Show Us Your Iray Renders. Part V
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Me too. I just rotate the dome in 30 degree increments and render for 2 or 3 minutes in CPU mode since that's all my computer will support.
...I was just on the Skin Material Optimisation thread and it seems one has to reset skins as well as lighting from any older scenes still in progress due to the Iray update in 4.9. As I mentioned there, reminds me of what I had to go through with older scenes set up in 2.5 when Reality 4.x (and its subsequent patches) was released . I ended up uninstalling R4 and Lux because of the constant frustration of having to reset all the surfaces again and again.
Here's what I use to set up with HDRIs...
The 360 protractor is from Wikipedia.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0f/Protractor1.svg/2000px-Protractor1.svg.png
Just apply it to a plane, align the axis (x and z), drop a sphere on it (doesn't have to be colored, I just find a colored one easier to see) and do a top down render...even at a high resolution it will render quickly. Also, you can use it with any renderer, if you keep the coordinate systems straight.
You could also use a cylinder...it may actually be a bit better, come to think of it.
If I remember correctly the "world" is set up so that characters are facing south when they load with east being to your right and west to your left. Unless they have made strange adjustments to the HDRI then you would never have direct sun from north or south.
...again for me it's not where the shadows are cast, it is how the "backdrop" imagry created by the HDRI sphere is oriented in relation to the characters/props when it loads. HDRI backdrops are only visible in a rendered image, not OpenGL which is what the viewport uses by default. The only mode in which I can see the backdrop while seting up a scene is in Iray view mode (which is effectively rendering the scene as one works), however as I don't have the graphics horsepower to maintain it, the programme soon runs out of memory and crashes to the desktop (Daz 4.8).
The HDRI is semi-independent of the viewport orientation, insofar as the creators don't know what application you plan to use them in. However, I do understand what you mean; I can't use the Iray viewport mode either because I am currently limited to CPU rendering. And one thing that has happened with mine have been floating characters because the apparent ground and actual image ground don't "mesh".
You render 2 or 3 minutes to check to orientation of the light shadows in the HRDI before you do the full render. It's enough to see how the shadows fall. If you don't want to that's fine too but you can still figure it out and use your PCs.
Click on image for full size.
Free mannequin mentioned in today's thread, with Mec4D vol 2 'old wood' shader, plus a piano from some modern room thing. (I was going to retexture it with Mec4D's stuff, but it looks good as-is, so hey)
...again it's not the lighting or shadows I have trouble with, it's the backdrop scenery itself. Take for instance the Yosemite HDRI with the roadway. If you don't get it positioned right, any vehicle you are using will end up looking like it's driving on the wrong side of the road, through gravel or through grass into trees rather than on the proper side of the roadway. A render process may only need to run for say 3 minutes or so, but sometimes the calculations before rendering commences can take longer. Having to repeat that a number of times still adds up, particularly if you find you need to move 3D elements in the scene around so size relationships between them and the background look correct and they don't appear to "float".
In one scene I have, it takes over 40 minutes before anything appears in the render window..If I so mhch as look at it crosseyed, Windows goes into "not responding" mode for five to ten minutes slowing the process down even more. The actual rendering from that point on takes just under four hours.
What it boils down to for myself is to really work with Iray efficiently, apparently requires a newer, more powerful system than I have. Unless I hit the Megabucks Lotto, that ain't going to happen.
But do you need everything visible in your scene? does it crash if you only have key elements visible? I mostly end up working with my 8gb non-GPU memory. and I still use the aux viewport constantly. But if I'm say workin on the general lighting of the scene I won't have the figures visible
Other useful thing if you're worried about memory, I usually set the render samples down to something like 30 until I'm ready for my final render
...using Iray View mode sucks the GPU memory dry in moments (as it is also maintaining system video) no matter what I have in the scene. I also have a first generation (Nehalem) 2.8 GHz i7 that doesn't have or support all the graphics processes which newer models do. This is also why I permanently ditched Reality/Lux as I don't get the speed bonus that R4.2/Lux1.5 are supposed to offer (haven't even bothered to DL the last several updates). Iray isn't as glacial as Lux on my system, but I feel I'm just floundering around randomly pushing buttons to see if I can get anything to work right.
@kyoto
I use a laptop, 16GB memory, i5 processor with 4 cores daz using 3 so I can do other things while it renders, no Nvidia card. I use domes and HDRI a lot and set them up by using the Aux Viewport set to Iray, hiding it when positioning stuff and viewing it to see the effect. Th AUX port isn't a full iRay render more like a cut down one that renders faster. To see the dome and the HDRI for positioning you can set the dome to finite and view dome, click on it and click on the zoom button in preview mode which will take you outside the dome and you can see the hdri on it. The dome can also be made transparent so what is inside can be seen, although from very far away :) There are other things but I am in the middle of a render just now and, with a memory like a seive, I will have to wait on it finishing to go and look :)
Perhaps this preview sphere would be of use.
http://www.sharecg.com/v/84693/browse/21/DAZ-Studio/Preview-sphere-for-IRay-render-dome
I too prefer PDF tutorials to videos. They are generally much easier on my aging eyes.
