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Absolutely, that has been one of the key points of Reality since the beginning.
As Kim mentioned before Lux works with Light Groups, which is in fact the tab that you highlights. Each light is given a group and all mesh lights are by default in the "Mesh Lights" group. If you want to adjust lights individually, while rendering, all you have to do is to put in a separate group.
Click on a light in the Reality editor, and you will see the light group. Change it to any name that you want and in Lux you will be able to adjust that light individually.
Hope this helps.
The handle aiming tip was a "Eureka" moment for me. The light literally came on. I've struggled with Reality, but once pushed the handles to the three meshlights out to intersect with the figure, I suddenly came together. Thanks, Paolo! Think of Modern Family's Sofia Vergara as "Wonder Woman"!
Hi Steve.
You're very welcome. I'm glad that it was helpful. Interestingly enough, the handle trick came up as a "happy accident." After I designed the original Mesh Light prop I asked John Reilly to help me defining some morphs. While I asked just for the snoot and gobo morphs, he added the handle too. After a second of surprise I thought: "this is going to be excellent for aiming the light." I immediately replicated the morph into the Poser version of the Mesh light. So, thank you very much John for the tip.
And thank you Steve for the fun image. BTW, if anybody wants to post their Reality renders in this thread, you are very welcome.
Cheers.
Paolo, one thing I was wondering. Is there a higher quality setting in Lux, something other than just starting the render. Are there some settings in Lux that will increase the quality or is it just time to run the render?
I ask as I do quite a few outdoor renders and as such, use the sun for lighting. I know I can get different looks and colors from adjusting the angle of the sunlight, but overall quality seems to be less that what I am seeing with Iray for example. Granted I want to stick with reality and Lux because setting up materials is a nightmare with Iray and a breeze with Reality, but I am looking for better quality.
Lux, quality is always set to "11" :) and I dont quite understand what you mean. Maybe you can provide an i age to illustrate the point?
Keep in mind that the sun is the most unflattering, harsh light that you can have in a scene. It can be exactly what is needed fir a scene, but it is a very hard light. Many times, 3D landscapes are lit using IBL instead. Generally, IbL gives a more pleasant, and realistic effect.
Thanks Paolo for the info and nice to know I am not missing something ( I like the 11 spinal tap reference, LOL). I have tried the IBL route many times and was never really happy with it either. I think what I was looking for was the IBL softness/quality with the actual sun light shining on the surfaces, Here is the latest image I was working on with both IBL and sunlight and went wih the sunlight only option. I got the subtle effect I was going for with the sun shining thru some palm leaves (out of the scene) onto the scene as seen by the shadows across the body and lack of actual sun rays towards the back of the scene.
To make IBL work you will need an HDR image, like the ones available at hdrlabs.com, in the sIBL archive. Some of those maps do have a sun present and in that case you will get sharp shadows. If you use a map that doesn't have a sun present, then you can simply add a mesh light, skale it small, and then move it up in the sky, in the position where the sun should be. Because the light is small and moved far away from the sun subject, which makes it even smaller, you will end up with very sharp shadows while retaining the great light of IBL. Mixing IBL and sun will not work. The sun will overpower the IBL and it will be hard to balance both lights.
Hope this helps.
Thank you, that is one of the strong points of Reality, the ease of editing materials. And if you think that it's good now, you will see with the upcoming 4.3 update, which s free for all Reality 4 users. I added a feature that will make editing materials even easier and more fun.
Cheers.
Light-Emitting Materials
Sometime it is necessary to make some areas of a model emit light. For example, we might have a TV screen that needs to glow in the dark.
Reality makes this taks very easy. If we click on the Modifiers tab of any material, we find, at the bottom of the panel, the Light emission modifier, which is enabled by a checkbox.
Enable that option and the material will start emitting light. It's that simple. Now, if we look at the Light emission panel, we can see that there is room for a texture to be used for the light emission. By default, the light emitted by the material is simply white light. If we want to use the same colors that are used in the Diffuse channel, the channel that gives the surface color, we can achieve that effect by simply linking to the Diffuse texture. This is done by clicking on the gear menu next to the texture and by selecting "Use Existing." This option allows us to use and existing texture for the channel. When we select it, a window opens showing us the list of available texture for the material, and their role. For example, Diffuse, Bump, or Specular.
