Iray Ghost Light render and support thread (Commercial)

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  • L'AdairL'Adair Posts: 9,479
    L'Adair said:

    Okay. One redone image coming up. laugh

    This is "Rise" from last July...


    And this is close to the same image, (there were some changes, apparently, in the duf file,) with ghost lights added...


    It turned out brighter overall. I added a ghost light to the left of the scene, tall and skinny, shining at the godrays prop, (Epic Props: Godrays & Volumetric Light for Iray,) making it more visible. There is a ghost light in front of her face to make it lighter. It also made the shadow under her chin less dark. There is a spotlight on her face, but if it gets too bright, it spills over onto the godrays prop. I also added ghost lights to the hallway-like area on the back side of the columns. There is one on the face of the acolyte and four sides around the lantern she is carrying.

    Sorry L'Adair, i completely missed your first comment! I know, i'm and awful host sad Great work here - I'm most interested in your work with the godrays, i didn't expect that. That's just one Ghost light pointing at the Godray? Or did you tinker with the godray as well? Great work with the rear chambers as too, very ominous :) Are you using the beta again or have you settled with the current build?

    The godrays consist of a prop and a spotlight. The spotlight highlights the effects on the prop from the top down. The intensity of the various effects is controlled by opacity. While I'm not positive I didn't change the luminance of the spotlight while doing corrective spot renders, the luminance of the spot in the second image remains the same as when I opened the duf file yesterday. The Ghost Light I added to brighten the numph's face washed out the effects of the prop. I tried increasing the luminance of the spotlight, but that just made the overall image brighter. I tried increasing the opacity of the effects, but that overpowered the rest of the scene. So I tried using the ghost light on the side, and that allowed me to bring out the effects without washing out the rest of the scene. That Ghost Light is less then 100% wide, and approximately as tall as the godray, maybe 350-400% tall.

    I'm still using the beta. Until today's release of 4.9.3, the released version didn't support the Pascal Nvidia cards.

  • Digital Lite DesignDigital Lite Design Posts: 728
    edited January 2017

    I wanted to post a "non-architectural" image to show off the usefulness of the Ghost Lights in other situations.  Plus play with some other new toys at the same time.  LOL

    (Bonez skull, Ceramic Candle Holders, Epic Props: Lens Flare, Gemology Shaders)

    The image uses the default render settings with the following changes:

    Film ISO at 150
    Environment Intensity to 0.10

    The lights are from 2 Ghost lights and the Epic Lens Flare

    There is no room.  I just put a plane on the ground.  That's it....Pretty simple set up.  :)

    The first attached image is a  screenshot that shows the Ghost Light set up.  The second is the image before the Ghost Lights, and the final with the lights added.

    Here is the final render.

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    Post edited by Digital Lite Design on
  • barbultbarbult Posts: 23,049
    edited January 2017
    jakiblue said:

    AHA!!!! found it in the content library. OMG that makes so much MORE sense now!!!!!!!! NOW i get it!

    Grrrrrr, the metadata sucks big time for this one. I'm sending in a ticket to tell them to fix the stupid metadata. 

    Bless you. I hope they fix it.

    Edit: reading further in the thread, it looks like they have made a change. I'm not home to check it out, though.

    Post edited by barbult on
  • barbultbarbult Posts: 23,049
    edited January 2017
    barbult said:
    deleted - I quoted instead of editing.

     

    Post edited by barbult on
  • jakibluejakiblue Posts: 7,281

    Looks like they did! Update in Smart Content just then - under Light Sets, it breaks it all down into folders. Intensity Presets, Lights, Time of Day and Utilities. Now THAT makes sense. smiley

    I'd just spent two hours doing a tutorial on how to create metadata, specifically for those huge non-daz products that don't have 'iray' or '3delight' in the material names, so you hit the Editor and have NO idea which file is which. I'm convinced I do better metadata than DAZ. *laughs* cheeky 

    barbult said:
    jakiblue said:

    AHA!!!! found it in the content library. OMG that makes so much MORE sense now!!!!!!!! NOW i get it!

