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224 S 200 W, Suite #250
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© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.Daz 3D is part of
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DAZ Productions, Inc.
224 S 200 W, Suite #250
Salt Lake City, UT 84101
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Just wanted to say I've only tried this on one scene so far but it seems to be an excellent product. Very easy to use and adjust with the presets.
Similar to yours but I only have a 970, no Titans, so my VRAm and Cuda Cores are limited. I made the classic mistake of buying the 970 just before the 1070 was released but there were all sorts of rumors that the Pascal range was a year away and that it would not support Iray anyway, so I jumped and regretted it.
By the way, I use the Skylake inbuilt GPU (BIOS setting on my syetem) to drive my monitor leaving the 970 free for Iray. I'm still confused as to whether that means 4GB VRAM or 3.5 GB as mentioned in some reviews. I really hope the 1070 prices come down soon - here in NZ they are around $700 NZD (about $500 USD compared to $380 if bought in the USA).
My apologies to the people above, i've been mega busy - but i see you all! Thanks for dropping in everyone. :)
Kyoto - Yes, you can. You get all the benefits of soft mesh lighting (aside from spec reflections of course) whilst being completely hidden from view. I just rendered an image of a figure stood inside a cube, and completely surrounded by Ghost lights, almost like a cubicle. There are no other light sources in the scene, just a cube, figure and GLKs. This is a rather extreme example, but as you can see, you can stick them anywhere really.
@KindredArts, this light set looks great! Would you mind showing renders with Daz Studio with something like House of Mog Ruith Interior? The reason I ask is that it comes with wall lights and candelabras that are only lit for Poser. What would be the trick to light them easily with this light set without resorting to surface changes? It also comes with vertical glass windows and a half - moon window above the door.
If you don't have time or that particular product no problem, maybe just some tips would help! Thanks!
...I'm pretty much stuck in the CPU "slow lane" for the forseeable future as I have an older system with a 1 GB card (that is pretty useless for rendering) and cannot afford to upgrade since I am on a fixed income. I would be interesting to see what times people are getting in CPU only mode.
Thanks Snow! Appreciate you dropping by.
I bought the 970 just as iray hit the scene. It was (and still is really) considered a *high-end* video card, which is technically true. It's a great little card, and the clock speed is not at all shabby. As you pointed out though, the VRAM issues didn't help. They were marketed as having 4gb of VRAM, but neglected to mention that only 3.5 gig of that is accessible. I used the 970 for my first six months as a PA and got through it just fine, and that's a fair amount of daily rendering. My advice would be to monitor VRAM like a hawk and try to make your scene's as spartan as possible. Simple character portraits will pose no threat whatsoever, but busy scenes with lots of characters and such will be a bit tricky. As a side note though, i can fill up 12gb of vram pretty quickly with a busy scene - we all have to budget sooner or later :)
Hey db, what do you mean "without resorting to surface changes"? Are you planning on using uber shaders on your older sets or leaving them with the old daz shaders? I've had a look at mog ruith, and i've got no problem buying the set and showing you how i'd light it. I would highly recommend using uber shaders though, if possible. Or perhaps you mean you don't want to use the ambient surfaces from the legacy shaders? Could you elaborate a bit?
Hmm, i've had a few people talk about cpu rendering, and i really don't know what to suggest. I'm very confident my set can clear images faster across the board (if not fully complete faster). I wouldn't say it's the magic bullet for cpu rendering however. Hopefully some cpu campers can post some feedback, until then i wouldn't want to steer you in one direction or the other.
I do have one quick question now that I'm working with it more. Are the Artificial Light Presets (like the candle) supposed to be used on a tiny horiztonal ghost light over the candle prop with no emission on the flame itself? I'm not completely sure how to use those specific presets.
Thanks!
KindredArts said about the 970 GPU:
"They were marketed as having 4gb of VRAM, but neglected to mention that only 3.5 gig of that is accessible."
Sorry, but this is NOT true!
Of course the card can access all of the 4GB VRAM. The only problem is that only 3.5 GB are "fast" VRAM, the other 0.5 GB are "slow" VRAM. Please dont ask me about the correct technical terms. Whereas this "slow" VRAM part can cause lags in modern games (where a lot of stuff like textures has to be loaded very quickly and frequently, it is neglectable with Iray rendering. Because here the textures are loaded usually only once (when hitting the render button). And if your VRAM is filling and some textures have to be loaded into the "slow" part, and therefore this operation lasts about 0.5 seconds longer than usual, you will not notice that anyway :-)
I'd keep the emission on the flame itself - enough for a little bit of light, but not enough to blow out the details of the flame (about 100kcdm/2). Then yes, i would use a small ghost light pointing in the direction of the flame. Not too small, perhaps about 2-3 times the diameter of the candle itself. here's a rough example:
Sorry for the confusion @KindredArts. Yes I would definitely apply the Iray Uber Base shader. What I meant by changing Surfaces was that I had started putting Jepe's Flames in each of the candles, but it got too laborious.