So, we can simply select the Diffuse texture and then light emitted will have the colors of the surface.
Now, when people use this option, they generally expect some sort of glow. That is not how light behaves in he real world. Light sabers, if they really existed, would probably look almost completely white. A light emission device, when look straight in front, looks white, especially if photographed. Cameras have much less latitude of the human eye. Light sabers, or many other glowing effects in movies, are created artificially, using digital manipulation and tracking of otherwise dull objects. Since we use a physics-based renderer (PBR), the effect returned is consistent with the laws of Nature and not Hollywood's ;)
I have prepared a short video tutorial that shows how to make materials emit light. You can find it at out YouTube channel:
Enjoy!
A few months ago I posted this tip on my blog, I'm reproducing it here for your convenience.
How to make an invisible light
For years you heard me saying that you can’t do that, ins’t that true? As I often said: “Reality and LuxRender are about physics, and in the real world you can’t hide a light. If you need to hide a light move it out of the frame.”
And that is a very good piece of advice. So, today I’m going to tell you how to cheat
This trick works with the new accelerated rendering of Reality 4.1 and above.
Here is the image that we are going to create:
The light is produced by those ceiling lamps that we see scattered all around. Except that the shadow of the railing is projected in exactly the opposite direction that we would expect. And the light on the floor has a cool quality while the lamps are clear warm, as we can see from the yellowish reflection on the ceiling. Not to mention the fact that the base of the dome is extremely bright. So what’s going on here?
What’s happening is that there is a globe light right in the center of the dome and that light is much brighter than the ceiling lamps and it’s set at a cool color temperature. And it’s invisible!
In the center of the dome I have created a sphere. This setup was done in DAZ Studio but it will work exactly the same in Poser. The secret here is to create a primitive with the lowest amount of face possible. To do so I selected, in the Studio menu, Create | New primitive… and selected Sphere. I then edited the values before confirming the creation of the primitive by setting the number of segments to 4 and the number of sides to 8.
Anyway, that generates a sphere in the scene. I then moved it to the right position and in Reality I selected the material, which is called Default. I didn’t bother with any other settings, insteAd I just clicked on the “Modifiers” tab and enabled Light emission. Here it is:
So fa so good, nothing special, you probably know this stuff already. Ready for the cheat code? Here it is:
That’s it!
Since the sphere has only one material and that material is completely transparent, the sphere will not be visible but it will emit light. Render the scene and, in LuxRender, set the other lamps to a warm color temperature, like 3500, and the sphere light to some cool value, like 7000. Adjust the exposure and power of the lights and you are done. Invisible lights in the physical world. Who would have thought of that?
Happy rendering.
Everyone wants to start creating an image right out of the gate. Props, models, background, lights are added into the scene, and the render button is hit. Then the disappointment that it doesn't quite look like what you had in your head. Does that sound familiar? One common thread I hear from anyone rendering is how to get the lighting just right. Everyone including myself would like to have a magic formula to give us the best light for any image. Well, like all good things it takes practice. I was struggling a while back on learning how to use mesh lights in Reality. After a conversation with Paolo, I took a step back and explored how lighting affects a model.
The set up I used was a cube to enclose the model, one mesh light, and a backdrop from Daz. Under each picture, I documented where the light is then positioned, the size, rotation, sensitivity, exposure, and FStop.
I will be using this to help remind me how the light falls, and size affects the shadows.
I thought I would share this and maybe someone else will find it useful.
I am glad I took the time go through this exercise; it reminded me you must first crawl before running. I was trying to run when I wasn’t really prepared to do so.
I would strongly recommend that if you are having issues to try these or something like this.
Hi Kim.
I'm glad that you enjoyed and benefitted from the exercise. Thank you for posting it here.
That exercise highlights a very useful idea that is often overlooked. When we need to learn something new, it's best if we isolate parts of the problem.