    Grrrrrr, the metadata sucks big time for this one. I'm sending in a ticket to tell them to fix the stupid metadata. 

    Bless you. I hope they fix it.

    Edit: reading further in the thread, it looks like they have made a change. I'm not home to check it out, though.

     

  • L'AdairL'Adair Posts: 9,479

    Here's a shot of the setup for the godray and the Ghost Light.

    Balnea 01 Rise Redux IGLK GodRay and Ghost Light placement.png
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  • L'AdairL'Adair Posts: 9,479
    edited January 2017

    And here's a variation of Rise without the godray. There are only two spots used. One very tight on the nymph's face, the other spot adds light to the corridor behind the acolyte. Ghost Lights were used around each flame to increase the light in the scene, while the flame emissive values were dialed down to produce a more believable flame. One Ghost Light is directly under the nymph pointing up. This highlighted the dripping water much more realistically than the emissive I had been using. Without one or the other, the drops didn't show up at all. Two Ghost Lights were used to put light on the Behemoth. One makes his hand stand out from the water behind it, the other is over his head and arm.

    Rise (Again)
     

    Rise (Again) by L'Adair

    The full size of the render is 2560 pixels by 1440 pixels and can be viewed from the gallery page here.

    Post edited by L'Adair on
  • ConnaticConnatic Posts: 279

    I placed a ghost light within the corridor to get some exterior light shining in.

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  • dawnbladedawnblade Posts: 1,723

    There is an update in DIM, but no mention of what changed in the ReadMe file.

  • KindredArtsKindredArts Posts: 1,217
    edited January 2017

    @KAT - Beautiful work Kat! It's nice to see some non-architectural renders, gives some food for thought.

    @L'Adair - Great work here! If i were to make a suggestion - there doesn't seem to be much light aimed down at the character. Being the focal point of the piece, i would definitely cast some more light on her. Either way, i think the piece stands on its own merit, very well done :) Oh! and i got your pm, will get in touch later.

    @Connatic -  Awesome render! i really regret not getting that outfit while it was on sale, it's such a great set. Thanks for stopping by!

    @dawnblade - i know they were doing something with both the smart content and DIM, but i don't personally use them. I could enquire after the weekend if that would help?

    Post edited by KindredArts on
  • dawnbladedawnblade Posts: 1,723

    @dawnblade - i know they were doing something with both the smart content and DIM, but i don't personally use them. I could enquire after the weekend if that would help?

    No worries. I just finished updating, and although I don't remember what was in Smart Content before the update, it looks like everything except the "Apply this first" visibility toggle is there now:

     

     

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  • L'AdairL'Adair Posts: 9,479
    edited January 2017

    @L'Adair - Great work here! If i were to make a suggestion - there doesn't seem to be much light aimed down at the character. Being the focal point of the piece, i would definitely cast some more light on her. Either way, i think the piece stands on its own merit, very well done :)

    Thank you. :) I forget how many Ghost Lights are aimed at the nymph. Two for sure, one on the face to help brighten the spot light, without causing a lot of overspill onto the dark set. There is some, but not enough to draw the eye away from the nymph. I had one on the torso and another on the legs, but once I used a Ghost Light shining up for the water drips, it was too much light. I know I turned off the light on her legs, but I'll have to look to see if I turned off the one on her torso. The spotlight is shining at her from an angle, lighting up her head, neck and chest. That's why I added a Ghost Light at the same angle as her face. It wasn't necessary with the godray, but without the godray, the focal point became her chest and necklace. I shall tinker. 
    smiley

    Post edited by L'Adair on
  • NovicaNovica Posts: 23,859

    (Bonez skull, Ceramic Candle Holders, Epic Props: Lens Flare, Gemology Shaders)

     

    Here is the final render.

    Oh my goodness!!!! Simply stunning!

