Via Serena in the iray, what do i do?
Mistara
Posts: 38,675
in The Commons
is there something i have to do before it can render in the iray?
http://www.daz3d.com/starry-night-for-via-serena
http://www.daz3d.com/via-serena
i bought the tiki iray lamps, thought it would help
thanks 
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I don't own it but according to the ad copy it's a scene preset so you just open that scene & render in iRay. Although you might want to check the iRay render presets to they set with their scene preset to may the render smaller or bigger and so on.
I can't see any iray presets listed on the product pages. You probably need to convert all of the materials to iray Uber base.
It would be saved as part of the scene file or not?
Scene: (.DUF and .PP2)
Via Serena predates Iray. Did you convert all the surfaces from 3Delight to Iray Uber, switch all the Starry Night lanterns to emissives, all that? (Oh, and don't use the Starry Night skydome in Iray; it's not built for that.)
For Starry Night, there are also a lot of lights that need to have photometric mode turned on. (a LOT of lights! but they're grouped, so you can just select the members of each group in the scene menu and do that all at once) And then you'll need to tinker to see what level they need to be.
I'm tinkering with Via Serena now, just out of curiosity, and the surfaces transfer into Iray Uber just fine, even without Normal maps (although it would look better with them), but the lights need to have their strength turned way up.
I have it and it is 3Delight. It has a Skydome that needs either deleted or set to render in Iray. I changed everything with the Iray Uber Shader then set the Skydome settings to allow the light through from the Iray dome. I also set the lights to Photometric and turned the Main Light (sun) up. I'll post a render and the skydome settings in a little while.
Did you have any issues with the lantern lights on the left side of Via Serena, if you're using Starry Night? The ones on the right side converted to photometric just fine; the ones on the left side don't seem to be doing anything. I've even tried replacing them, but they just won't make any light on that side. It's acting like there's something completely blocking them, but the lanterns are mostly open. There's not even glass in the parts where there could be. On one side, I get the shadows of the lantern frame where the light shines through; on the other, nothing. No sign of any light.
EDIT: Figured it out. On the right side, the lights are placed above the candle; on the left side, they're down a little bit, and they're IN the candle. (Or possibly in the flame.) 3Delight doesn't care; Iray considers the lights to be completely encased and won't render them. Easy enough to fix.
Oh, if it predates iRay it's easy to update to iRay by selecting the models in the Scene tab & then the Surfaces for each of those models and going to the Content Library tab and to the Shader Presets - iRay - DAZ Uber - !iRay Uber Base.duf applied to each and all of your surfaces.
Then for each of the candles & lanterns & lights in your Serena scene you select the glowing light part of that model (you'll have to hope them named them easy to understand) and change the Emmisive color to white or some other color. Then percause the light temperature (K - Kelvin) is defaulted to 6500K (good for sunlight noon) you want to change the light temperature to 2700K which is the typical flame light or sunset or sunrise color of light. Then change the candelas unit of measure to a unit of measure more common available to people like us, say lumens or watts. If you change it to watts you want to change the number for 1500 down to about 5 watts or 10 watts per candle (actually really it's less than that in real life). Then in the iRay Rendering Settings you want to enable the Bloom Filter Enable. I get results I like for nighttime lights by setting the Bloom Filter Radius to 0.20 and Bloom Filter Threshold 2000.00 and Bloom Filter Brightness Scale 1.00.
Now you may want to individually attend to each model surface and update those to use iRay / PBR settings that are appropriate for what sort of physical material those are and to do that you need to search the net for PBR/PBS material settings. You'll find some already calculated settings for common materials that artists use.
Included is a link to a thread at the Unity 3D forums with a link to PBR shader settings you can translate those to be appropriate to DAZ Studio iRay PBR Surfaces settings:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/official-5-0-pbr-calibration-charts.289416/
This is the daylight one, 25 minutes and 111 iterations so a bit grainy. I'll try the night one next. I've also attached the skydome settings.
Oh, and I left off some good advice Fishtales gave me about rendering in iRay earlier. Change the ISO for indoors or nighttime scenes to 400 ISO or 800 ISO. It is in the Tonemapping section of the iRay rendering tab.
This is straight out the box using one of the provided cameras. Everything is 3Delight but rendered in Iray. 91 iterations at 35 minutes and it is still showing 0%. CPU only :)
Looks really good.
