Iray Ghost Light Kit

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Comments

  • MusicplayerMusicplayer Posts: 515
    edited December 2016

    Hi KindredArts,

    Thought I would post this interior shot. There are already ceiling lights, but I like the way light now comes through the windows, more than provided by the hdri skydome. 

    You quoted earlier how surprised you were that this product took off, but I think it was just what many of us wanted. I have been using planes like this before, but it was a constant chore going back and forth the surfaces tab to alter the light emission values etc. You have made a really neat way of doing this without too much effort, and I am guessing a lot of others have seen this potential, hence why it is number 2 in the Daz store 'What's Hot' section.

    Thanks also for making the video. This was also a deciding factor that made me buy once I saw your product demonstrated.

    I have a very slow computer with only 12Gb of ram and a processor running on a cat's whisker, so it would be unfair for me to guess how much time has been shaved off a render. This one ran for an hour and a half, and showed only 5% done, but already I am liking the extra light effects and the way in this render it reflects off the ceiling.

    Kind regards, and wishing you and your family a very Happy New Year.

    smiley

     

     

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  • KindredArtsKindredArts Posts: 1,217

    Hi KindredArts,

    Thought I would post this interior shot. There are already ceiling lights, but I like the way light now comes through the windows, more than provided by the hdri skydome. 

    You quoted earlier how surprised you were that this product took off, but I think it was just what many of us wanted. I have been using planes like this before, but it was a constant chore going back and forth the surfaces tab to alter the light emission values etc. You have made a really neat way of doing this without too much effort, and I am guessing a lot of others have seen this potential, hence why it is number 2 in the Daz store 'What's Hot' section.

    Thanks also for making the video. This was also a deciding factor that made me buy once I saw your product demonstrated.

    I have a very slow computer with only 12Gb of ram and a processor running on a cat's whisker, so it would be unfair for me to guess how much time has been shaved off a render. This one ran for an hour and a half, and showed only 5% done, but already I am liking the extra light effects and the way in this render it reflects off the ceiling.

    Kind regards, and wishing you and your family a very Happy New Year.

    smiley

     

     

    Hi Musicplayer, thank you for your very warm comments, it's much appreciated. I've found that actual *finished* render time is an odd one to compare, it just seems to be all over the place in iray. I never actually let a render finish though - some of my promo shots for other products barely pass 0%. I normally just eyeball it and shut it down when it looks about right. So even if i have a scene that converges in the same time frame with or without ghost lights, i still find i get acceptable results in a fraction of the time with them added. In practical terms, i think people are seeing the results and are happy campers, and i couldn't be happier with that either.

    Anyway, i hope you had a good christmas and best wishes for the new year. Don't be a stranger! smiley

  • pdspds Posts: 593

     it was just what many of us it was a constant chore going back and forth the surfaces tab to alter the light emission values etc. You have made a really neat way of doing this without too much effort, and I am guessing a lot of others have seen this potential, hence why it is number 2 in the Daz store 'What's Hot' section.

     Yep. Exactly why I couldn't resist picking it up too. Plus, seeing how supportive KA has been in TWO threads, makes me even happier to vote with my wallet. Congrats on another great product!

  • TooncesToonces Posts: 919

    I noticed you placed the ghost lights in front of the windows in your youtube video. Would it matter if you put them just outside the windows, allowing the light to pass through the window (and perhaps create shadows)? Or is that best achieved with spotlight?

    Thanks!

  • KindredArtsKindredArts Posts: 1,217
    pds said:

     it was just what many of us it was a constant chore going back and forth the surfaces tab to alter the light emission values etc. You have made a really neat way of doing this without too much effort, and I am guessing a lot of others have seen this potential, hence why it is number 2 in the Daz store 'What's Hot' section.

     Yep. Exactly why I couldn't resist picking it up too. Plus, seeing how supportive KA has been in TWO threads, makes me even happier to vote with my wallet. Congrats on another great product!