I often say that 80% of the scene is lighting, which can be discouraging for some people because one of the most common lamentations I read in forums is "I dont' know about lighting." Wich is then followed by statements about using some pre-made lighting package. Those packages are useful but they might not fit every situation. Or even some common situations. The best way to make the art that you are dying to make is to learn how to light. To do that you need to know how a light behaves and to learn that you need to practice. But you need to practice smart. Just throwing a random combination of lights into a scene will not work.
Often I see suggestions to use a 3-point lighting scheme of some sort. 3-point lighting can be good but, if you are learning about lighting, that scheme has two lights too many. If you don't know how light works, how are you supposed to understand how three lights interact? You can't! That's why it's important to work in isolation. Use only one light, like Kim described. Resist the temptation to add anything else. Do what Kim did and learn the effect of a change on one single light, without interferences. You will be surprised how fast you will learn how a light behaves. And then it will happen to you what happened to Kim, who went from being frustrated about lighting to producing images such as these:
Cheers.
So I'm JUST starting to use DS and Iray and have been a Poser only user until March but now have a lot of DS only content. I'm thinking of getting Reality for Poser but do I need it for DS too? Is it better or easier than Iray? Can I use the Iray products (shaders, lights, characters) I just bought with Reality? Is the leaning curve hard? Thanks.
Hi Wonderland.
Thank you for your questions.
The advantages of using Reality are:
- Renderignn with the most accurate PBR, unbiased rendering system, based on LuxRender, the benchmark of quality in the field.
- The easiest material editor in the industry.
- Same interface whether you use DAZ Studio or Poser.
- Non-blocking rendering: continue working in DAZ Studio or Poser while the render runs.
- Adjust the light's intensity and color while the render runs.
- Adjust the scene's exposure while the render runs.
- Use GPU and CPU acceleration at the same time.
- Use GPUs from nVidia, AMD, or other brands, and you can mix them together.
- Apply film emulation to create a new, more filmic look.
- Physically-Based Materials make it intuitive to edit your scene. No confusing nodes or endless lists of properties.
- Run multiple renders at the same time.
- Procedural textures that can be used to amazing patterns with a few clicks.
- Automatic presets simplify your workflow.
- Share material presets with other Reality artists.
- Use the same presets in the DAZ Studio and Poser editions of Reality.
- Stop and resume the render at any time.
- Unlimited network rendering, even with mixed OSes (Mac OC, Windows, and Linux machines).
- Fully documented.
As you can see from the comment of FSMCDesigns, he finds editing materials in Reality much easier. The Reality material editor is designed with the artist, and not the computer, in mind. That means that materials are simple, use recognizable terms, like "polish" for metal, for example, and have a type associate. When you see a material being labelled as Glass there is no doubt on what that is. Unlike Poser, there are no nodes, but you get the same level of flexibility with the Reality Texture Editor that you would get with a node editor.
All materials are converted automatically. Keep in mind that shaders that are meant to exploit a specific renderer will work best with that renderer. Lights are the same. To get the most out of Reality you need to use that program. Reality provides a parallel rendering system, it's not a series of scripts or shaders to make the built-in renderer better. It's an additional rendering system. Reality comes with its own lights, which are the more flexible in the market. They are included. The same is for all the material types. If you want photo-realistic glass, you got it. You want photo-realistic water? You got it. Same for metal, cloth, and others. There is no need to add anything else. Skin with SSS? It's automatically activated without you having to do anything.
I designed Reality to not just give the highest amount of realism but to be also the easiest way of creating your own vision.
Artist brucelee27 agrees. After posting the following image, he said that Reality made him re-discover the pleasure of making 3D art:
Hope this helps.
Sorry, but I'm still confused. Do I need Reality for both Poser and DS? Do you create the scene first in Poser or DS, save it, then bring it into Reality as a separate app and then adjust lights and materials/shaders or is it a plug-in? Can you adjust the scene and poses in Reality or you just have the final saved scene and you just adjust lights and materials/shaders? Do I use the vendor's original materials for skin, clothes, etc... or does all that have to be done in a different way in Reality? Sorry for all the questions but I'm just having a hard time envisioning exactly what the product is. Thanks :)
The learning curve is not bad at all, the Reality interface is pretty straightforward, at no point are you trying to interpret a wall of properties from the top to bottom of your screen like with say Iray or even 3delight.
