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Exposure value in Tone Mapping in DS, setting it to 28 will change the exposure value of the rendered canvases exr to -14EV , same as sliding exposure down in PS to -14EV
And building a monster rig into thinking one is going to get faster render times is a dellusion
Yes, I know. Exactly what I was saying earlier:
Your statement only confirms that DS is somehow baking in the default tone-mapping value (13) when it writes the EXR files, which is messed up IMHO.
- Greg
I think you're pretty spot on here. Its not hard to work around but man is it annoying,
On the subject of annoying quirks with canvases,did you know that applying any render setting presets (like say one applying an HDRI) wipes out and canvasses you've set up? Gahhhhhh.
Im also discovering using jpegs and eviro pane works well too
It should not bake anything in the exr, but it does not bake other settings as I tried, it may be messed up since canvases not working always exactly as they should , and the fact that it render .exr the way with so high exposure values is weird so may be a bug
Haven't seen this behavior, but I only ever render beauty passes out of Iray.
- Greg
Sorry but this is wrong. When Daz Studio saves the HDRI with Canvases, it ignores any Tone Mapping setting, including the EV setting - I just tried saving two renders, one at EV=0 and one at EV=13 and both were identical.
The confusion comes perhaps from Daz Studio's default settings. Exposure Value is set to 13 by default, so this is taking the raw HDRI data and making it around 10,000 times darker (8,192 if we are splitting hairs!). When the EXR is saved, it saves the raw data, which is around 10,000 times too bright for normal usage. So the solution (as I indicated in an above post) is to set the Environment Intensity value to around 0.0001 to 0.0002. If you did this without changing the Exposure Value under Tone Mapping, you would see a black rendered image (or maybe just the brightest lights like the sun), so if you want to actually see the image as it renders, which is useful for judging when the noise has reduced to an acceptable level, then you not only need to reduce the Environment Intensity but also to set the EV to zero - that way you can see exactly the values that will be saved in the EXR.
P.S. If you are using mesh lights, these also need to be turned down to 1/10000th of their value. if you set the Exposure Value to zero then you can see exactly what the values will look like in the exported EXR.
Who is wrong Phil ? It was not a suggestion ! since Tone mapping is not rendered by the engine it is post production I said it now how many times before already? however there is a bug since changing the EV to 26 in tone mapping do affect the canvases and in a very bad way , setting the Enviorment intensity to 0.0001 did worked, but it render very noisy canvases for me so that is not an option
Sorry Cath but the way I read it seemed to be saying that changing the Exposure in Tone Mapping will change the exposure values in the rendered EXR file. I am glad that we are agreed that it does not!
While there are folks around with technical knowledge of HDRI in Studio, a question: does Studio still use only spherical mapped light probes, or are angular mapped possible?
Only Spherical Environment HDRI [Longitude Latitude ], angular [Chrome ball] or light probes HDRI are not supported.
+1
Thanks, Cath. The reason I ask is that there are a couple of Bryce tools that create round maps of your scenes but only one outputs in spherical projection and can be used for something similar to what's being discussed here.
This is the suitable one:
https://www.daz3d.com/bryce-7-pro-spherical-mapper
This might be useful for some, given that Bryce can natively make more complex landscapes than Studio. Maybe Carrara has spherical output too?
Haven't had the need to do so in many years, but used to use a program called HDRShop to do conversions between projections. It's not even installed on this box, but it may be a place for you to start looking if you're interested. It was lightweight (portable) and included a plugin architecture. I'm sure there are other conversion utilities out there, too. Hope this helps.
- Greg
Peter - you can load an angular map into Bryce and export it in the spherical projection. There's no need for HDRShop (which is super cool but not available for free anymore).
I did not use Bryce in ages, but I did time ago with Vue, rendering out skies with Spherical projection to use in Poser and UE2 in DS , I saw some iray products that used Bryce for that purpose since as Horo said it can export the maps you need . I still have the old HDRShop but to convert Light probe to Spherical maps you will need a huge resolution to have some quality after conversion or just use it as a light source with Dome off in iray. I have 100s of my own HDRIs Light Probes collection from the past when I was doing lighting for Poser , but due to low resolution it can be only used as light source in your full 3D scenes with dome off and some matching backdrop or use with software that support separate Environment maps and HDRI lighting with Light Probes
PhilW - thank you for this cool idea. No, they are not HDRI, not even DRI, just LDRI but a pano (panorama) is always better as backdrop than a flat photo. Reflection works fine, gloss or specular much less so without really bright pixel values. And they can give nice ambient light but one or several key lights are needed. These are limitations but don't render this idea worthless - even with the obvious stitching errors. It's not the real thing, but it can be real fun. I made over 300 HDRIs photographically (indoor and outdoor, even spherical HDRI anaglyphs) and a couple from Bryce multiple renders by changing the lights for each render to emulate the effect of changing the exposure. I call this "faking". There are several ways a partly-true HDRI can be faked from LDRI photographs. Apart from the valid comments here, I do appreciate you brought this idea forward.