    Thanks pds, i try :).

    havsm said:

    I noticed you placed the ghost lights in front of the windows in your youtube video. Would it matter if you put them just outside the windows, allowing the light to pass through the window (and perhaps create shadows)? Or is that best achieved with spotlight?

    Thanks!

    You can place them outside of the window, this would however act like the HDRI, thus negating a lot of the benefits. Plus the light would have to pass through refractive glass, which could cause more computational load. That's not to say you can't do it, i just prefer not to for the sake of speed. Personally i would use a directional light or a sharp hdri for shadows and use the ghost lights as low level ambient lights. As you said, you could use photometrics (directional/spotlight), that's probably the best way to go.

  • KrupkinKrupkin Posts: 8
    edited December 2016

    I love these lights! They are so useful and easy to set up.

     

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  • TottallouTottallou Posts: 555
    edited December 2016

    I agree that these lights are really easy to set up & they render very fast on the things I have tested so far

    These will encourage me to render content I have avoided for a while as getting it lit was just to much trouble :)

     

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  • I havent tried it myself but has any tried using the light portal function on a spot light along with the ghost lights. To be honest i never really have messed with that function yet, it supposedly directs light forward of that spot so you can tell Iray dont bother rendering anything outside of it.

    Daniel

  • Krupkin said:

    I love these lights! They are so useful and easy to set up.

     

    Nice render...and i see that it works with the trick for getting godrays...nice!

  • IceDragonArtIceDragonArt Posts: 12,548
    pds said:

    I'm curious if they render slowly? I have quite a few emissive sets and they are lovely but take lots of time to render and draw

    As probably single polygon meshes, these should render quite fast. The benefits of the product seem to be in adding more light to a scene to help renders "converge" faster with less noise, and easy to use (and perhaps more intuitive) presets for light output and temperature. Like many items in the store, while some people could recreate the product, many might not be able to, and for those who can, it's always a trade-off of time vs. money. With the sales price on this, I think a lot of people will be happy to buy it because they'd rather spend more time making art than building light presets. I hope it does well as KA puts out great products and supporting quality vendors is a good thing, IMO. :-)

    Well you put it far more elegantly than i did pds, thank you :)

    PDS has perfectly summed up why this light set is now at the number two position on my weekly shopping list (behind food but ahead of everything else). 

    I want to spend  my time composing and rendering art not fiddling with lights for hours to get everything right.

    Cheers,

    Alex.

    This, in spades. Hoping to try this out tomorrow.  If I get the chance to do it I wll post in the render thread.  Have an afternoon movie date with my husband tomorrow though.

  • KindredArtsKindredArts Posts: 1,217

    @Krupkin - Beautiful! Thank you for the purchase and taking part, it's appreciated. :)

    @Tottallou - Thank you for the render, very well done! I really hope more people can dust off those old sets that have been religated to the archives after iray dropped. Renders like these could prompt them to do so, so thank you!

    @D.Robinson - I'm not going to try and turn anyone against light portals to push my own product, but i really haven't had much luck with them personally. If anything they tend to slow renders down for me, but i'm open-minded if anyone has had different experience? It could be the compulsory use of caustic sampling to get them to work which causes the issues, i'm really not sure. Again, that's just my 2c.

    @Ice Dragon Art - It would be great if you could drop by dragon! Enjoy the movie :)

  • Judging by the "Trending Now" and "Most Popular" store views, this set seems to have been a big success. And that's through all the mad grab sales (and glitches!). Congrats, KA.

    Look forward to playing over the coming weeks, but for now - home improvements!

  • KindredArtsKindredArts Posts: 1,217

    Judging by the "Trending Now" and "Most Popular" store views, this set seems to have been a big success. And that's through all the mad grab sales (and glitches!). Congrats, KA.

    Look forward to playing over the coming weeks, but for now - home improvements!