  • RGcincyRGcincy Posts: 2,805
    edited January 2017

    I used the ghost lights to make an exterior night scene. In this case, I used some building sets from Dreamland models. I set the render mode to scene only, added a small sphere as an emitting light bulb (5K) on the power pole in image center, made the windows on the far right emitters (1.5K), and added a 50% scale ghost light just under the lantern on the center pole. Here's the result with just these 3 lights.

     

    I added a large (800% scale) ghost light in the foreground and set the luminance to 50K. Below is the finished scene. Render time was 3 min 7 sec.

     

    As you can see, the large light adds a lot of light to the scene at a low luminance value. That's because the units kcd/m^2 are area units, and the bigger the area, the more light it is providing. Below the first image shows a ghost light at normal scale (as it loads from the preset). The light has 1/16th the area of the large light I used, so it is much dimmer. The second image is at 200% scale, and you can see a bit more. So if you scale the lights, keep in mind the effect of scale on area.

     

    Click on images for larger versions.

     

    River Front Iray night 5 normal scale.png
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    River Front Iray night 5 2x scale.png
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    Post edited by RGcincy on
  • GreybroGreybro Posts: 2,453

    I haven't really followed the technical aspects of this thread because everything with Ghost Lights worked just like the tutorial for me so there was nothing unexpected. I did render this with them and thought the results were pretty sweet! I used the Ghost light planes to brighten the whole room adn create the illusion of light from the TV.

     

    Ghost Lights

     

     

  • RGcincyRGcincy Posts: 2,805
    Greybro said:

    I haven't really followed the technical aspects of this thread because everything with Ghost Lights worked just like the tutorial for me so there was nothing unexpected. I did render this with them and thought the results were pretty sweet! I used the Ghost light planes to brighten the whole room adn create the illusion of light from the TV.

    Ghost Lights

    Very nice! Like the glow from the TV - that was a good idea.

  • GreybroGreybro Posts: 2,453
    RGcincy said:
    Greybro said:

    I haven't really followed the technical aspects of this thread because everything with Ghost Lights worked just like the tutorial for me so there was nothing unexpected. I did render this with them and thought the results were pretty sweet! I used the Ghost light planes to brighten the whole room adn create the illusion of light from the TV.

    Ghost Lights

    Very nice! Like the glow from the TV - that was a good idea.

    Thanks.

  • KindredArtsKindredArts Posts: 1,217

    Hi guys! Thanks to everyone dropping in and contributing, it's all very much appreciated! I'm re-arranging my little office and working on my pc today and tomorrow, so i might be a bit slow to respond. If anyone needs me, you know what to do (pm). I'll be back and fully functional very soon.

  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 40,514

    I wanted to post a "non-architectural" image to show off the usefulness of the Ghost Lights in other situations.  Plus play with some other new toys at the same time.  LOL

    (Bonez skull, Ceramic Candle Holders, Epic Props: Lens Flare, Gemology Shaders)

    The image uses the default render settings with the following changes:

    Film ISO at 150
    Environment Intensity to 0.10

    The lights are from 2 Ghost lights and the Epic Lens Flare

    There is no room.  I just put a plane on the ground.  That's it....Pretty simple set up.  :)

    The first attached image is a  screenshot that shows the Ghost Light set up.  The second is the image before the Ghost Lights, and the final with the lights added.

    Here is the final render.

    ...nicely done.

  • jakibluejakiblue Posts: 7,281

    oh that's a great idea!! Looks excellent! 

    Connatic said:

    I placed a ghost light within the corridor to get some exterior light shining in.

     

  • nicsttnicstt Posts: 11,714
    marble said:
    marble said:

    Had a little test run of this....all i can say is THANK YOU!

     

    This little set i had kickin around for awhile, last time i rendered anything with it, it took nearly 14 hours to reach 75% convergence. This took only 35 minutes to reach the same point...and with far better results....cant wait to start messing with this gem again! Ease of use is incredible too...only took me about 3 minutes to set up the lights.

    Daniel

    That particular product is one I also had trouble with, especially when I used Reality/Luxrender before I had a GPU to enable me to play with Iray. But even with Iray I had to resort to hiding walls and roof and adding emissive planes.