Plus Paolo is very quick to assist with any questions/problems over at the pret a 3d forums: http://preta3d.com/forums/index.php
For me being able to redo all the materials of a figure or object right in reality without having to touch a thing in daz is pretty sweet. Glass with a click, metal with a click, water with a click, cloth with a click. All with more options to play with or not. Being able to work on a scene in daz while a scene is rendering (without completely bogging down your system) also a major plus. And being able to adjust the lights and camera settings during the render, also pretty sweet.
Its a plugin. Once installed you access reality through daz (or poser) from the render menu (or you can put a button for it on a toolbar, which is what I do), clicking on it instead of the iray or 3delight render buttons. Load/create your scene, place lights, camera, finalize poses (you do not adjust poses in reality, its for tweaking the settings of materials, lights and cameras), then launch reality from within daz/poser and the reality interface opens. You use the various tabs to access the materials panel (and do all your surface/materials adjustments there rather than in daz/poser), or lights, or cameras, etc, and once you are done hit render in the reality interface and reality will export the render to luxrender. You can jump back and forth from reality to daz/poser, reality opens in its own window so you can minimize it to get it out of the way so you can go back and adjust things, add or remove things from the scene, whatever. Luxrender will then launch as a separate program and load the scene and start rendering, only to stop when you tell it to. You will be able to see a rough of the whole scene within seconds to minutes depending on complexity. You can even adjust the lighting, camera exposure, film settings, while the render is running.
And you can continue to work in daz/poser while lux is rendering.
Reality loads whatever you put in the scene so yes you can certainly just load a figure (iray or 3delight), add clothes, lights, camera, use default materials, not tweak a thing in reality and just hit render to see whats what but often you will want to go in and tinker.
Hi Wonderland.
If you use Poser then you need to buy Reality Poser Edition. If you use DAZ Studio then you need to buy Reality DAZ Studio Edition. It all depends on what you use. From the point of view of Reality, Poser or DAZ Studio are the host programs. The way it works is simple:
BTW, right now Reality is on sale at DAZ at 50%. You can't get a PBR system as complete as Reality for less than $24.98. It's a steal :)
Hope this helps.
Thank you for chimining-in Gederix, much appreciated.
Thanks. I use both Poser and DS. I've been a Poser only user until this March and am just learning the basics of DS and Iray now. I will definitely be getting it for Poser because it is still hard to get realistic renders there, but not sure if I will get it for DS because I've already invested in a lot of Iray shaders and lights and it seems like those already are very realistic and since I already invested in it, I should learn how to use it to its full ability unless Reality works with Iray shaders? Plus I also have some 3Delight shaders which I purchased before I understood the difference LOL. Sorry, still confused and trying to figure all this out! Still brand new to DS and trying to figure it out and Iray, and then now trying to figure out how Reality fits with this! The Poser version is already in my cart. But could you please explain how it works with DS and Iray? Also, how long will they be on sale? Maybe if I have some time to play with the Poser version, I can see if I need it for DS too... Thanks! :)
I don't know how long it will be on sale, that is decided by DAZ. They often do a one-day sale at this discount so it might be over tomorrow.
Regarding iRay, Reality does not use it. We have pioneered PBR rendering in 2010, five years before iRay was introduced, and we feel that we have the most advanced renderer in the market. Reality converts the Studio materials automatically, whether that have been configured with 3Delight or iRay shaders. There is not much to say about it :). The process happens behind the scenes, automatically. All you have to do is to call Reality and then take advantage of the features that it offers.
Cheers.
OK thanks for all the info! :)
Here is a short, 9 minutes, video that I made that shows how to get started with Reality in DAZ Studio:
Same concept but with Poser, although the vide is showing a much older version of Reality. Both editions have now the same exact interface:
Hope this helps.