    Thanks Peter, i'm quite surprised really - When i did the tutorial it got quite a cold reception, so i really didn't expect it to do well. Sales figures weren't my focus though, i genuinly just wanted to help. I was almost bullying people into at least trying it, because i knew it was such time saver. All it took was to condense it all into a neat little kit and people seem to be all over it! Now it has such high adoption, i'm just going to try and support everyone as best i can.

    Anyway, the very best of luck with your DIY. Try to keep those thumbs intact!

  • NaviNavi Posts: 443

    I've got it last night, and now that I'm testing it today, it reminds me the hard way that I've carefully avoided buying indoor scenes since Iray has been released... lol :) (as it was really longer to render than outdoor sets) . But joke apart, this is really a great product, nice work KindredArts ! I've always been using mesh panels, which are faster to render than photometrics to me for some reasons, but this is so neatly organized and set up (ease of moving/posing, one click settings, etc) that I knew I would need it.

  • Oso3DOso3D Posts: 14,878

    KA: I find it really odd how people react to advice. Apparently people react much more to stuff sold in a store than anything that's free, which is... bizarre to me, but there it is.

    I'm constantly seeing people getting all enthusiastic about new sold products that do stuff my (or other) free stuff already does, and I'm like... um, wot?

     

  • Serene NightSerene Night Posts: 17,553

    So far, my initial test on intereior lighting was that this prodcuts still took a fairly long time to render. I will test it again... But the speed I had hoped for, is not significan improvement t in my initial trial run. 

  • KindredArtsKindredArts Posts: 1,217
    Navi said:

    I've got it last night, and now that I'm testing it today, it reminds me the hard way that I've carefully avoided buying indoor scenes since Iray has been released... lol :) (as it was really longer to render than outdoor sets) . But joke apart, this is really a great product, nice work KindredArts ! I've always been using mesh panels, which are faster to render than photometrics to me for some reasons, but this is so neatly organized and set up (ease of moving/posing, one click settings, etc) that I knew I would need it.

    Oh yes, i know exactly what you mean. I've got a pretty hefty system and even i flinch a little bit when it comes to buying indoor scenes (or even making them). Hopefully this stacks the cards in the users favour, and judging by the feedback i'm getting, that appears to be the case. Thanks for the support Navi, and don't be a stranger!

     

    KA: I find it really odd how people react to advice. Apparently people react much more to stuff sold in a store than anything that's free, which is... bizarre to me, but there it is.

    I'm constantly seeing people getting all enthusiastic about new sold products that do stuff my (or other) free stuff already does, and I'm like... um, wot?

     

    Well, i understand people buying the kit vs going it alone. Many people understand the concept quite well, and could do it themselves, but prefer to buy it in kit form without any extra fussing. Most PA's on the store are very competent artists who could replicate most of the products sold by others. That doesn't stop us spending a small fortune on gear ourselves though, simply as a time saver.

    When it comes to the free stuff, you've got me there, i have no idea. To be fair though, i very rarely pick up freebies and i'm not sure why. It could be something to do with exposure? I'm not sure, i think i could only offer wild speculation beyond that.

     

    So far, my initial test on intereior lighting was that this prodcuts still took a fairly long time to render. I will test it again... But the speed I had hoped for, is not significan improvement t in my initial trial run. 

    Hmm, this is a tricky charge to answer for. I've had people posting in the render thread that they've seen 5-10 times speed increase, but it's all about context. The scene, the lights, the shaders and a whole host of other variables are still heavily at play. Regardless of ghost light presence, if the scene is still heavily reliant on bounce lighting, it will still require a lot of render cycling. 

    I would like to make the point of full scene convergence vs acceptable render quality though. In my 5 minute render comparison video, i didn't let either scene converge fully. I imagine that final render times of those two scenes may have been quite similar, but it attained a far more acceptable render quality in a much shorter time with ghost lights.

    Keep tinkering and let me know what you think.

  • nonesuch00nonesuch00 Posts: 17,890
    edited January 2017

    I am doing at render now and the first thing I've noticed in the H & V lights, H one as a ceiling light and V one roated 60 degrees over a mirror is that the ambient lighting looks much more believeable in the room. 