I just took a look at the maps to see how it was built, and Via Serena is really oddly mapped, even (perhaps especially) for 3Delight. Several surfaces, obviously, but only one specular map, for one of the floors. Given that almost none of Via Serena is particularly reflective, I guess that makes sense. Only a couple of bump maps, and three normal maps -- for both the patio floor around the pool and the different floor behind the chair and columns, and, of all things, I think the rust on the lanterns. A couple of the bump and normal maps didn't seem to apply with the preset materials, so I went in and added them where needed. And the roof rather desperately needs bump and normal maps it doesn't have -- although it does have a displacement map that I stuck in the bump map slot, since displacement doesn't do much in Iray.
That said, as long as you're not doing a shot where the flat geometry of the roof shows, you should be OK with the maps it has; you'll just need to make sure they're all applied.
The night shot again this time everything changed using the Iray Uber Shader. No stars though so that would need a bit more work. 40 minutes, 105 iterations and 23% done.
Starry nights with the lights adjusted and its own skydome. The Iray Uber thing turns it into an emissive surface, so I just turned it down to 2 cdcdm*2 so that it was barely doing anything, which seems to be enough. The lantern point lights are still too bright, I think, but I can fix that later.
Also another test render with the Labella Magica skydome from elsewhere.
Both CPU renders, ran for about 10 minutes each. No idea wht the completion percentage was.
Nice, I like the one with the moon.
thanks!! first step is to select all the surfaces and do iray uber base ...
It is probably worth changing the water to use an iRay specific water shader, this is less important for the shaders of the walls, ceilings etc
Those are good. I need to buy that model.
cant find my iray shader base
did it come with ds 4.8?
n/m found it , with help lol thanks!
I checked in DIM in my installed files for DAZ Studio 4.9 Pro and one of the listed shaders are a list of files that end in .dse (DAZ scripting engine???) or .sdl (shader definition language) and one that ends in .mdl (material definition language). You can check your installed files for DAZ Studio 4.8 Pro and see if it has iRay Uber in any of the installed files names. I think iRay only came about in D|S 4.9 but am not sure and they may of patch D|S 4.8 to support iRay since then. You should have a dropdown in the Render tab for iRay is your version supports iRay.
I can't however, find which package has the !Iray Uber Base.dif file though. On my standard D|S 4.9 install it is found in the 'Content Library' tab under
<My Library>/Shader Presets/Iray/DAZ Uber/!Iray Uber Base.duf
founf it, thanks.
searched 'daz uber'
next step is the skydome?
i'm using the tiki torches http://www.daz3d.com/tiki-torches
do i supposed to do the scene lights only option?
or is not meant to light whole scene?
need an emissive moon
Technically moon's supposed to be reflective but that is one bright light shining on it...don't know if you can do that in DAZ.
The Starry Night set comes with a "moon" distant light that you can convert to photometric. It'll have default settings, so you can tinker until it's as bright as you want. It doesn't come with a moon prop or a moon in the sky, though.
The moon in the sky in my render was actually from the Labella Magica set. I was testing it, and forgot to remove it. (It's a volumetric plane, however that works.)
I don't have any idea how the Tiki Torches work, I'm afraid.
When you find Iray Uber Bas right lick on it, scroll to the bottom of the drop doen menu and choose Create Custom Action. This will add it to the Script Menu at the top of Studio between Windows and Help. Now all you have to do is select everything, go up and select the Script Menu and choose the Uber Base to run it, no more searching :)
I put a Milky Way HDRI in for stars in this one. The image was pin sharp so I don't know what Studio does to images when they are added to domes they all come out fuzzy. If I want fuzzy I can do that with DOF or haze, I wish they would fix it.
.dse are encrypted script files (.dsa are ASCII, .dsb are compressed).
add script trick was awesome! thanks!!
I agree! how many times have I searched for it when it could have been so close to hand
hey i made a plane emiss, it's emissing !! luminence set 100,000
next step try on the starry dome
on the via serena starry dome, try surfaces, geometry, i set horizontal tiling to 10. stars look more normal
starrydome as light source not working out so well
cranking luminence makes it whiter. tried putting it's star texture map in the luminence.
it's up to the tiki torches
need more light !!
2 torches light luminence set to 300,000,000
very Y lowered starry dome horizontal tiling = 10