What are the best iRay light sets to purchase for indoor and outdoor lighting?
nokoteb99
Posts: 931
in The Commons
Hello. i've been searching for some iRay products to help me with indoor and outdoor lighting. Anyone have any suggestions? I'm a newbie in iRay, not very experienced.
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For indoor lighting I use mostly:
http://www.daz3d.com/render-studio-iray
http://www.daz3d.com/render-studio-iray-scenes
I do not know, if these are the best, but I like them.
For outdoor, I use many of the light sets, so I do not have found the best one, yet.
For simple HDR light setup, I use: http://www.daz3d.com/iradiance-hdri-variety-pack-two
Bear in mind, that lighting setup is also a personal taste and I read in many forum threads recommendation is to create your own sets.
If you have a decent computer and graphics card working well with iray, you can use interactive scene preview, to customize lights yourself.
For outdoor lighting, take a look at Design Anvil's Real World Lighting. I purchased it recently, and now wish I had bought it when it came out. I'm also really happy with Kindred Arts' latest, Iray Ghost Light Kit. You can learn more and see what customers are doing with the ghost lights in the support thread here.
Some people talk about Painter's lights beign great. But from the promos they don't look that great. Are they?
Painter's Lights are very good if you are doing portraiture and setup the subject correctly and allow the render to run to completion. Of course if that is not the style you are after then you won't appreciate it.
Are These Ghost lights good for indoor lighting on characters or just for architecture?
They are better for architectural illumination but can be used with characters in the scene too of course. For characters you usually want more dramatic lighting and so use only supplied emissive light with a set and a lot of patience or use a Portrait Studio style lighting product you can buy in the DAZ Store.
I really hate there's no documentation on these things. I got the Ghost lights and i'm not getting any good results, cause i'm just guessing what i'm suposed to do.there's no read me file , pdf or nothing
Can you recommend a Portrait Studio style lighting product?
I think Ghost Lights will probably work well for very dimly lit outdoor scenes, where you want some set of the scene to have a decent fill light. It's particularly good if you want ambient light in some general area.
Yeah i wish i knew how to use them. No PDF, no instructions.
My supposedly ghost light with 50k material IGLK 50K. This doesn't look any good. Cause i'm doing it wrong i know.
The support thread for Ghost Lights is here.
Tips here
I get good portrait studio style lighting from this product:
http://www.daz3d.com/ultra-genesis-studio-vol-1-iray-box-lights
It's the only one of that type product I own besides Painterly, which is intended or a completely different type of render.
As far as lighting a room how you imagine if you use ghostly indoors you should use 5000K and you should not exceed the equivalent to 100W per ghost light where you place the ghost lights and then you need to have patience to let the render run long enough to look good.
If you try, as I tried earlier, to get your renders to render quickly by flooding an area with too much light or overexposing the render you will get poor results as you showed with your render. It is better to try and match natural lighting or typical home and office lighting and have patience when you render than to try and rush the render.
If you are doing sci-fi or super-heroes or something totally artificial then you need to explore how people who have done those things themselves have lit and mostly postworked and filtered their renders.
Thanks for the suggestion for lights. They sound good. Do they have control over positioning ?
ANd if i use those lights for indoor lighting, then i don't need to use the Ghost lights?
Render Studio IRay and the monochrome version (which you can also use with color) are both great for indoor character lighting. And Colm Jackson has some great free tutorials about how to use them on his Facebook page! I learned a lot about lighting in general from those videos.
They are great for architecture. But they are also very good for putting light on a character, too. If you look at the last variation of "Rise", in the support thread or in my gallery, (here,) I've used ghost lights just above the behemoth to make him stand out from the water behind him, and both behind and in front of the nymph to help draw the eye to her. Also the face of the acolyte sneaking a peak through the door in the upper right is lit with a ghost light. There are only two spotlights in that image. One on the face of the nymph, and one behind the set lighting the corridor behind the acolyte.
It is easiest, imho, to use ghost lights if you locate them in your Content Library, where everything is in folders based on function. They are actually very easy to use. I have to go grocery shopping now, with hubby, but I'll put together a short tutorial for you later today, and post it here.
No, they are good for lighting people as done in portraits but in a mordern style.
For natural manmade lighting like you find in a home or office you are best going to use the Sun-Sky or HRDI for outside the windows and for inside the windows setting the emissives lights everywhere they are to real world values. If that isn't to your satisfaction then you supplement with the Ghost Lights but also using real world values. It's easy to get carried away in an effect to get your renders to finish quickly and create an even, flat, boring lighting that isn't the reality of nature.
I'm back. Lots of errands to do today, and traffic was a snarl. I'm off to work on the mini-tutorial...
I tend to cheat rather badly on indoor lighting. I do mostly indoor renders and I remove walls, ceilings and any other part of the interior not in front of the camera. Iray renders interiors especially dark ones rather slowly and I don't have all that much time.
I found ghost lights to be a bit flat looking for me personally
Okay. The mini-tutorial is finished. You can download it here.
The thread that's linked has information, there's also a link to the BOO light set I did, with an entire setup done for you. (It's over in the Art Studio if you want to use it, with a link to the files.)
Basically, look at the difference in horizontal vs vertical and pick one, - hit "apply before presets" then decide if you want daylight/evening, etc and I pick a color. Then click intensity. If you want to see your light again, hit Debug. (But that erases your settings.) If you want to tweak the light intensity, select the light in Scene, go into the Surface pane and change the Luminance.
I use Ghost Lights, and it's not just fill. Using them alone gives you some great portrait lights.
However, take a look at Pro-Studio HDR Lighting System (and yes, I light Painter's Lights but I like these better. I have a product showcase/discussion thread (going on 4 years) so I do a lot of portrait renders (hundreds frankly) and Pro-Studio is a good choice for easy selection, good results. For outdoors, Dumor and Apocalyptic lights (there's two, that's the link to one) and Skies of iradiance.