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True... but you really aught to take a look at this thread for anything UberEnvironment related. I cut my render times down by a factor of 10!
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/5320/
Wow Zam, I love your shadows on these renders. I can see where lightling really creates the render. In fact, I know how important lighting is. I just remembered I purchased Skies of Terra Vol Two months ago and used it as well to try to get the right look and it just didn't work for me.
But I do have a question that might be my problem (I'm willing to get anyone's feedback on this). When I'm working on the lighting and rendering in Daz3d I have been using the camera (instant) render to get a feel for what it will look like during the final render. I have not actually rendered it "final" before accepting that the final render will not look right. Could it be that the instant render is not the best judge when trying to see if the lighting is right? I did just download the Arah 3d Subtly Soft Lights you linked to but I have so much lighting that I've paid for and received free that I really don't think its the lighting that I need but the training. I'm just not using it right and that is more likely my problem. There's something I'm just not understanding about lighting and it's hard to figure out my problem when I'm trying to teach it to myself.
If you're talking about the slide dial on the render screen, the default settings of 1-3 are sorta useless for most lighting and are really only good for checking your placement of things. There's various manual adjustments for default setting 4 that allow it to render faster at a lower quality but look good enough to act as basic previews. I'll need to find the lighting info I had since it's good general reference (that I tend to forget to use).
http://rubicondigital.host22.com/index.php/articles/poserdazstudio/4-optimising-render-settings-in-daz-studio
While it seems to be for an older version of Daz Studio, the info seems pretty good for adjusting render settings. The main current piece of info it's missing is on Shading Rate. Lower numbers are more crisp yet they render slower with the more common goto number being 0.20 unless things are really needing to be cranked up. Higher numbers ranging from 0.50 to 1.00 often work well on their own, pending on what you're rendering.
I'm not sure, but I think UberEnvironment overrides most if not all of those setting, Zamuel.
Hey Zam,
So do you think it's the render settings and not the lighting? I'm still trying to work on lighting. I see videos on lighting that use distant light as if it was the sun to create shadows and light direction. I follow it to the letter and it still doesn't work. In fact the instant render I get omitted the light all together and the only way I can get any light in the scene is add tons and tons of light and hope for the best. Oh well, you may not be able to help me without actually tutoring. LOL. But I really apreciate all that you have tried to do. I'm still going to work on it and hope that one day I can get it.
From your descriptions, I'm pretty sure it's the render settings. That, or outright hardware limitations but I don't think that's it since you got two human figures in a scene at the same time and got it to render.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "instant render." When judging lighting, I don't rely on anything other than "real" renders because previews and OpenGL renders* can be deceptive. On my system, that means a lot of long waits for test renders on fairly high settings (for these, in order to speed things up, sometimes I find it helpful to hide the hair, or at least turn shadows off on the hair). If you post some renders and screenshots here (or better yet, in the New User forum), I'm sure people will be able to assist you. :) Possibly including me, although I'm still much closer to a total newb than I am to a lighting master! :lol:
*that is, the results of rendering on levels 1 through 3 on the slider that ZamuelNow mentioned.
You might also look into using some freebie or cheap light sets, either as a solution (load the lights and render) or as a learning tool (load the lights and check out all the settings to see how it was put together).
Thanks so much Zam. In fact that whole scene had five figures plus a horse and the rendering didn't take very long at all from what I can remember. I use a laptop that's only about eight months old and has a lot of power. I'm hoping that article you linked me to will help too. I'm also reading the notes that others are leaving here as well. All the information I can get can't do anyting but help.
Hi Scott,
Thanks so much. The instant render is the "camera" render that Daz has. It's very fast and gives me an idea of what the render will look like before I go to the tab and render the full sceen. I can't be the only one with this feature. Anyways, I will post some renders but I'm still working on several and will have to wait a bit before they are ready to show. I want to get them as close as possible so that I don't have comments on things I know how to fix but didn't just to quickly put up a render. As for the new user thread, I tried that several times. Most of my questions were basically ignored and when I got answers, well, they left much to be desired and so rude the mods deleted it and I never got a real answer. In this thread people actual try to help and they are the most respectful of my ignorance. I think I will stay here for a while.
