Need help with lighing

Faeryl Womyn

I came across a free product by Squarepeg over at Renderosity and, after installing it, tried to use it. Big issues and probably cause I don't know what I'm doing.

It's an iray light rig by squarepeg, has three files, invisible mesh light and visible mesh ligh and rig. When I tried to use the mesh lights nothing happened and when I tried the rig everything in my scene disappeared and I could not undo it. The second time I tried it, I selected a figure to use the light on and again, the mesh lights did nothing and the rig, when clicked, a message asking if I wanted to save my scene came up, meaning it would have replaced my scene again, just this time it actually asked first.

I don't get it, all those who posted their thanks and some saying it works great, no one mentions anything wrong...so why won't this work?

Hope I can post this link, it is a freebie. If not can you only remove the link and leave the post so I can get help with this.

https://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/iray-light-rig---100-free/76554

jestmart

Mesh lights wont show light in preview.  I see no need for such a product and since it seems badly made just delete it and learn to do lighting yourself, in the long run your images will be better for having just the perfect light set up needed.

Faeryl Womyn

Thank you for your imput. Most of the time I do my own lights, or alter one's others made, to get the look I want. My beggest drawback is Iray, I just can't grasp it. My computer can't handle it, however there is teh iray to 3dl and it's been useful, though I first have to know if the lights will work in my version of Daz before knowing if the converter will even work.

Tottallou

I had these but had never tried them until now & this is what I found:

To load the mesh lights you need to click the icon "Rig" - It is saved as a scene so if you want to add the mesh lights to something you already have loaded in the viewport - Right Click & choose "merge into scene".

Once you have loaded the rig the green tick icon just makes all the added mesh lights visible so you can move them around The red icon makes them invisible again

nonesuch00

Also when it comes time to render I've discovered having Spectral rendering turned on considerably dims the lights being rendered. I'm not sure if it's always done that or if it's a new behavior but I do know the difference in contrast between light & shadow is considerable better and more what people are expecting when Spectral Rendering is turned off. The 'white point' also starts being more of what people expect too,

jestmart

My cranky old fartitudeness has no patients with products that are not made right that is why I would get a refund for paid one and just delete freebies  But if you really want to use these I would suggest loading them by themselves and save them properly as Light Presets.

StratDragon

I can not begin to tell you how long I've put off trying HDRI lights. Actually I can; how long have they been around? But do yourself a favor and try these out.

https://hdrihaven.com

I started using these last week and for outdoor work I have no reason to fight with mesh lights ever again. I have not tired HDRI for indoor but there are indoor lights as well. The results are remarkable and I would guess faster to calculate because the fewer light sources needed to calculate.  Truth be told I was a real late comer to Iray myself. The largest bottleneck for me was working entirely off GPU. It's very hard to grasp what you're doing when you work with a surface and cant see the result until you render. Having invested in a relatively inexpensive GPU I can a good idea of how things look (including lighting) before I commit because the GPU is responding far faster.

 

 

Faeryl Womyn

Thank you everyone for your help. I had no idea what the item fully was, it was a freebie and the render looked great, so thought I would try them. Seem to recall there waa a lot of hoopla about them a while back, but haven't heard anything about  them since. I don't know a lot about iray and tend to avoid it, even though I have the converter to 3DL, paid and free versions, I am still figuring it out.

Thanks for the link StratDragon, I will check it out.

Thanks for the saving suggestion Jestmart, will see what it looks like and how difficult or easy before deciding to do that.

Tottallou thanks will do that now that I know how to use them.