Will IBL Skies work with 3Delight ?
carrie58
Posts: 4,112
in The Commons
I checked the product description and it doesn't mention iRay but I'd like to be sure it would work in 3Delight thank you for any help
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Which products are you talking about? Those from this bundle? https://www.daz3d.com/ibl-skies-perfect-skies-bundle
Those look like iray settings to me.
Yup those are the ones but they don't mention iRay .........
They mention "sky and dome" settings, and dome rotation presets. Those are iray features.
ahhhh figures thank you very much @Leana
Of course they can be used like any HDRIs in 3DL. You can load them into UberEnvironment2, use them with IBL-Master or just use them on regular skydomes for backdrops.
UE2 in bouncelight mode and an HDRI, 20 sec progressive render:
Non progressive with tweaked samples settings, 1 min:
Thank you @Sven Dullah I'll put them in my wish list for now with the sale and store still wonky .
Yeah probably a good idea:)) If you need help setting up HDRIs in 3DL, let me know:)
...yeah I have the full bundle, indispensible
They can work without UE if you have Parris' IBL Master and AoA's Advanced Distant Light. I use that setup because UE is slow as molasses on my old rig. This scene took about 12 min to renderand it has a tonne of items which would slow UE to a crawl.
...yeah I have the full bundle, indispensable. I particularly like these as they have no ground scenery so they're more versatile.
They can work without UE if you have Parris' IBL Master for the GI lighting and AoA's Advanced Distant Light for the Sun. I use that setup because UE is slow as molasses on my old rig. This scene took about 12 min to render and it contines a number of items and shaders which would slow UE to a crawl.
Thank you very much @Sven Dullah,for the help offer , I do have IBL master in my wish list too already I don't have AOA's Distant sun ,but I do have a Sunlight product I use......
Good point, might have to drop them into my wishlist.
Yup UE2 is slow, especially with transmapped hair, unless you exclude AO and raytracing, which makes the hair look bad, so...
. Thankfully there are much better alternatives now, UE2 is pretty ancient stuff.
Just clarifying...you don't necessary need the AoA lights if you use HDRIs, but since you render a lot in 3DL I figure the AoA advanced lights would be very useful to you. They are the fastest rendering 3DL lights around AFAIK;)
I could use an tutorial on how to use IBL and HDRi's with 3Delight, I have UE and UE2. I can use iray but my computer is old and every image has noise, no matter what I do, so I stay away from it. Also, can you create your own skydome and use these items?
Here are some tips on using HDRIs with IBL-master. More can be found in this rather extensive commercial thread.
I'll put together a mini tutorial on how to use HDRIs with UE2 when I get the time.
You mean your own texture? In theory, yes:) It needs to have a width/height ratio of 2:1 and use spherical mapping to wrap properly around a sphere. If you want it to emit direct light and not only ambient/indirect light it needs to be in .hdr format (high dynamic range). Sorry no expert on creating my own HDRIs, there are probably numerous threads somewhere in here;)
And of course, for the brave hearted there is the free AWE shading kit that let's you tap into the 3DL pathtracer. The newest update gives you more or less total control over environmental lighting with features like tonemapping (Reinhart, Unreal and Aces), temperature, gamma, exposure, camerabased exposure to name a few. You can use HDRIs or just plain png:s or jpegs as environmental light.
I'm not real brave or real patient waiting for renders ,and the older I get the quicker things seem to fall out of my head ...... but since I started playing with DS it seemed to not give 3Delight a chance everything was more optimized for Poser ,not optimized for use in DS , then they switch to iRay .... and I was just getting a bit of an understanding on 3DL ..... so being stubborn .....
I would be very grateful for a mini tutorial when you have the time Sven
UberEnvironment2 Basics
Load UE2 from your content library, the first icon also loads an environment sphere parented to the UE2 light.
I created a simple test scene, a figure, the UE2 and two spotlights that I set to specular only. Why? Well UE2 only emits diffuse light, so without additional lighting there will be no specular highlights on any surfaces. Here I used two spots for simplicity but you could use a number of distant light from various directions with low intensity specular light. Just remember to enable raytraced shadows, set shadow softness to your liking and set the proper amount of shadow samples in rendersettings. Without raytraced shadows your character can get glowing teeth, gums etc.
Next, here are the rendersettings I used for this test. Most important of all...the gamma settings. If you go for any level of "realism" use gamma correction on and gamma 2.20. Bear in mind that most poser content and also DS 3Delight materials are often in need of tweaking textures gamma settings in the image editor. As a rule of thumb, the diffuse textures should have gamma 0 and all opacity-, bump- etc. controlmaps should have gamma 1!!! (Tip: If you have to use a diffuse map as a substitute for a bumpmap, make a copy of the diffuse map in LIE, rename it and set gamma to 1.)
(For final renders I would probably use 8x8 or 10x10 pixel samples and lower the shading rate to 0.2 or 0.1.)
Load an HDRI in the UE2 Color slot. Here I used the "Green Sanctuary" from HDRI Haven. These are the light settings I used for this particular HDRI.
Saturation controls the emitted light saturation, contrast is obviously affecting diffuse gamma settings, more contrast darkens shady areas and brightens highlights. If you get noisy renders increase occlusion samples, if you get weird artifacts like black banding etc, decrease shading rate. The lower you go the more detailed shading you get at the expense of longer render times. All surfaces outside the radius set by trace distance (in cm) will be ignored by the UE2, thus will not contribute to color bleed/ light bounces/ambient occlusion.