Hi LJWM I'm also a bit confused by what you mean by 'the camera render'.
Can you post screen shots of what you use to render, your light settings and your advanced render settings.
Scorpio,
It's called the "spot render viewpoint" tool. On my screen it's the camera at the top of the desktop for Daz. If you still need a screen shot please let me know. Thanks.
Thanks that is what I thought you meant but just wanted to check, I would still like to see your render settings and light settings if possible.
Hey Zam
You are great, this really helps and helped. This is for a new book called Engima.
I have attached the render I did strickly using the information from the article. I added only one distant light at 200 intensity behind the figures. Here are the stats. Bucket size - 32, Max Ray Trace - 4, Pixel Samples - X&Y - 4, shadow Samples - 32, Gain - 00, Gamma - 1.00. I did have a background that didn't show up but that's okay. I didn't have a light towards it at all. But what I got from the render is wonderfully fantastic. I have shadows that I didn't see until the render and I love that I only used one distant light in the back of the figures. This helps tremendously. Now I have an idea which way to go to get what I need. I may not get there without running into a problem but this does help me understand what lighting should be giving me in a final render much better. I may be able to use Realty 2.5 now because the lights and reflections now makes a lot more sense.
Scorpio, above are the stats. I still have a ways to go but at least I feel I'm on the right road.I will add more renders as I get closer to my goal with this. Thanks to both of you
This is just an out of the box Kumar (and PD Kim from Rendo), but I think it came out rather well:
LJWM Gain and Gamma are usually set the same I have both of them at 1.
Glad to hear you feel uou are making progress.
I love Raw's Voodoo texture so I used it here.
Hey Scorpio, that's wicked. : ).
Can you tell me what Gamma and Gain does? The article Zam hooked me up with didn't cover it.
Here's what I have with just a shotlight. I like the orange tint that I didn't even add to the scene the spotlight created. I think I'm going to work on this one until I get it pretty close and upload it. The background I want for it I haven't bought yet so I don't want to add a bunch of light and not use the environment I want. The environment will determine where I place the light. But yes, I'm very happy. I think I'm on my way.
Hey Zam where are you? I'm missing you buddy. I would love to get your feedback too. You're awesome, my friend.
LJWM: Very nice! I really like the silhouette effect. I think it might benefit from some more dramatic shadows on the ground plane...try turning shadow softness down and/or switching to raytraced shadows.
Here, there, and everywhere. I like the image but agree that it really needs the ground shadows like were on your image on the previous page. Actually, it's got me curious about what the characters would look like in standard lighting instead of shadowed.
As usual, seeing a lot of cool stuff overall in the thread.
Been slowly stumbling across things to add to the list in the first post. Some day I may even eventually get around to actually making it organized. Maybe.
I'm loving all the renders. I want to play, too.
Here's my contribution: Lady of the Two Lands.
Auset, nice....I like it.
Hey Zam, so glad you're still around. Please, don't leave me now, my friend. :-).
So folks I've been having some interesting and intriquing steps in my rendering of this scene and loads of fun, it took me 9 full renders to get to this, but by jove I think I've got it.
Here's the stats. One Distant Light acting as the sun with similar color to the background, 2 SpotLights one with a slightly lighter color than the Distant Light working with the background sun lighting and 2 Linear point lights. One white right below the female's gun and one white directed at the male but casting light on the female so that her abdomen muscles are not in shadow. The novel will have them on another plant with red/orange lighting so this works well.
Here are the problems I see right off and things I'm going to have to work on . 1) the spotlight on the male washes out the color on his gloves. 2) her knee to the ground is too high but when I move her down her boot goes under the floor line. 3) I'm not happy with the reflections of the material on the guns but I may not mess with that at all. 3) There's something dark across the male's shoulders that dulls his skin that I don't like. It maybe a shadow coming from the female, not sure what's happening here. 4) It's hard to tell where all the light is coming from in front of them but I may just have something like a spotlight in the environment that's coming from the back thus the viewer can assume there's also a spotlight in front of them as well. Not sure how I'm going to handle that.