    @KindredArts can you describe your PC setup used for the video? Are you still rendering with CPU only?

    Sure - I7 Skylake 6700 oc 4.2Ghz, 32GB of DDR4 3200Mhz lpx Ram, and for the sake of disclosure i have two Titan x's BUT i only used one card in the video. I was going to use my Gtx 970 (runs the monitors) to do a more consumer-grade test but there wasn't quite enough VRAM.  I'd say clock-wise that scene probably would have reached the same level of quality in 9-10 minutes on a mid-tier card (970-980). It was mainly the VRAM limitations that made me go with the Titans.

    What card do you have in your new rig? Are you running cpu only?

    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). 

    It has four, and it is all accessable and useable by the renderer. The reports referred to how that RAM could be accessed; it was using other RAM's controllers (forget the specific name now).

  • L'AdairL'Adair Posts: 9,479

    Following KA's suggestion, I worked on getting more light on the nymph. It makes the whole scene even lighter still, but I think it works. I've been letting renders go all night, while I sleep, and stopping at 15K samples. I also used Architectural Sampling. However, before I rendered this last version, I read a thread on Spectral Rendering in the Daz Studio Discussion forum and decided to give that a try. I've posted my test results there.

    Rise (Spectral Rendering)
     

    Rise (Spectral Rendering), by L'Adair

  • SaiyanessSaiyaness Posts: 715

    Just picked this set up. I already use mesh lights, but yours are much easier, with click and go settings. Love it! I don't do many interior scenes (unless I'm doing a fake indoor HDRI portrait) because I couldn't be bothered mucking around. :p Nice work! 

     

     

  • KindredArtsKindredArts Posts: 1,217

    Sorry guys, i've been tinkering with my computer. I'm back now though, and it looks like nothing urgent has popped up :)

    @L'adair - Much better! I've not used spectral rendering, and i'm still a bit hazy on it. Did it affect performance?

    @Saiyaness - Yay! I'm a huge fan of your skins, just so you know - Sven was one of the first guys i picked up for G2 and he's still my favorite. Anyway, thanks for picking up the lights, glad you like them. smiley

  • L'AdairL'Adair Posts: 9,479

    @L'adair - Much better! I've not used spectral rendering, and i'm still a bit hazy on it. Did it affect performance?

    I did six test renders at 1280x720. One was the default I've been using, which was Architectural Sampling On, four were the variations of Spectral Rendering available, and one was a combination of Architectural Sampling and Spectral Rendering.

    The four images with just Spectral Rendering finished 5000 samples in 21 to 24 minutes. Both images using Architectural Sampling took nearly an hour. I put all six images as layers into a photoshop image and looked at them at high magnification. All of the Spectral Rendering images had less grain than the Architectural Sampling image.

    I'd been using Architectural Sampling for most renders, when doing CPU only renders on the old computer, because the completion was uniform across the whole image. I didn't even think to check the Optimization options in the Render Settings. Rendering with the GTX-1080, it's not such an issue now.

    I didn't keep track of the time it took to render the previous version of Rise, only that it was something over 8 hours to reach 15K samples. (I render while sleeping, so I always set it to very high samples on dark images.) Rendering this version of Rise with Spectral Rendering instead of Architectural Sampling took about half as long. I'm going to render it at 1280x720 again without either Architectural Sampliing or Spectral Rendering to see what the control render time should be. (Should have done that first yesterday. lol) I'll let you know if that ends up faster or slower than the Spectral Rendering.

    The Spectral Rendering definitely made the image look better. A word of caution, though. The cie1931 option did not render any light in the corridor behind the acolyte, (upper left.) The area behind her was completely black.

