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DAZ Productions, Inc.
224 S 200 W, Suite #250
Salt Lake City, UT 84101
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© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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This set (Fantasy Hovel) was completely dark before I added Ghost Lights. 7 minutes of rendering on an old 700-gen nvidia card.
I may be able to make some good use out of this product for doing promo renders. Currently I'm working on an expansion pack for a newly released hair from Hivewire and while I'm happy enough with my lights just to do thumbnails something a little more evenly lit for when I bring in a clothed character to show off the hair better would be nice. I'm horrible at lighting so I need all the help I can get as long as it's easy and understandable. Some of the folks here are experts at lighting and get into all this technical stuff. I'm not a technical person so most of that just goes over my head. Could I just use these planes to light a new scene with and forego adding in other lights, would it be enough?
If you were having a room in the day time that's what you'd want but at night time you still want to turn on any emmisive lighting from candles or lightbulbs in your room as those create the source for all the ambient light your eyes are expecting to see. There are presets to turn those on it you like.
I am rendering a scene now that I spent much time trying out different stength emmissive lights only to decide I don't want to might up rediculous values for emmisive light meshes so I thend started messhing with tone mapping except anything but the default value looked too bright so now I am using one ghost light on thr ceiling where it'd expect an overhead light and it looks great even though the render is just starting...
...with the right adjustments to intensity and temperature they could still be used for ambient lighting in low light scenes.
Not sure if this is the right thread for this. Getting punchy.
KA i picked up The Ventian Suite today, having a bit of a problem lighting this....if you have the set and a bit of ideas i would like to hear them. Its such an awesome set but all the dark colors seem to soak up all the light. I am just not sure where to put lights to make it look more like the promo's
Daniel
Hello my wonderful campers! Sorry, as i mentioned, i was away for new years. I'm back though and i'm going to try my very best to respond to every single one of you (on any of the threads). Everyone who Pm'd me is already sorted, and if i miss anyone out, i promise i'm not doing on purpose! Just drop me a pm or remind me in the thread. I know i keep saying this, but a huge thanks to everyone who has been doing render comparisons, or even just leaving their thoughts - It's such a great help to anyone who's skeptical or on the fence. Anyway, i'm working on replies, won't be long!
Happy new year!
@dawnblade - 5 minutes on cpu only? That's pretty good going really, and i'm pretty stoked to see cpu results since people keep inquiring. I did spot that lamp in the corner though, is that a lit bulb? How dense is the bulb in terms of polys? Remember that each polygon of an emissive surface is calculated as its own light source, which can really bog down render times. Just one bulb can have the equivalent render overhead of 2000 ghost lights. I would decrease the emission value of the bulb so it has a less effect on the surrounding area, this should help with the firefly problem. Great test though, thanks for taking the time :)
Oh and the horizontal/vertical question - There is actually no difference between them aside from their primary orientation. Vertical lights load standing up for windows and such, whereas horizontal lights load in pointing down to emulate a ceiling lamp. It just made the most sense to me to do it that way, is anyone else finding it odd?
@RGcincy - Another great test, thank you sir! I may seem like a lazy oaf who hasn't done his fair share of render comparisons, but i really wanted to see tests like this and different hardware, and this is great. Could you do my a huge favour and post your pc specs? I understand if you want to keep them top secret, but they could be a handy for anyone with a similar system. Cheers!
@jakiblue - Sass blue, SASS?! You have bought the set though so i shall lay down my pitchfork.
. I did do a full write up on how it works, but it looks like folks wanted an out-of-the-box solution, so it was more than worth the tinkering time. You're not alone blue! Anyway, if you read through the thread, my loyal campers have been posting some great setups and scenarios, so that should help. If you get stuck though, just give me a holler!
@kyoto kid - You keep mentioning HMB 2, is that what the tesla/quadro range utilize? I've read into deep learning but to me it looks like another piece of glorious tech that will be viciously underutilized over the coming years. I really hope i'm wrong!