Why do tutorial video producers always use the darkside screen style? It makes it very difficult to see what's going on, especially if the video is medium definition 720p, rather than true high definition 1080p.
Cheers,
Alex.
I really dislike video tutorials and how common they've become.
If you really need to show how to do something in video, embed an animated gif or have a video just for the specific thing.
...when I started in this eight years ago almost every tutorial was a either downloadable PDF or HTML page that could be bookmarked. Learned a lot from both types. Since everything shifted to video in recent years, I feel I have learned little as again, my retention rate with video is very poor. So, often I end up just muddling about on my own.
Trial and error is a bad learning process and often ends up discouraging the student. This is why for days at a time I do not even bother opening Daz up anymore.
I totally feel like Khory, but not with daz but with post work. I feel like i grasp lighting and mood in Iray but there are things that are just not possible in Iray. Like true volumetrics...or special effects that use anything but primitives. Case in point this render i did i like the lighting and the composition. What i would like to add is a half sphere kinda shield around the sorceress. A beam exentending out from the staff of Evilson striking the shield and sparking. Also creating a shimmer heat wave type effect on the fire in the scene....all these require post work and i have spent days trying to find a tutorial to even know where to begin let alone how to do the specific thing i am envisioning in my mind. The lack of beginner tuts for things like this is really frustrating the crap outta me. I have bold ideas but i feel like i need to go to college for my hobby cause there isnt ready information out there unless your using some 1000 dollar 3rd party software.
Daniel
...nice scene and I can see what you are saying. My postwork skills are pretty bad as I do not have a steady hand for doing detailed work.
Heat waves are particularly tricky to make look believable. I have one scene I did a while back (3DL) called Summer in the City, where I wanted to use heat waves but just couldn't get them to look right. As I don't have PS. I don't have the full array of tools it offers nor can use any of Ron's overlays, just the brushes.
One suggestion for the beam from the staff, if you have HeroExtreme FX, that will work in Iray. It has several beam and magical effects. I think one of Jepe's SpecialZ sets also has beam props and those work in Iray as well.
Alex, I suspect that most tutorial authors use that screen style because it suits their workflow and if they tried doing a tutorial in any other layout, they would be lost.
Recent mannequin thread inspired:
Click on image for 1920x1080 version in new window.
Many shaders come from Mec4d's recent shaderpack: the mannequin surfaces, the plastic cup, the wood on the clock, the frosting on the cupcake.
...well it appears that Predatron came up with a nice tool to figure out how an HDRI sphere is oriented.
...and it was free.
Fast Ride Orignal post found in my gallery
Rendered with Daz Studio Iray.
HDRi Background
Click for best view. full sized 1920 x 1080 HD 133kb
On the HDRIHaven.com site is a good HDRI done at dusk from that earlier scene you were working on. You can pretend protagonist is being chased with floodlights. 300 Degree Dome on is facing floodlights and 120 degrees facing away from the floodlights (actually about 150 degrees because there are 3 floodlights.
Oh, I forgot the HDRI is called Preller Drive and it's a freebie.
Try this for the heat effect in Photoshop - it would probably work in any photo program using similar tools.
There are also tutes for animated heat effects in After Effects on YouTube.
...ahh but it is not free and 1024 x 512 resolution is pretty low quality.
What I really needed was some way to check the position/rotation of the Sphere's backdrop dome without having to go into Iray view mode or run a bunch of render tests. It appears Predatron's light probe tool could be the solution I've been looking for.
No, there is a freebie pack of 5 very high HDRI sets (16K or almost 500MB each!). The one at dusk is called Preller Drive.
...I saw those. already have them. I mostly need good skies that would work with urban scenes for both day and night settings. All too often with daytime HDRIs,I find the sun angle is too low and most of my scene ends up in shadow. Some HDRI's I've used either do not seem to have a bright enough sun or produce realistic shadows (often too sharp or too diffuse) like the Iray "sun" does.
What would be nice to see is something on the order of the old LDP2 and Azure Skies plugins which had different sun elevations for the same sky set. From what I gather though that is extremely difficult and time consuming to do whne creating HDRIs.
In 3DL I had few if any issues as I could use a number of different skydomes I have, both free and commercial, and could set the "sun" (actually a distant light) elevation as I needed. However in Iray, a "conventional" skydome acts like an umbrella and blocks out the Iray sun. As Iray does not have a "shadows off" function like 3DL, there is no way around it.
Tired of having featureless flat blue skies in my scenes all the time.
My advice for easy Iray Skydome conversion:
Refraction IOR 1, weight 1, turn 'share glossy inputs' off, set refraction color to your skydome image, turn glossy weight to 0.
Then adjust the sky to look right through the skydome.
I actually used this method on my last render, converting Easy Environments: Oasis skydome.
Click for full size
I turned off the skydome, set haze to 5 or so, then moved the sun to line up with the sun on the skydome. When you have a cloudy environment, you often have a little more leeway to place the sun where you want.