Thanks for your willingness to help. I'll buy your lights when I get home from work tonight!
Thanks very much, I'll try those settings.
edit: interestingly enough, when a candle is not next to a wall, I like it more when the light's direction is pointed down towards the candle. It lights up the surrounding area better than the emissive flame does by itself.
I wonder whether Real Lights (on sale atm) might be suitable for the candle flame while the Ghost Lights are used for the ambient light in the room? Don't want to steal the limelight (pun, sorry) from the Ghost set but it was my first thought. By the way, I hadn't realised the emissions were quite so directional. Not having my PC here is frustrating - does the set come with any convex or concave shapes or just flat planes?
@KindredArts: see what I mean about VRAM confusion with the 970? Two characters in a room with clothes and not much furniture seems to be my limit. Some PAs are frugal with their polygons yest manage to create beautiful models. I'm thinking of Stonemason and Jack Tomalin in particular.
...that's why even If I could afford to upgrade I'd probably build a dedicated render system for CPU rendering with dual 8 core Xeons and a boatload of memory as my scenes are often pretty "heavy" and could pose a challenge even to the forthcoming 10 GB 1080 Ti. For example a British railway Station scene I did is 8.7 GB in idle mode when uncompressed, much of which is due to 8 G2/Genesis characters and an atmospheric "wet mist" effect. Until really big memory cards are available and affordable at the consumer level (like 16 - 32 GB), for myself, GPU rendering is more trouble than it is worth having to find ways to crowbar everything in to fit within the VRAM of current cards or mess with multi plane rendering/compositing (yes you can "catch" shadows, but AO, reflections, and refraction are different matters).
At least with a separate render box, I can work on other projects while a scene is "cooking".
I agree we should be messing with tonemapping in the render setttings. The problem though that i have experienced is the light fall off from Iray photometric lights its not real, secondly the settings for "Camera" controls ie Film ISO, F-stop and Shutterspeed although we like to think it works like the real world .....it does not. Most photograhers will tell you to keep the Film ISO at the lowest value possible because unless you have a REALLY expensive camera the more you raise the ISO the more noise you create in the photo. Also the F-stop function in the Iray renderer does not work at all like the F-stop on a real camera because it is not "Opening" the shutter apeture ring any further..all its doing is adjusting the exposure value in the renderer. Photographers use F-stop to also control depth of field which the renderer does not. we have to set that in other parts of the engine to simulate it. Lastly the shutterspeed although a real world value. is not ideal for renders because nothing in your scene is moving. If a photographer were to set the ridulous shutter speeds we need to raise the exposure levels of a picture to be acceptable it would be a blob, micro movements of your subject and anything that could be moving...ie candle flames, or a slight breeze on a cloth or anything would create a big mess unless you were going for an effect of timelapse photography.
All in all Iray does a good job of trying to simulate those real world things..but thats all it is..a simulation. It is not a factual representation of real life. Our biggest goal as 3d artists is to get the results we want. How we get there everyone has their own ideas, I for one find this simple tool will be a boon for achieving the look we want.
Daniel
Just on a whim, I decided to see how it would do for a simple portrait.
KindredArts, in that video are you ONLY using ghost lights? No hdr or any other lights?
I've yet to pick this up as I was curious whether it would be one of those sets that I have no idea how to use - heh, there are quite a lot of those - but the video REALLY cleared up a lot of confusion/questions I had. Thank you for that!
@XoechZ - I stand corrected!
@dawnblade - For the realism, it would be better to have the flames set to emissive. The ghost lights can handle the actual lighting side, but a flat diffuse flame might look at bit strange. Are there a lot of candles in the scene? If they all have the same material setup, it might be worth setting up just one candle the way you want it, save that as a material preset and apply that preset to all the other candles.
@SnowSultan - Great! Glad you worked it all out. My next reply to marble might be useful for you as well.
@marble - They are indeed flat planes at the moment, but i have been thinking that a very low poly sphere might be useful. I wanted to stick to just planes as they are the cheapest in terms of render cycles, and that's mission here, performance. Planes and a sphere would cover both uni/bidirectional lighting, but i think any other sort of shapes might be wasted. I'll put my thinking cap on!