@nonesuch00 - Well hello, i was wondering when you'd show up. Thank you for purchasing, as usual, it's very much appreciated! Please feel free and swing by with any thoughts/results, i would be very interested to hear them. There's already some great feedback rolling in, so i'm confident you wont regret picking them up. :)
@marble - Thank you, i've checked them out and i've had a similar thought process. I've had a few requests for small features here and there, so when i get time i'll add to the pack. Looking back on it, there are a few little utilities that i should have included (like low poly spherical shapes) but didn't. Hindsight is 20/20 right?
@dreamfarmer - Yay! Another render, thanks so much! Thanks for including your video card as well, it helps a lot.
@RAMWolff - Don't you worry, i've made the set as accessible as i possibly could. If you run into issues i'm just a pm/post away, so let me know. Lighting can be a daunting task, i understand that, but i'm confident this set can help. You can use ghost lights on their own, but remember that they are diffuse lights. They have no specular effect, so reflections may end up looking a bit flat in darker scenes. An hdri or a few mesh lights would add some neat effects, but they are far from mandatory. In the video i made, 99% of that is simply ghost lighting, but i left the exterior HDRI on simply for some nice reflections on the floor. Again, if you get stuck, im here.
@D.Robinson - Sorry, can you confirm that it's Venezia suite by stonemason? If so i'll buy it and show you how i'd light it. I'm sure with a bit of tinkering you'd work it out - but i've been using these lights for nearly a year in one way or another, so i'm pretty handy with them. Just confirm the set and i'll do setup shots and perhaps a preset light group? Let me know.
I'm sorry this is a messy reply, but i didn't want a mega post with tons of quotations. I will try and keep on top of everyones posts from here on in. Keep rendering campers!
No secrecy needed! Those renders were all GPU only. I have a Nvidea GForce GTX 760 with 11152 cores and 2GB memory. CPU is a 3.6 GHz i7-4790 with 4 cores running 8 threads with 16 GB RAM but was not used except for one render (# 8 below) where I used both.
6. I did some follow up testing on the same set. This render uses 3 ghost lights, one down low at 1000K, one in the far side chamber at 50K and one in the near chamber at 100K. Render time was 7 min 19 sec, similar to the #5 2-light setup in my previous post.
7. The above render still didn't match the look of the Scintillant lights so I repositioned and changed the intensities. The low light went up to 1500K, the far light went to 100K and I positioned it vertically, and the near light went to 400K and it was given a greater angle (these side lights were rotated to leave the center behind the well in the dark). This gave a fairly close match to the Scintillant lights. Time to render was 13 min 6 sec, 3 times faster than the Scintillant lights.
The Scintillant light results:
8. I usually do GPU only rendering, but I did test the combination. Time was 9 min, 11 sec with CPU and GPU vs. 13 min 6 sec with GPU only.
9. I tried adding a spotlight to cast the long shadow but the render quickly went to long times so I stopped it.
Interesting that in this test series, the more intense the light the longer the render, the opposite of what is usually expected. I'm thinking that may come from light reaching farther into the recesses, so more time is required to calculate the light reflected back.
@RGcincy - You're doing some top tier detective work here RG! Your cpu vs cpu/gpu comparison is quite interesting. I always leave everything off other than my gpu's, but i might have to do a bit of testing with cpu support. I've not tested this myself yet, but perhaps a very small Ghost light with a high emission value would cast a long shadow? I'm not sure what the impact on render times would be, or if it would work very well, but i think it's worth investigating.
On the new i13 bathroom scene I madea render with, DEFINITELY inside the window. Inside, the scene looks great, was illuminated perfectly when looking through a window. Outside the window, every pane of glass was solid white from the reflection. I'm also getting a much better convergence ratio much quicker using Ghost Light.