  • L'AdairL'Adair Posts: 9,479

    Okay, I did the control render without either setting. Here are the results for all the test images, (at 1280x720, 5000 samples):

    • Control, Architectural Sampling Off, Spectral Rendering Off: 1449.353s (24 minutes 9.35 seconds)
    • Architectural Sampling On: 3414.986s (56 minutes 54.99 seconds)
    • Spectral Rendering On, Faithful, cie1931: 1313.596s (21 minutes 53.60 seconds)
    • Spectral Rendering On, Natural, cie1931: 1392.673s (23 minutes 12.67 seconds)
    • Spectral Rendering On, Faithful, cie1964: 1315.761s (21 minutes 55.76 seconds)
    • Spectral Rendering On, Natural, cie1964: 1319.192s (21 minutes 59.19 seconds)
    • Architectural Sampling On, Spectral Rendering On, Natural, cie1931: 3518.754s (58 minutes 38.75 seconds)

    The time to render difference between the control and any of the Spectral Rendering settings isn't much, but still faster, at least with this dark image. But the lighting is slightly brighter with the Spectral Rendering, and the color of the lighting is more accurate. (I should probably make the color of the Ghost Lights over the Behemoth less white...) I think I have found a new favorite render setting.
    smiley

  • KindredArtsKindredArts Posts: 1,217

    @L'Adair - Great info! Thank you. I've never really understood the up side of the architectural sampler. It's supposed to ease path-tracing calculations on naturally lit interiors, but it's never quite done that for me. Apparently they are reliant on a lot of caveats though, so it's no surprise. Richard H said that spectral rendering is a bit heavy on render times, but 20+ minutes for an enclosed scene isn't to shabby, unless you're running stacked high-end cards. Perhaps once again there are caveats to spectral rendering and render performance. I'll have to do some tinkering on my end to get a better picture. Anyway, thanks again, great detective work. :)

  • KindredArtsKindredArts Posts: 1,217

    Just a quick note! Novica has been kind enough to share her wonderful light-rig. You can read stop by her thread on the subject here. Also, i'm sure many of you know already, but you can also find by her product review thread here. She's put forth a huge effort to not only setup the set, but also pack everything up neatly, and i can't thank her enough for doing so. smiley

  • RGcincyRGcincy Posts: 2,805
    edited January 2017

    Finally had some time to try out another product: The Library which also has a follow-on set The Library Iray Addon. This  test is with the original 3DL set which is less memory intensive even with the Iray Uber Base applied and so fits in my 2GB GPU . I'll try out the Iray Addon later. 

    This first render is without any ghost lights. The only light is provided by the Iray dome through the upper windows. I let it go to 48% convergence which took 1 hr 5 min. As you can see, it's a quite dark interior with most details hard to discern, even though the windows imply a bright sunny day outside.

     

    I added two ghost lights, scaled to fit the length of the hall. In height they start above the table and end below the ceiling. Since they've been scaled up (250% overall, 900% on x-axis), they need a low light value so I used 25 kcd/m^2. I also made the lights 2-sided so they would illuminate both sides of the hall. I started with only one light at 50K which worked other than you end up with an obvious narrow shadow on the ceiling and floor directly above the single light. With two lights spread out in the room, at half the luminance value, I got the same amount of lighting without the shadow. The Iray dome is still providing the same amount of light through the window as in the first render.

    This image shows the finished render. To get to 100% it took 1 hr 43 min. It was at 95% convergence in 1 hr 18 min and the extra 24 minutes to 100% had only a small effect (mostly around the windows). It reached 50% convergence in 23 min, so much faster than the dark image with only dome lighting. I would say this is now a fairly evenly-lit room but still has shadows along the walls and under the furniture. 

     

    So you can see how the lights were place, here is a screen capture of the lights with the ghost light's checkerboard pattern turned on:

     

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    Post edited by RGcincy on
  • RGcincyRGcincy Posts: 2,805
    L'Adair said:

    The time to render difference between the control and any of the Spectral Rendering settings isn't much, but still faster, at least with this dark image. But the lighting is slightly brighter with the Spectral Rendering, and the color of the lighting is more accurate. (I should probably make the color of the Ghost Lights over the Behemoth less white...) I think I have found a new favorite render setting.
    smiley

    Thanks for sharing your results. I'm going to have to check architectural and spectral settings out.

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