Iray - the difference
cosmo71
Posts: 3,609
in The Commons
Hello, I have a question. Can someone render the same scene twice? The first with the old lighting and the second with IRay to show the difference?
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Here.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/861619/#Comment_861619
I didn't adjust the Iray lighting which I would do normally.
but I would say that the normal lighting looks a bit better
I'm not sure how truly comparable this is. The Iray render is my original. The 3Delight just changed the render engine and added ray traced shadows. I didn't change the shaders so it looks worse than it could.
That said, on my machine the Iray renders are clearly better on my machine. Particularly the skin, but material look better as well. Iray is also a fair bit faster on my machine. I have found that one often does need to go to convergence. Even 60% looks pretty good. Bear in mind that I have been experimenting and haven't done really elaborate scenes. What I have seen is that more lights in Iray seem to render the same or faster, whereas more lights in 3Delight is not faster.
The brighter image i Iray, darker is 3Delight. 3Delight can be better, but at the end of the day it isn't real lighting. My preference is realistic seeming images even with fantasy settings.
Your results will depend on the artist who is doing it.
A scene rendered in Iray will not use the same light setup as it would rendered in 3Delight if you are looking to get near identical results or just the best out of both.
I did a comparison, doing the best I could to match. (I don't recall the lights I used in 3delight...the iray is Design Anvils's free light pack).
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/53797/free-design-anvil-iray-light-render-presets#latest
I've been playing with compositing 3DL and Iray renders, so I have a comparison as well.
http://dawaterrat.deviantart.com/art/Vintage-Afternoon-Comparison-545841301
The 3DL had an AoA ambient light, an AoA distant light to provide sunlight, and an AoA spot light to brighten up their faces.
The Iray had just the Sun slaved to the location of the AoA distant light
I found it interesting that the raytraced shadows in the 3DL provided sharper dappling through the tree than the Iray sun.
I feel the Iray lighting is too cold for the scene.
It's not really surprising. 3Delight uses a different light setup to Iray, so the lights just don't work well without tweaking them. Now if you had requested a similar light setup then you could have a scene which is a better comparison. Remember that in 3Delight you can 'cheat' the lighting by using shadowless lights and ambient lighting, while in Iray you rely on real world physics to bounce the light around your scene.
I'll work on a simple comparison using similar lighting. It'll give you a much better idea of how Iray works so you can judge for yourself.
The reason it is too cold is that the fill lighting is coming from the default Environmental Map which is very blue, I would change it for a warmer HDRI to make the two scenes similar. The only thing different in the two scenes is that and I had to use the Iray female base on the girl on the left as her skin was rendering blue.
That is BRILLIANT! I'd been trying to figure out how to perfectly match directions rather than doing the best I can..Never once did that occur to me!
(Now part of that is I haven't figured out Sun's in iray yet..I just kind of hope for the best with the dome thing.
Since shader and lighting constructs in the environments are completely different, there is no real way to compare the two in this way, as it is entirely dependant in each how well the shaders/materials were put together and how well the lighting was done. It's like asking people which tools give better finished results, hand tools or power tools, either can give great results or lousy depending on the person using them. That's not to say comparisons can't be done between the two environments, just that the comparisons need to be tied to something more specific that can be directly compared.
Yeah, if you set your environment mode to "Sun-Sky Only" (or have nothing in the environment map) you get an option to define a node the sun. Since I'm used to using a Distant Light for my sun, I'll usually set that up as "normal", turn it off, and then make that my sun node.
You can also create a new camera and name it like My Sun Cam, make that your sun node, then look through it to position the sun like you would position a distant light. Probably no easier than what you do, just that no worries about forgetting to turn off the light.
True, but I've been playing with compositing 3DL (which have the saturation levels I like) with Iray (which has the easier lighting), so the light's already there. :)
Here is another of my scenes rendered in Iray.
The first image is 3Delight.
The second image is Iray.
The image backdrop is a photograph of my own. In 3Delight I used two planes, one for the water and one for the land, to catch shadows; I had to turn these off in Iray. In Iray I had to plug the image into the Environment Map to get it to appear; set Dome and Scene with Dome set to off; ground set to manual, I had to move it the Z plane by 200 to get the shadows in the right place, shadow set to 0.50; I changed some of the lights to photometric because the originals were too strong and I changed the colour temperature trying to match the light from the picture.