Yes Stonemasons Ventian suite. Sorry if i wasnt clear...had been up too long messing with new stuff and wasnt thinking so clearly lol
Daniel
Well hey, your first post, very glad to have you here. Thank you for you input, i agree, i would heavily advise them being inside the room.
Gotcha! I'll pick it up and post my setup. It might have to be tomorrow because i have a bit of a back-log, but i'll get it done.
Its all good bro..i really appreciate it. You have gone the extra mile for all of us..thank you!
Daniel
I played around with this a little bit yesterday. I used the ghost lights in the Living Room Interior and it helped brighten the scene really well. I probably could have gone a little brighter because I darkened my final image in a post a bit, but I'm pretty happy with it so far. Overall, not bad for a first try.
I set up a test render with a kitchen set that I did earlier in the year. I used only the lighting that came with that kitchen, originally, and it took over 25 hours to render and I still stopped it early, nothing else in the scene. I dug out the .duf file and set up the ghost lights and turned off the lights that came with the kitchen and added in an HDR on the dome. I'll be letting that run today while I'm not at my computer for the rest of the day. I can tell you this much so far. The room is already twice as bright as the original and it does look like it might be going quicker. I'll let you know what my final stats are, but it's looking good so far.
...only the Pascal Tesla P100 has HBM 2. The pascal Quadros are still using GDDR5X just like the 10xx series. Over a year ago AMD released the Radeon R9 Fury which had 4 GB of HBM 1. HBM memory is faster, more compact and configured in four stacks of chips that are right next to the main Graphics Processor itself (see below). This also allows for a smaller form factor that is just over one half the length of current cards.
The AMD R9 Fury
Ayyy no problem bud, it's all part of the service :)
@Knittingmommy - Good lord KM, you do manage some fantastic renders. Great stuff, let us know how it goes!
@kyoto kid - Well that clears things up, thanks. And here i thought the quadro range was sporting some kind of witchcraft, but from what i've heard they just have a VRAM advantage. I watched a LTT video where they pitted the 24gb pny against a titan x and in terms of performance, there really wasn't all that much difference.
Hmmm. i should post my feature request here instead of the other thread. I'm using it now in a render & it's working really well.
Anyway my feature request is something like this: a while back I made a geoshell or maybe just duplicated a mesh and left it in place, I don't remember, and them I made the duplicated mesh invisible and set up emissive lights on the invisible mesh. Then I set up the original mesh to be partially transparent of a color to make the appearance of a ghost.
Anyway, so similarly, the feature request is if I used IGKL with eg the South Beach Art Deco rooms and selected a ceiling in the room and selected your 5000K preset (or 2700K preset) that preset would simply duplicate the ceiling geometry or make a geoshell of the ceiling and make the dup invisible and emmissive. Is that possible all with only one DAZ preset?
And this way I can avoid using the H GhostLight most of the time.
Also is there a way when I select the H & V Ghostlights to have them placed automatically where the light fixtures in a room are without manually placing them after they are added to the scene?
...speedwise yes as the Titan-X (P) has the same number of CUDA cores as the Quadro P6000. Where the P6000 has the advantage is in VRAM and that is more suited to the kind of work we do rather than gaming, so if you create really "big" (in terms of poly count and textures) scenes like I do, pretty much you would not have to worry about the process dumping to the CPU. Sadly, I can build the workstaion I outlined above for over 2,000$ less than what one P6000 card costs.
@nonesuch00 I spotted you in the other thread, but i'll respond here. I agree that the colour temperatures can be a bit strange. I specifically took them from real world values instead of making them up by eye, in hindsight i should have gone for the latter. I have included a wide range of presets on top of the specific scenario presets though, so people are able to cycle through until they find something pleasing to the eye.