There are several environment modes. The "cheapest" is ambient. It will not produce AO or shadows, only diffuse light using the color of the HDRI. Will render very fast and produce rather flat and dull looking renders. The only modes that support color bleed/bounce light are indirect lighting and of course Bounce Light, that will produce the most realistic results.
To make the HDRI appear in render you need to do the following: Select the environment sphere and enable "visible in render".
Head over to the surface tab and insert the HDRI into diffuse color (for viewport visibility) and ambient color. Also enable "Raytrace" to make the sphere appear in reflective surfaces (eyes, skin with reflections enabled, glass and metals etc.) Turn off "Diffuse active" unless you want it to be lit by additional lights you might want to use in the scene.
The brightness can be controlled by adjusting ambient strength or -color. This will affect all reflective surfaces but not the diffuse light strength from the UE2.
This first testrender uses the "Occlusion with directional shadows" mode, renders pretty fast (7 min) but there is no true bounce light:
Next one is with "Indirect lighting with directional shadows", 27 min. render. You can see there is bounce light if you toggle between the renders.
And same thing with Bounce Light, had to enable progressive mode for this test, still took almost 20 min. to render.
The Bounce Light mode needs slightly different light settings as you can see, so I increased the intensity scale as shown here:
...and re-rendered:
And finally a quick and dirty render with another HDRI:
...and another tip: Don't rotate or alter the environment sphere! If you want to reposition the HDRI you can safely rotate and scale the UE2 light. If you have added spotlights or distant lights parent them to the UE2 before you change the light direction.
A few personal reflections on the UE2: It is really slow if you are going for any kind of realism, but it works, it is free and it can handle HDRIs. On the other hand, it can be pretty fast if you use occlusion with soft shadows or indirect shadows. IBL-Master is much faster, it emits specular light, much more straight forward to work with BUT it cannot produce true color bleed, it is basically a nice light shader that uses good old ambient occlusion and it renders transmapped hair very fast compared to UE2. Soo...aweSurface is the obvious solution for me, it has it all. Many times faster than UE2 in bounce light mode with superior results. And it's also free
.
PS I admit I haven't used UE2 for a very long time so no expert in any way, and I've seen some stunning renders by some friends, so yeah it's just a matter of personal preference I guess:)
Thanks, that's a great tutorial! Do you have any tips for using aoa advanced lights instead of UE2?
...here is one I did before IBL master came out. I did use an HDRI, but only for the skydome (turned off the UE "sun" and AO lights). I also used the AoA Distant and AoA ambient light. Bounce light was faked by using a low intensity distant light below the ground plane with shadow casting turned off (did the same in the bus stop scene above). This was about as close realism I could get at the time without UE. The cloud shadows were actually produced by creating my own "billboards" using instances of a puddle mesh that I morphed which are above the camera's field of view.
Well, since the AoA ambient light does not take maps I sometimes use this trick when doing animations, it's believable enough for what I do and renders fast. You might find it useful or not
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Set up the UE2 as in the above examples with an HDRI (or whatever skydome texture) and set the environment mode to ambient (no Raytracing). Set intensity rather low and color to mid gray as a starting point. You might want to tint the color to your needs. You also might want to increase saturation. Add an AoA distantlight to simulate sunlight, approximate the light direction and set lightcolor and intensity, shadow color etc. to match the dome color. Add the AoA ambient light for ambient occlusion and adjust AO color and strength. Keep the light intensity low (as in dark grey) so it does not wash out the UE2 ambient light.
Here a quick render using a primitive sphere with a pure white diffuse color and a primitive plane with a SM shadowcatcher for ground shadows. This shadowcatcher will work with all the DS standard lights and AoA lights but not with UE2 generated raytraced shadows.
And, in case someone needs a shadowcatcher shader, here's how to set it up in Shader Mixer.
okay another stupid question ......is it possible to make the sky visible in the viewport in 3dl? I bought the IBL Skies ,(took 4 days to get them down loaded ) and have tried to follow directions above ,but either I'm having a brain melt down or something ...... Sorry it is my brain had to reread your tutorial ......
Absolutely. As long as the HDRI image is loaded into the diffuse color slot of the dome surface it should be visible in the viewport. With the DS default shader you just need to use the diffuse color slot for the HDRI and set color to something other than black. Set diffuse strength to 0. Set ambient color to pure white and ambient strength to 100%. In the parameters tab turn off "cast shadows". If you use the omSimpleSurface or Ubersurface also inserting the HDRI in diffuse color makes it visible in the vewport, as shown here:
Let me know if you can't sort it out.
Use these settings for the dome if you prefer the default shader:
May be obvious but here's how to make a skydome: Create a primitive sphere with 64 sides/segments (less will probably also work) with a 20m diameter. Set y translation to -1000 to center it in the scene. (awe users will need to flip normals in the geometry editor to make it behave correctly with HDRI lighting). Create a null object or group at 0.0.0, name it skydome and parent the sphere to it. Use the null/group for rescaling the dome.
@Sven Dullah Thank you I'll try again a little later
So what is the difference between between a HDRI ,and a Hdr ? are they the same or different ?
An HDRI (high dynamic range image) can use file formats like .hdr or .exr.
Edit to add: .exr files are not working properly in 3DL as far as I know. So purchasing HDRI sets from the DAZ store can be hit or miss, since there is usually no mentioning of the file formats provided:( But there is the 30 days refund thingy, or atleast there used to be, but that also seems to be hit or miss these days...