Show Us Your Iray Renders. Part IV
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I'd recommend not relying on these old manual exposure rules. They have nothing to do with CG. They were created to help setting exposure when there were no exposure meters in cameras. While there's no exposure meter in Iray, you can easily do a test render to get the light levels. The Looney 11 rule you cite is for taking pictures *of the moon*. How is that relevant for setting exposure of a CG scene?
Correct exposure is determined by looking at the midtones, and detail in the shadows and highlights. With experience you can see it immediately, but you can also look at a histogram (Levels in Photoshop).
Unless you're lighting for a specific mood, pick a general setting -- the default will do to start -- then adjust the lights to get you closer to your goal. When you keep going back and forth between the lighting levels and the tone mapping settings, you'll just end up confusing yourself. The tone mapping settings in D|S don't yet do any "film camera" sort of things, like set depth of field, camera blur, or film grain. So instead, use tone mapping to fine tune the exposure with a scene that's correctly lit.
If you want to learn a good rule in photography, it's the law of reciprocity, which most any intro-level book will cover. It's how the values of ISO, shutter speed, and f/stop are interwtined, and work together. For example, f/8 at 1/128 is the exactly the same, from an exposure standpoint, as f/5.6 at 1/256. You could fiddle with settings all day, and keep arriving at the same exposure. It's better to use that time to adjust the actual lighting in the scene. Unlike in the real world, in CG-land we do have the ability to make a sunny day darker or brighter. And of course, we have tone mapping setting to make the exposure perfect.
Playing with skin settings thanks for all the great examples on D/A less then 4 minutes one converted Reality mesh light
Points taken. Sunny 16 works for the kind of renders I have in mind, which is to put figures into outdoor scenes instead of standing them in HDR environments.
I've always found the tear annoying on G2. You could turn it off completely in 3Delight so it didn't show in the render, but, I haven't found out how to do that in Iray yet and searches both on forum search and Google haven't yielded much. I've seen G2 Iray renders where it doesn't show so I know it can be done, but how!?
CHEERS!
One way is setting IOR to 1, another way is by setting cutout opacity to 0.
Thanks, I'll try them, you can see in my render that the 'tear' is a thin line across the bottom of his eyes that hides the bottom of the irises, I hate that effect!
CHEERS!
Femme Fatale - Sasha
The gorgeous Sasha as femme fatale! Beware!
Rendered in Daz Studio 4.8 with Iray, no post-work.
Ok, I tried both, but, the tear is not completely gone like it was in 3Delight. There is still a thin line cutting off the bottom of his irises. Surely you can make them completely disappear!?
EDIT:
Mmm, looked at 3Delight renders and they are actually the same on him, the tears only completely disappear on other G2 eyes.
Oh well....
If you put the display in nVidia Iray mode (if you can - but there's always the Aux Viewport if using the main viewport is unmanageable) there is a light meter widget next to the view style sphere - click it, then click or drag on an area that should be well lit.
Nice!
RogerBee has made to move to Iray?? Lol!
Those are some nice renders you're getting there.
As for the tear, what shader are you using? I've noticed that sometimes if I want to hide certain material zones in Iray, I have to apply a shader cleaner to set it to the DazDefault shader, and than lower the opacity to "0".
Yes, I moved over to the dark side, LOL! I just wasn't satisfied with the renders I was getting with V7 in 3Delight, so, I saw how she looked in Iray and haven't looked back since. I'll see if I can change the shader on the tear and see what it does.
CHEERS!
Changed it to DS Default via a preset I'd made and it looks the same, I guess it's just how the tears on Darius 6 are.
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Gorgeous!
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Trying to get a Poser character to work in IRay...
A self portrait. Though she might be a bit more booby than I am.
Yep, but real light works like blank discs, the effect that you expose is more like an oscilloscope display, pretty easy to do in photoshop with line and external glow instead tricking iRay. Btw, iRay sometimes crash when I'm playing the mad scientist of Shader experiments, freezing all DazStudio like processing something and nothing is working on background, even ram or cpu, and the need to shut down all the scene.