@kyoto kid - I know the struggles! I keep stacking Titan x's, and even though the performance is solid, memory can still be an issue. Because of the work i do though, i need something quite close to real-time rendering otherwise it slows down my pipeline something awful. I'm hoping next years Titan variant will have 24gb ... hint hint Nvidia.
@D.Robinson - If i involve myself any further with this battle of ideas, i'm going to need a thesaurus. I agree though - a good understanding of photography doesn't hurt by any means, but a lot of the theory doesn't port very well to Iray.
@Daikatana - Hey! Sorry i didn't reply to you the first time, i'm having to monitor a few different threads. Great render, and i'm glad you're liking it. Is that just the one light? Nothing else?
@jakiblue - Have you come here just to give me sass blue?!
No, in the video the first render is HDR only, with a lower exposure setting (It probably should have been even lower, but i was getting a lot of noise). The second is both HDRI and Ghost lights - I left the hdr on simply for the sake of reflections on the floor. Whether you should pick it up or not depends on what you're doing. Do you have any issues rendering interiors? Do you have scenarios that would benefit from invisible area lights? Again, really don't like pushing people to buy something they don't need, but i personally wouldn't consider rendering without them at this point. Take that for what its worth...
Few, that was a long one! I'm slipping out for new years so i might be slow on the replies later today. If there is anything urgent guys, shoot me a pm and i'll get back pronto!
@Daikatana - Hey! Sorry i didn't reply to you the first time, i'm having to monitor a few different threads. Great render, and i'm glad you're liking it. Is that just the one light? Nothing else?
yes. Just the one light. :).
This product is super easy to use and gives great results. Thank you so much for making it.
...the issue with the photometric lights bothers me as well. Even though it is not for Iray, AoA's Advanced Dpotlight has a number of different profiles and falloff settings including one that follows the inverse square law. Odd that doesn't seem to be the case with Iray photometric lights.
As to film speed, this is why I loved using Kodachorme and Ektachrome 64. Extremely clean images with a excellent colour saturation. Unfortunately it was a "daylight film" so not very good in low light settings without a flash or other strong lighting. For night and indoors I'd move to ISO 200 or 400 (the latter for "available light" photography).
Awesome, that's a great result! Well don't be a stranger, be sure to pop back if you have anything to share :)
See i was under the impression that the lighting is not very modifiable due to the fact that it's supposed to be physically accurate, and unbiased as possible? Then again, they do have interactive mode, which i can never seem to work out.
I should probably work more with tonemapper to get everything right in camera. i'm still waaay to reliant on fixing everything in post. It might be a good idea to just uninstall photoshop for a week and make do.
...I was actually expecting the Pascal Titan X to have 16 GB of HBM 2 memory instead of 12 GB GDDR5X (especially considering the price increase and the fact you can only get it from Nvidia now).
Give it about another nine months and we should be seeing the first Volta architecture cards. If the current pattern holds true, we most likely will see 32 GB and maybe even 64 GB Tesla compute units for deep leanring systems first, followed by the pro grade Quadros (the latter which are might have 16 and 32 GB of HBM 2 memory for the V5000 and V6000 respectively). Not sure if this will trickle down to the consumer market as I also believe these cards will employ the new NV-Link bus instead of PCi E 3.0. As a spinoff we might see a 16 GB HBM 2 Pascal Titan-X and maybe something like an "1180" Ti with 12 GB HBM2. Less expensive cards (save maybe for an 8 GB "1170" as HBM stacks evenly in multiples of 4) will probably still use GDDR5X.
Supercomputer development has been moving from pure CPU to CPU + high memory Compute GPUs for increased calculation speed and it seems to be what is in turn now driving GPU development rather than graphics production and gaming..
16-24 gb would have been nice, but they seem to be putting the emphasis on pascal architecture. It's a shame because even though they are only a year old, Maxwell titans are very hard to get a hold of in good condition. The price hasn't dropped either, i'm still paying 800-1000 pounds for second hand cards.
I'm hoping by the time volta comes around, pascal will be actually roundly supported. Although they did say that they wouldn't let the same thing happen again (Iray not supporting pascal at launch). You mentioned deep learning - doesnt the pascal titan supposedly have that? I'm sure they mentioned neural network training at the keynote? I could be wrong...
Just a quick 5 min. test render using the Mini Haven Interior Vignette, so sorry in advance that these are not full renders to showcase your product!
I render CPU only since I don't have an Nvidia card. My PC is at least 6 years old, 16GB RAM, Intel Core i7 CPU 860 @ 2.8GHz x 2, AMD Radeon HD 5700 video card. Yep, my Iray renders take quite a while!
I'm using the "Scene-only" lighting setting in my render settings, because this interior prop only has 2 walls, so I opted not to use an HDR since it would just flood the scene. I added a backdrop in the Environment's tab (not Environment in the render settings) just so that something could be seen through the window.