Wonderland, I have both poser and DS and Reality for both. Reality is about the same for either, but you have to decide what features you want from each program with the figures you want to use and any plugins and effects that each program provides BEFORE you open the Reality interface. I was a long time poser user and only switched to DS because Reality had just come out and in order to use Reality and Lux I had to learn DS.
Years later and now being a fairly exclusive DS user, Paolo comes out with Reality for Poser, so I jumped on board to give it a shot. Needless to say I found the Poser interface clumsy and unintuative now that I was used to DS and I was severely missing things in DS like the smoothing modifer and collision that I couldn't continue with poser any longer.
My point being that your Reality experience will be about the same with either version, so it's up to you which scene setup scenario works best for you if trying to decide which Reality version you want to buy into.
As for Iray, 3DL or poser materials, you will have tweak any of them once you load them into Reality since Lux has it's own format/logic. Good think is, once you figure that logic out, it works in any version of Reality, LOL. For me, understanding the logic of how shaders work in Reality is much easier than understanding the logic behind Iray material settings or worse yet, the poser node based material room.
Hope that helps
OK, well I'm trying it now in Poser and obviously I don't know what I'm doing because it's coming out really weird, ribbons on the outfit are invisible and the character has odd pock marks on her face... There is only a pdf for installation, not instructions. Is there a manual somewhere? Also it said Reality will install a folder in Poser and it did, but it is empty... I think it said there was supposed to be lights and props. My brain is still reeling from learning DS and Iray which I just started mid-march, so I hope the learning curve for this isn't too bad!
@FSMCDesigns, as far as Poser vs DAZ, I wish they were combined! To me the interface of Poser is much easier, I can set up and pose a character in like a minute, and it takes much longer in DS because the controls are all over the place, there are no face and hand cameras and the UI just drives me crazy, but then there are other things I really like, like the various ways you can save things and the ability to quickly change characters' age and size or into toons, the morphability is much better, autofit when it actually works... But V4 clothes fit V4 all the time, never have to worry about smoothing and V4 is very versatile as far as her facial features if you have a lot of morphs but the Genesis gang are more versatile as far as body shapes, although I'm not finding G2 that special, more of a transition character for fitting between G1 and G3... And I'm spending too much time with utilities to transfer over things from V4/M4 to the various Genesises... Anyway, I hated DS at first, now I'm learning to like it, and there are a lot of features that seem really interesting that I haven't learned how to use yet, but the UI still drives me crazy at times LOL. Poser to me is much easier, but I'm in kind of a rut with it, on auto-pilot, so DS has stretched me artistically and stretched my brain cells!
Paolo, I may PM you my issues and screenshots if that's OK, if the video you posted doesn't resolve my problems. And please let me know if there is a pdf manual. Thanks!
OK, I just saw the video. The main thing I did wrong was not use the mesh lights because my Reality folder is empty... Not sure how that hapened or how to rectify that... I used an IBL, not sure if it was Reality's or my own... But that shouldn't be the reason why the ribbons on her outfit were invisible and there are pock marks on her face. I'll send screenshots to you via PM if that's OK. Thanks.
Hi.
There is a manual, you can find it in the Help menu. It's a full, 160 pages long, guide. Please read the introduction, it will help you enormously. If you have any issue please post your examples and information in the Reality forums. Obviously you need to give it a bit of time to become familiar but we will gladly help you.
The lights and props have been installed in the location that you have selected and added to the Poser library. You need to look in the Library/Lights and Library/Props sections, there should be a Reality folder.
Cheers.
Ok, I'll post the screenshot in the Reality forum, I couldn't find a way to upload it to you personally.... Oh, umm, where is the Reality forum?
http://preta3d.com/forums/
Wonderland, you can find all the links, including our social pages, in the Reality User's Guide.
Cheers.
Hi Wonderland.
Another tip that can benefit both new users and experienced ones is to use my Perfect Shot Scene (PSS). PSS is a freebie available at my site that provides a great starting point for a portrait. You jusy load it, add your character and render. It gives you the perfect result every time. Once you become more experienced you can use the PSS as a starting point and modify the lights to your liking.
Cheers.