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Try creating a new spotlight / distant light and compare it to the existing ones - the parameters settings for Iray lights have temperature and lumens settings in the properties (increase a lot from default if you want enough light). Temperature of 6500 is a white light, 5500 has a slight orange tint (like some sunlight), Lumens of 5000 on a distant light might be ok to try, then adjust from there. Spotlights often need much higher values as the falloff from the light reduces its effect too quickly.
Noise filter has been there for over a year. It's explained a little further down the page in this thread: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/57038/iray-manual-render-settings-explained#latest
There was another thread not too long ago I can't find at the moment that suggested, if your lighting was good, you could save time over using the noise filter and still lose noise by upping the quality setting.
@outrider42 "And now my question. I see people talking about noise being reduced. There is a noise filter option in the render settings now. Does this need to be enabled, or are the renders better without it? Are there any drawbacks to the noise filter, like longer render times, or blurriness? And what do the settings for it do??? I have no idea what they mean, and what their impact would be. This is one of the features I was asking for last year, and I'm sure a lot of people were. Noise and graininess have been one of Iray's biggest flaws, so this is much, much appreciated."
I'm going to disagree on this.
There has been a noise filter setting in Iray for some time, at least the 4.9 versions. Secondly, noise and grainyness in images isn't an Iray flaw, it's an image composition flaw. Noise and graininess are most caused by poor lighting choices. Calling it an Iray flaw is like blaming a camera for blurry images when the shutter speed is too slow for the scene.
I do not have a Pascal card but I am still glad I updated. I have not had any of the issues others are suffering from (yet!). One of the most worthwhile improvements IMHO that is well worth the upgrade is the abilty to tweak a character's pose whilst using IRay preview mode, and you are not forced to wait for ages for all the shaders to be recompiled.
Oh, well my bad then. I never noticed that filter, all the talk about noise had me thinking that setting was part of the update. But I know the answer is often more light, though to a point.
I'm going to disagree right back. Sometimes you can do better lighting, but sometimes you want/need low light environments. If you are to mimic real world light conditions in a low lit scene, you WILL get noise and grain. That is a flaw. There is a very specific reason why Ghost Lights was just released as a product. And if it wasn't an issue, why did Nvidia work to make it better? It was a problem, that's why.
You want to compare it to photography, sure, Iray is like a digital camera, not an optical camera. Most digital cameras are flawed in low light conditions, and so is Iray in those situations. Let's say you want to photograph the moon at night. With an average digital camera you are guaranteed to get a noisy picture. Do you blame your poor picture on the lighting or shutter speed when no amount of either is going to help? You can't really fault the moon. No, you used the wrong tool, you should use an optical camera for that picture. And sometimes Iray is not the best renderer for the job.
So far Iray renders much faster with the new engine for me. I'm quite happy.
It's not a flaw, it's a reality of rendering. You need more light to render decently and you can adjust levels in post if you do it right.
Ghost Lights just made it easier to use methods people already had.
And in real life, photographers use all sorts of methods to manipulate light to create the effect they want.
Honestly, I feel that I too have had issues with the lates Nvidia driver release 376.whatever. Reverted back to the previous one.
I wonder how to take a picture of the moon at night and it not wind up looking like a picture of the sun t dusk?
...Newegg has a GTX 740 with 4 GB GDDR5 for 138$ that also supports DX12. and OpenGL 4.4. I tend to do more business with them as they are just "down the road" from me and I never had to deal with damaged or DOA parts.
...downloading the Beta now. If I have an earlier version of the 4.93 beta, do I need to reinstall the 4.9 default resources again?
On that last statement that would be nice. Octane uses such a setup where if the texture weight exceeds GPU memory that is what dumps to the CPU while the geometry remains in VRAM
Poor analogy. it may be that Iray shares poor low-light performance with most other rendering engines, but it's still a technical flaw that it can't handle them well. Knowing enough about lighting for Iray can help combat the problem, but that often means compromises, and, in many instances, can't entirely fix it.
Noise is everywhere. Here's an interesting paper from the Renderman Community on how to figure out what is causing noise in a Renderman 21 render and how to reduce it before even having to use their new denoise process.
https://community.renderman.pixar.com/article/1673/debugging-and-optimization-1.html?l=h
Be sure to click - more - on that page to read the whole page online.
...never mind..
tried doing that, but still getting a black screen.. played wit the settings, and set to photoreal. if i change that, then it just looks like it was done with 3delight.
i was using the http://www.daz3d.com/advanced-ambient-light and have those other 2 advanced lights too. but guess i must be missing somthing important here. but dont know what.
also using the Skullcove skydome with light enviromient incoming storm
I have those AoA lights and they were my go-to lights for 3Delight render but I'm pretty sure they are not intended for use with Iray. I don't know the Skullcove skydome but perhaps that is for use with 3Delight too?
Skull Cove is set up for 3DL.
You'll want to delete the skydome itself, since that's blocking any light from the Iray Environment.
Yes, the dome was the problem.
deleted it, and now it works... Need to come up with something else.. got plenty of Iray stuff to look through... since i never used it yet, due to my vid card wasn't supported..
Yes, the AoA lights are definitely the problem — they only work in 3Delight and they're designed to fake the effects that Iray lighting does by default. Note that the default D|S lights (infinite, spot, and point) will switch between 3Delight and Iray mode depending on which render engine you've selected.
...installed the .166 beta and ran a couple tests (not to full convergence) and while it did seem to render a bit faster there was more noise.
Well, took an iray Dome, which is working. and use the standard Distance ligt. But scene wasn't getting brighter.
when i placed it, i used the same sames for the current view, and hit OK.
Then i cranked up all the lights items to 100000 and one 65000 i think it was. but the scene stayed dark, like a small spotlight was set to the same spot.
rendered a view times with different settings, and no change.... (on a side note, where do i change in the forum, that it doesn't jump 2 lines when i type... really annoying)
Are you certain you were not rendering with the enviroment set to Dome Only? Unless you have it set to Dome and Scene, the lights will not illuminate at all.
Distant Lights shine from outside the scene and so will be blocked by the dome.
To have an unspaced paragraph break press
shift return
instead or just return.
I also get more noise with the same rendering time so in that sense it's slower.
Im must be doing something wrong..
If I have no lights, then i can see the scene, but if I add any light, then all I see is a pinpoint to a spot.
Tried all kinds of lights and turned up all the volumes, but no luck
If you have no lights then the camera headlight turns on (unless you have set it to always off in Render Settings or the camera's parameters).
No lights as in the viewport or the render? There is a camera light which normally lights up the viewport and you would use that when the viewport doesn't recognise the lights you have added to the scene. If it is a viewport issue, try the Iray preview mode (I don't have my PC to point to where you select that but someone will show you, I'm sure).
in the render.
All I see it like a hotspot, like I am pointing a light to it, but I have it setup as the current view, so I am assuming the light goes with me, once I turn etc.
In the view port it just stays dark. (Have iray preview turned off)
For dark scenes you could try using the trick cinema has used forever for dark scenes, and use blue lighting to trick the viewer into thinking it's dark, while still being able to actually see.
Here is a screen.
The distance light is outside the dome... can't get it in.
So tried the other de faults lights, and linked to Camera 1, and played with the settings..