    The presets I chose was I applied the Halogen lightbulb to the 3 lights in the 3 light fixtures and 1 5000K preset each to the IGKL H at the ceiling and the IGKL V at the mirror. Not really sure if applied the Halogen lightbulbs to the existing light fixtures did anything as I'd already turned Emissive on for them, set them to 100Ws, and the color temperature to 6000K (or rather left K at it's default).  

    I'm doing CPU renders at UHD resolution trimmed to be portrait (something like 2100x3800) so after 10 hours it's not even at 1% and I'm not going to let it render for more than a day but the important is the light distribution in the room is believable.

    One thing that confuses me is usually incandesent bulbs are at 2700K but when I tried 3000K preset it make the room really orange, not that yellow light washed out with white light that I expected. With CPU rendering I've yet to try all the different color temperatures.

    I don't know if this is possible with how DAZ presets & scripting works but it would have been nice if, for example, I could have just selected the ceiling in the room (the South Beach Art Deco sets for example) and then clicked a IGKL preset and that preset would have made a Geoshell (or duplicated the ceiling in place - I'm not sure which I did now) of the celing and then made it invisible and applied the proper emmissive settings to the ceiling. I did something similar to create the illusion of ghost dragons in a prior render but don't really know scripting in DAZ Studio to turn a ceiling into an ambient light source for example so that would be a welcome preset addition.

    Thanks for the product. It saves much hassle time.

    Post edited by nonesuch00 on
  • ooofestooofest Posts: 36
    edited February 2019

    This is a useful product, thanks!  The setup alone is worth the price.

    Of course, another way to completely "hide" any mesh light in a rendered Daz scene with Iray is to point the Cutout Opacity towards a small all-black file, which essentially acts as a complete mask for the object when it comes to visibility of the mesh.  There's not even artifacts to render away, such as sometimes seen when using 0.0001 value in that same parameter.  This applies equally to a light emitting mesh, of course.

    Beyond that, Iray confuses me here!

    Because, if you used a similar opacity "mask" for an emissive mesh in other unbiased engines such as Cycles or Octane (for example), the mesh light object is hidden to the camera but the shape is still shown in reflections for a nearby mirror-shaded object by default.  In those cases, you need to turn off specular explicitly to hide the mesh light shape from showing in a mirrored surface, which can have other side-effects.  And, going through multiple transparent objects, such as glass panes, can also cause the need to filter transmission and so forth.  So you try to avoid those situations when hiding the light source itself is important.

    It seems that Daz Iray "Opacity Cutout" also filters specular and maybe other characteristics for the mesh light (?), which is OK but not what I would typically expect from experience with other renderers, I guess.

    Post edited by ooofest on
  • feussifeussi Posts: 11

    Does it work with Doom&Scene?

  • TooncesToonces Posts: 919

    Yup.

  • I think I use this product in 99% of my projects. Highly recommended.

  • nonesuch00nonesuch00 Posts: 17,890
    feussi said:

    Does it work with Doom&Scene?

    Dome & Scene, Sun & Sky, Scene Only it works with all those because it's just a mesh with emmisive lights already calibrated for you is all.

  • dawnbladedawnblade Posts: 1,723
    edited January 2020
    feussi said:

    Does it work with Doom&Scene?

    Dome & Scene, Sun & Sky, Scene Only it works with all those because it's just a mesh with emmisive lights already calibrated for you is all.

    Does it work with Sun and Sky, or do you have to do the trick of removing the default .HDR and then leave it in Dome and Scene? That will put it in Sun and Sky and let you use scene lights as well.

    Post edited by dawnblade on
  • jardinejardine Posts: 1,190

    the ghost lights work just fine with HDRI lighting.   i use them all the time as fill lights in scenes where the primary light source is an HDR that casts strong shadows.

  • feussifeussi Posts: 11

    ..thank you for sorting out...it works .... just tried it :)

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