights by factor x10 to x100. Don't change the intesity.
- Decrease Shutter Speed under Render Settings -> Tone Mapping.
- Place Ghost Lights along your ceiling or walls. One way to do that is to make a primitive plane and apply this free Ghost Light shader.
WOW! You guys are amazing..............................I will try those suggestions.
Thanks
Having lights set at a few hundred thousand Lumen for interior scenes isn't exceptional.
Something that also often works well for me, is turning the entire ceiling into an emitter. Provided the ceiling isn't supposed to be in the shot (and isn't part of direct reflections either!), and that the ceiling doesn't have too complex a shape (the more polygons the ceiling is made of, the longer render times will become!). Do keep in mind that this will create very homogenous light from above, and hardly casts any shadows, except directly below assets and figures.
An alternative to this, is making a large emissive plane instead of a regular light. The bigger the plane, the more light it will give. But also, the bigger the plane, the softer the shadows will be. So it creates an entirely different kind of lighting than spotlights do.
Another trick that can help is to use an Iray Sectional Plane to let the environment light in behind the camera.
if all else fails that was mentioned above like for dark caves and prison cells dungeons etc. I use a emissive light panes and locate it in the area;'s that need the light or you can use the hide pane settings but still keep the emissive light as a hidden light source.
I have some free panes that work great for this propose. you can change lumens and light colors options under the surface tab
http://www.sharecg.com/v/92902/gallery/21/DAZ-Studio/Ivys-Magic-Pane-prop
There's also a couple of ghost light products in the DAZ store. I use those all the time.
Wow I love all of the suggestions. Thank You I will try and keep you updated.
I've noticed this, how every tutorial on lighting starts off with drastically increasing every built in light. Is this just an iRay thing? Seems odd, otherwise.
This is really cool, Ivy. I have a cave scene coming up and I'm going to try your panes!
More to the point, the default Tone mapping is for a bright day outdoors and the lights are set for an artificial light, not a floodlight. Upping the luminance is one option, adjusting tone mapping another - though you will need to be careful, regardless, about areas thata re not receiving direct light as those can take ages to converge nicely.
I often use a ghostlight square (primitive square, with the iray/DAZ Uber shader applied and opacity set to 0.00001) of 1m / 3 feet side length attached to the camera... As I don't use lumen I set the luminance value to a value between 5 and 50 (depending on the scene and the lighting I want) using cd/cm^2 for luminance units.
Wouldn't use that for a portrait, but when rendering a scene inside of a room (or cave or whatever...) it helps to get some light on the important parts. Oh, and when rendering a night scene, one can use some dark blue as the emission colour to get that night-ish effect...
Just a caveat on emissive objects, especially lightbulbs. Iray needs to do calculations for each and every emissive polygon. Anything with lots of polys can really add to the render time, (unless something has changed in the more recent versions of Iray?) This can really bog down slower machines, especially if they are rendering CPU Only.
A better solution, especially if a lamp is out of frame, is an emissive, single poly plane. Out of frame, the plane doesn't need to be ghosted, (set to Cutout Opacity of 0.00001 or less,) and can add specular highlights. In frame, ghosting the emissive plane will add light without actually being seen.
The Iray Ghost Light products in the store are great, and really convenient, but any plane primitive will work. Cubes are good too, in some circumstances. Spheres, Cylinders and Toruses all need multiple polys for the curves and I don't personally recommend them for ghosting.
Great advice! I didn't realize polys had such an impact on render time.
when you use the hide pane option you may need to turn up the lumens up a little higher than the presets , please let me know how it works out for you
As a relatively new user, I'd also recommend learning Tone Mapping. It will serve you well in the long run too.
There is also the Iray interior camera, which removes unseen walls from the render and thus also speeds up render-time. It needs to be used with a great deal of caution however, and isn't suitable for every scene:
https://www.deviantart.com/heroineadventures/art/Iray-Interior-Camera-V1-4-758604718
Back to tone mapping, someone posted this page with a simple guide to f-stops and ISO that I use as a starting point all the time now [thanks whoever that was]
https://lifehacker.com/how-aperture-shutter-speed-and-iso-affect-pictures-sh-1699204484
And when all else fails, delete the fourth wall.
Remove the ceiling and angle the camera cleverly
If your room has windows to the outdoors, placing an HDRI sphere outside makes things interesting. There are a number of HDRI related products here, plus there's the 'ruins' default HDRI that comes with Daz. I visit https://hdrihaven.com regularly, as he has lots of free HDRIs to choose from, and uploads new ones regulary, with no registration required. Just remember to set Dome to ON so that you can see the pretty HDRI Sphere through the window.
The sun in the outdoor HDRIs can be at a number of different angles, so experimenting with different HDRIs to get the right lighting angle through the windows is something to think about. You can also just place a distant light outside, but that's not as much fun...
The indoor lighting tips suggested above still apply, of course.
Also when fiddling with lights and iso settings it may become difficult to control exposure. You can set crush blacks and burn highlights to zero in the tone mapping options to avoid overexposure or losing details in dark areas. Unless you do want overexposure for rim lights that is ..
This is free at diviantart works well>>>https://www.deviantart.com/heroineadventures/art/Iray-Interior-Camera-V1-4-758604718
You might also find that making the ceiling a low value emissive works well too; if it's in the shot it may not work, otherwise it works well.
or buy a ghost light kit with many presets https://www.daz3d.com/iray-ghost-light-kit
Realism and Iray
An awful lot of these suggestions - ghost lights, making walls invisible (or section plances), lighting up the entire ceiling (or large emissive planes) are going to result in unrealistic lighting for the scene.
What's wrong with adding a few lamps/braziers/torches (depending on scene era)
At the very least you can vary the light temperature - the default 6500 odd value is approximate daylight - you are unlikely to have that indoors without adequate windowing.
Can't speak for the OP or any other posting here, but I prefer ghostlights, because adding many lightsources to get "realistic" lighting slows down the rendering a lot.
And light temperature, intensity etc. can also be adjusted when working with ghostlights.
While I agree that some of the ideas are more extreme than i'd be comfortable with, I disagree that the goal is "real lighting". I used to think that way. Even in 3Delight days I would spend a LOT of time figuring out exactly how the light should bounce and travel around the scene.
Then I realized that the goal is the result looking good. Sure you don't want a room with a bunch of warm light and then a character that is lit with bright white lights that make no sense. But if the resulting image looks plausible, then it's probably good enough.
For instance, why add another 3 or 4 floor lamps to the room that aren't in view of the final image, they're just there to provide light? They're probably much higher poly than a couple of ghost lights which (if scaled and adjusted properly) would have the same effect on the scene, but with a much lighter impact to the rendering time.
But really, the main point for interior scenes are the ones Jack and Richard made early in the thread. The default rendering settings and lighting are set assuming you're making an outdoor scene. In real world camera terms, this would be like taking a camera setup for shooting action scenes outdoors on a bright sunny day and trying to take a birthday snapshot in a dining room. Of course it's going to look dark and underexposed. Don't be afraid of adjusting the exposure and even the white point settings to get your indoor scenes to look better. it's not a "cheat" to just lighten the image by dropping the exposure on Tone Mapping down to 12 or 11. That's like taking your camera and changing the apperature f-stop from 14 down to 5.6. Photographers have done this for years. Back in my day we even had to worry about whether the film (gasp!) we were using was balanced for outdoor or indoor or even flourescent lighting (which is the white point adjustment).