I was creating a martial artist and the scene got to the trash after this...
Iray has been known to crash DS when you haven't converted certain shaders. That's why most of my recent renders have been naked ones. I'll get some clothing and hair shaders tomorrow and see how I go. I'm sure, when I work on my Helghast, that I'll get a glow I'm happy with, it's just a case of experimenting and seeing what looks right.
CHEERS!
...the easiest way to get around that is to manually apply the base Iray shader to clothing and other props.
True, but then you have to fiddle with settings again. I prefer the one and done option.
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Had some fun with different things in this image.
Used an HDR image I made from one of my pictures as a backdrop.
Used a distant light for the 'sun'.
Tried out Sub D, which I have never touched before.
Changed some render options around to see what they did.
Something I did find out was that to get the shadow under the Chipmunk sitting on the ground I had to lower it below the Dome Ground and ont the scene ground. You can see that in the second render.
Two of the 'better' renders
Chipmunks
Daz Studio 4.8 with Iray, no post-work.
Struggling to create a more realistic skin.
If you go back to p63, Szark posted links to some skin settings, they are a useful jumping off point. The settings I use are a hybrid of those and Mec4D's. I used them on Bjorn and I'm quite happy with how he came out.
CHEERS!
Testing the ripples tutorial of the last DS Creative issue. I should have changed some parameters to make them bigger and softer maybe. Lightning is sun/sky environment only; again, it's not exactly what I wanted but it was getting late and I wanted to let it render overnight. I kind of like it anyway :P
Looks good so far.
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Playing around with more new stuff...
Baryolax + expansion, Raven for Genesis 2 in an Ultrasuit with Reptilian 6 legs, and a mix of Exo (Creature Collection) and Reptilian 6 main and tail in a Genesis Supersuit. I think the general scene is a Stonemason 'scifi corridor' freebie.
Everything liberally tweaked for Iray.
Originally I had a human in a spacesuit off to the left, but I kept experiencing crashes. It SEEMED to be some sort of memory 'too much stuff' crash. Same deal if I set the subd on these figures to 3 (they are all set to 1, which doesn't make me happy).
I'm a little ... perturbed at possible memory problems, but what can you do. Since the figure was extraneous (and these figures look ok at subd 1), so be it.
Edit: Oh, and my current 'semi-drawn looking' postwork.
Here is my latest Iray render, featuring the new wolf model under production...
Nice! Some previous wolves (from other people) have looked a bit more like... rodents, if anything. This one looks appropriately lupine. ;)
I am sorry I haven't update my settings or made the shader preset, I have been busy but in short I dropped the SSS maps for the Transluceny Weight as they were messing with the SSS itself. Also I increased the Top Coat thickness to 22000.00 with an IOR of 1.50. Adding thickness to the top coat allowed the back lighting to spread forward more as it would in reality. Plus it gives it that touch of blue that we used to give in the spec channel when rendering with 3DL. I will do another test render tonight and all being well post in tomorrow. It still isn't prefect but it is a big improvment to my first human figure render posted a few pages back.
Rogerbee for the tears I used a almost black diffuse colour and gave it an IOR of 1.34 (not sure if it should be 1.33) at 1.00.
...actually all you have to do is go into the surfaces tab, expand the clothing item to show all the "children", then select all and apply the base Iray shade. That will set everything to Iray stats so even older shaders should not be an issue. It also helps to speed up the render process as it doesn't have to perform the conversion during rendering.
...did you use the M3 Space Suit? As it has been around for a while, it could have been a shader conflict.
I test rendered my railway station scene with 5 figures and the volumetric fog turned on and it didn't crash (and I only have 11 GB of physical memory available after Windows takes its share).
You should be able to set Sub_D just for the render process which will save on the geometry.