1. The first scene is lit just with the Vignette's included lamp, and I stopped the render after 5 min. I did not use a ghost light over the lamp since it is already emissive.
2. The second scene is lit with the included lamp and 1 vertical ghost light over the window, with the 6,000K "Time of Day" preset and the 1,000K "Intensity" preset. Again, stopped after 5 min.
A single Ghost Light adds much needed light to the scene without flooding it!
A really dumb question (that doesn't need to be answered New Year's weekend!)
I'm kind of not sure which ghost light to use in which scenario, because the horizontal light has an up-down icon, and the vertical light has a right-left icon. That is backwards to me, so can you clarify if I should be using the horizontal light on a window instead of the vertical light?
Thanks and Happy New Year!
I like to do interior scenes and Iray has been a pain to get the lights set right. This is especially true with a fully enclosed scene with no windows. I know a number of people who remove walls or roof, use section planes, and take other steps to try and get enough light but when you do that, you can end with the light coming from a different direction than you want. For a number of products I have, I've given up trying to use them because they are so slow to render that my computer is tied up for hours. Here's my tests with one of those sets: Aqua Subterranea. These are only 600x600 renders so as to not take too much time and I let them go to completion.
1. This first image is using the default lights that come with the set. They are torches, so very little light. It goes to completion in 3 min 50 sec but is too dark for what I want.
2. This image uses a change in tonemapping, boosting ISO from 100 to 800. Much more can be seen, but this took 21 min 30 sec. This is more than 5 times slower than #1 and still needs more light.
3. I've tried a number of Iray lights with this set and have gotten mixed results. Among the better has been Scintillant Portrait Lights. I like the drama they create in the scene but the render took 42 min 39 sec.
4. Here's a render with 1 ghost light, placed up high, to the right, and tilted down about 45 degrees. Uses 800K intensity setting. Render time is 6 min 43 sec. Overall light similar to #3 above but since it's only 1 light, it doesn't illuminate some of the areas to the left.
5. This one has a second ghost light added above the intersection. Intensity setting is 100K. Render time is 7 min 17 sec. More than 5 times faster than #3 for a similar light level. This was just a quick test. To get closer to what I have in #3, I would probably add a third ghost light and put the second and third light down the side chambers so as to leave a darker area behind the well.
I like what I've seen with my first use making me a happy camper!
EDIT: I did follow up tests with results posted here.
Of course I only turned up here to sass you! You wouldn't expect any less of me
Wait.....hang on...I hear something.......ka-ching! Whoa, what was that? Was that the sound of me buying Ghost Lights??? Yep, nabbed it this morning - my first purchase of the year! Whoooot! Heh.
And boy o boy, yes do I have issues lighting interiors. I'm going to go back and rewatch the video before I start playing with it - love this idea. I missed the thread where you were explaining how to do it ourselves, but like a few others have said, I'd rather pay someone to have it all done for me. Ha. :)
...they mention it with the Titan-XP, but only with regards to single floating point calculations. From what I see it is more advert hype than practicality as the Titan-X is still primarily a video rather than computational GPU card.
The first Pascal units released were actually Tesla 100 compute GPUs using the P101 chip and which are specifically geared towards deep learning applications and AI development. These were the only Pascal cards to make use of the newer and faster HBM 2 memory (16 GB).
The only Iray light that you can adjust the fall off is a Linear point light, but again its not proper. Of course not using LPE profiles makes it a bit wonky too...i have a few that i found around the net..but i still dont get the warm lights i am looking for. For some reason Iray lights diffusion against how materials are set up usually gives a non real light temp, i am constantly having to mess with white point balance in post. I realize you can do that in Iray render settings but its not intuitive, i have no idea what the actual light temps and white point settings are in reality within the engine. I kinda eyeball it based on what i normally do in post so i can get reasonably consistent results. But laying out a new scene i have no clue.
Back to the topic at hand though...the reason i picked these up are two fold. 1. I wanted an easier method of creating and moving the planes around, and 2. Single click changes to experiment in the iray viewport is so much better than messing with lumen values and color tones
This looks really good, adds the missing ambient light realistically, and a big time saver for light setup.
...just bought - I can't wait to do comparitive renders with some past scenes I've spent frustrating hours trying to get ambient lighting believable without blinding brightness.
@KindredArts you might like to check out Callad's light set (CLS) that she made for Reality/Luxrender. I believe she had a few low poly shapes and also attached a camera to make pointing them easier. Just an idea, it's quite a while since I used Reality. I think she goes by CalladsEssence at DeviantArt.