But I'm really loving what I'm seeing and the result of this is all Zam's fault for which I will always be eternally gratetful. :-).
Thank you.
Looks much nicer. A little clipping here and there but there's varying ways to fix that. Likewise, the metallic textures could either be done as a separate render pass with just the guns or perhaps postworked. Personal opinion but you might want to tweak the woman's expression. You could go either direction of making her look more coy or more determined but it seems a little blank right now. The knee is probably fine as is, especially since the adjustments would require tweaking the whole leg if not the whole body.
Glad to see the help...helped. Us new folks gotta stick together ;)
Hey, Zam, I'm all for sticking together. :-)
"A little clipping"? Not sure what you mean by this. I did notice his shirt is sticking out at the back but I can fix that with post work. Her shoulders look a bit strange but I think that can be fixed with post work as well. I'm also confused by the words, "a separate render pass"? That one has me stumped. If these two statements are too detailed to impart here I completely understand.
I do understand about her expression. It came with the pose as did his. I did create an expression where she looked like she just caught someone she's ready to shoot but it kind of destoryed how pretty she looked to me. She looked like she was smelling something unpleasant. LOL.
I think I need to move the gun down from her face a bit as well. I may give her an "I caught you" look but she's a very serious person and doesn't play which is opposite from him who is has an always joking, silly streak that gets on her nerves all the dang time.But he does work well and gets into the fight with no problem. That's why he's loading his gun (which he forgot to do) while she's holding down the...whoever.
1 Inner thigh sticking through pants
2 Pouch sticking into leg
I might have the terminology wrong but I was meaning that you could do a render with just the guns. Doing that would allow for different lighting/render settings to bring out their reflections/texture.
BTW, V4 or Genesis for the woman?
Oh my goodness... I didn't see those at all. Now that's too funny. They both had some problems with the skin breaking through but I did mesh smoothing a couple of times and it was fixed, at least it use to be fixed. And the pouch in the leg? I never saw that. Thank you loads. I think I can fix it, if not I know I can remove it. Her left hand half glove has some problems as well. I also moved the gun down some so it's not so close to her face.
She's Victoria 4.2 Nabila with a few tweaks. I loved the gear and the morph and used it all except the hair. Nabila's skin is great. I wanted it to look as real as possible and it does. But I also think the lighting and rendering helped a lot with the skin and that I owe to you.
He's Michael 4 with the Brad morph and a few tweaks as well. I also used my set of actual eyes with reflections for both. Didn't like the eyes they both came with.
Thats a big improvement.
A couple of things I would tweak are her knee is floating not resting on the floor and his eyes are not looking in the correct direction they seem to be staring off oddly.
Personally I would also tip the camera down and put something behind them the sudden cut off of the pavement makes the background look like a background it doesnt blend in very well.
Id also have more space above his head its cut a bit too close.
These are all little things but they really do help to finish an image off.
Thanks so much Scott. That render really helped me understand where the shadows should lay and the coloring that would automatically render. It really helped.
Hey Scorpio,
Yes, indeed...in my post #261 that was one of the problems I saw right off. But when I lower the knee her right foot goes down below the floor line. I think I may just increase the shadow at her knee at post work if this happens with the environment that I'm going to buy for the final book cover. Right now I'm hoping to figure out lighting and rendering so that all my renders are much better.
I also agree with the cutting of his head and that it's very close but when I tip down his head, the female's gun moves up and covers her face. It's a dilemma for sure. In addition the printing of covers have to have much space as well. What I'll have to do is pull back on the zoom to create more space. But I'm working on lighting and rendering in hopes to create better final renders so I did leave that in lieu of getting the shadow, reflections and lighting right.
I did render it with a few changes that I've enclosed here. I'm now wondering why there's no shadow of her against him. It may be because of the spotlight that's to the left of the scene. They look like their are touching when he's actually a few inches back. I'm going to have to lift the Linear light at the gun again. The reflection is off there as well.
The first is the render with the fixes that Zam noticed and the second is the distance between them that I'm thinking should have some kind of shadow on him from her so that they don't look like his pushing against her head.
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