It's funny you mention the geoshells, because it was heavily considered, trust me. The reason i eventually decided against it was performance - As i've mentioned before, the reason i went for single poly lights was strictly for the performance factor. If the end-user geo-shelled a 2000 poly bulb, on top of already emissive geometery, that's 4000 emissive polys (or 4000 light calculated sources). I really wanted to avoid people unknowingly crippling their scenes, which is quite possible if you dont pay attention to what you're shelling. Some ceilings may be a 4 poly box which is fine, but a detailed ceiling like something from jack tomalin could run in to the thousands - again effecting performance if you shelled it and turned it into an emissive. long story short, i simply don't know enough, or have enough experience with geoshells to build a utility framework around them.
In regards to automatically placing GLKs next to light sources - If we're talking about prop lamps, or at least seperate entities, you could try parenting ghost lights to the prop? I normally just drag a GLK onto the prop and choose "parent". I know you can't do this in a very automated fashion, but it's the only method i can think of at the moment. A more automated solution would require some sort of scripting, and i'm not even sure what daz scripts use (python?).
Anyway, i hope my reasoning comes across as sound here, if not, let me know.
KindredArts asked me if I would like to share my render with you in this thread.
Just to give you an idea how useful the Iray Ghost Light Kit is, I will show you both images. 1) applied 7 Ghost Lights to the scene, 2) the original setup for NY Living Room in Iray Preview. For me, the Iray Ghost Light Kit is one of the five best releases this year (2016) for DAZ Studio. They are very easy to use and the result you'll get is sheer amazing. You only have to be careful with the material presets: don't use to much bright light, as this would ruin the atmosphere of your interior scene. When I purchased this Kit, I was surprised how easy you can apply more lightsources to your scene, without drawing any shadows to it. I have a lot of interior scenes I haven't used so far, as the presets where much to dark provided by the vendors. But now I can lit those scenes and get a very satisfying result. I even shared a little tutorial in some Facebook groups to let the DAZ users know how easy they are to use.
Thank you KindredArts for that great tool / kit! I really love it!
Hey! You showed up, my hero :) Thank you for spreading the word and doing it in a very neat and informative fashion. Happy rendering Marlon!
OK, so that makes sense. Some of those ceilings are complicated.
I will try dragging the H/V Ghost lights directly to the light fixtures / celing in the future. I forgot you can drag them directly into a scene tab and parent rather than place them directly in the viewport.
Thanks.
So what does that mean in terms of iray performance though? A cpu workstation with xeons and plenty of ram vs a desktop with stacked titan x's? Perhaps its a bit short sighted, but i've not really put much thought into top tier cpu rendering with iray since ... well, nobody else has really.
Crikey, I'm obviously buying too much stuff because the set was already at the bottom of page 2.
And all that money and it's less than 500KB? What the hell??? Something this useful should take at least thirty seconds to download. DAZ needs to sort this out now!
(sorry, it just seems to be the approach one is supposed to take at the moment)
OK. So this is a big scene for me (I was testing multiple things) and it exceeded my GPU and was thus CPU rendered. I started it 'outside' with no scenery just an HDRI and it took.... forever to load and start rendering. Over five minutes? Then I stuck the girls in a room and added two Ghost Lights and it started a render much more quickly and went to completion in 1 hour 28 minutes on an i7-6700. I think these lights may be the result of some kind of demonic pact.
ETA: All my renders are with the Daz 4.9 public beta, which does Iray faster even without a GPU assisting, so I guess there's that grain of salt.
Ah, I loved these in the gallery. The little walkthrough was very nicely done and presented, too! :)
You can? I never heard of that. Where do you drag them from? I tried dragging from the Content Library and Smart Content, but it didn't work.
Ah, you're going to make me blush. ;) I'll let you know how the experiment goes. It's looking promsing. The first render in my comparison experiment is already done and in only 7 hours 41 minutes which is much less than 25 hours, last time I looked. :) Just starting the third and final stage of the experiment so it might actually be finished tomorrow.
Oh, that is Unity I do that in. Well, well...the hassle remains then in DAz Studio of placing objects in a viewport where you want them parented to.
Alt-drag is kind of useful, at least.