MEC4D - yes, size matters if rendered as backdrop. The angle of view (or camera focal length) together with the rendered document size determine the size needed. As reflection map, a smaller size can also work if the backdrop is only visible in the reflection. Another trick when using a smaller than necessary HDRI is using depth of field (DOF) that blurs the backdrop and you keep the main object in the focus. Bryce has even a separate DOF control for the HDRI backdrop.
That why I am including the lower resoltuion HDRI in my latest products to use with DOF and cameras above 50mm , but also for quicker scene setup and faster preview and loading , I just replace it with the Higher resoltuion HDRI if needed . Srill the low resolutions from converted Light Probes can be used for many things to render with , from product preview to portriat study , most of them I have are diffuse maps and are blurred as the one standard iray HDRI when you open DS , I was thinking the other day to blow off the 12 years digital dust and convert all my HDRI light probes to spherical maps and make something new and usable again . The size of HDRI for lighting not really matter , even so sometimes the mega high resolution HDRI used for lighting can create artifcals , since every pixel represent light and Artists prefer the medium size in general that why I stick to max 10K and after doing 16K I come to conclusion that there was not difference in quality of the light as the 10K did it better , the only good thing about was the abillity to render very high resolution renders , but there was also down side of memory and overal slow down in the workflow even with 12K cuda cores.
Horo - thanks for your comments and while I appreciate most of what you say, can I just pick up on one point? You mention about "really bright pixel values" - well you can have it as bright as you need. I only pushed it so far in my example, but you can push it much further - to the extent that it will bleach out everything in the scene! So I don't see this as any kind of limitation. I agree there are limitations in other ways, but that is not one of them.
Mec4D - yes, size doesn't matter for lighting, specular or even diffuse convolved HDRIs can give nice light. Although it's quite well defined what an HDRI is, different applications handle them differently. It depends how the lights are created from the image and how the render engine handles them. There's no better or worse, just different implementations.
PhillW - oh yes, clumsy me. Sure, we can fake in the sun (or any bright light source) as you explain in the second video. I didn't take that in account when I wrote my comment. I was rather thinking of very bright reflection dots on water or a window reflecting the sun. Such would be very laborious to add in PS not the sun and/or a few street lights, for example.
I just made little comparison of the 2 files between and how it can affect the ambient lighting shadows and specular reflections ( not confuse with reflections like mirror or shiny metal ) for those that still wonder about , both the same scene and materials, the fake one acting like a big softbox what can be usable in some situations if needed but then you will miss part of the light reflections and your iray materials will not respond in the same way since the full scene acting as a diffuse light source no matter it comes from the floor or windows as the most light info is lost and can't be restored .
Just for the info regarding the subject , as you can do as you please and what is good for you.
I did an interior spherical shot of a sci-fi lab with the resolution of 8192x4096. Took me 6 hours. I did some post work to reduce noise. I applied the same method as Mr. PhilW, and came out with a really cool lit scene! You need to remember to bump up your "environmental lighting resolution" in the iRay settings accordingly, to get those nice sharp/clean shadows (You may not have to render an image that high. I was also going to use it as a 360 environment for my Vive VR). Also, I recommend playing with the dome settings if things look off. Turn your ground on if you don't want any geometry for your floor. Turn on your "visiulize finite dome" to see where your ground and dome meet (the dome will have a green overlay over your render (I have a GTX 1080 and never use my live preview - here would be a good idea).
If you need to use DS's DOF in a render, you may need to use the manual ground settings. Your ground will be blurred right along with the background. The ground is great for catching shadows. However, there is no way to catch reflections.
Of course, this may not matter if you are just using the background for distant lighting or rendering out an alpha layer.
It took about 8 min. (Edit: I'm going to retest this) to render V7HD at 4 smoothinng iterratons with displacement maps, Layton hair, and AlphaKini.
My rig is an i7, GTX 1080, with 8GB of RAM.
In all, I would say that it's a lot of work when you could just set everything up and hit the render button and do some post work. However, some rigs can't handle a lot, and DS is prone to crashing. Having something like this is excellent for future work though. The environment is already set up along with Phil's lighting technique which gets my thumbs up. You just add your characters and props, and set your camera up. Just another tool/trick that may come in handy. Thanks again, Phil!
PS: I'll post a pic as soon as I get home. ;-)
@redvant - thanks for your testing! Rendering your own environments in DS is undoubtedly a lot of work for a single render. However if you are animating one or more characters in that environment, it can be a real time saver as the background and environment only need to be rendered the once, and it will bring your "per frame" render time right down.
Sorry for the wait. Here is what I did. This render contains only V7HD with 4 smoothing iterratons along with displacements and 2 spheres. I had the render setting close to high. The spheres are in the scene to see how different materials would interact with the environment. I applied the spec maps to her glossy roughness to see how wet skin would look as well.This render took about 15 minutes at this resolution. It's very convincing!
Redvant - that looks great, thanks for sharing,
Hey Cath just bought your beach HRDI very cool. I am also enjoying what one can do using the enviro plane with good high res BG pics make for good poor man's DOF as well. I used to sometimes leave empty backdrops and bridge them in PS enviro works at blending them better!
Actually it would be cool if we could place the main viewport or the aux viewport in 360 scene creation mode so that we could build a scene that we could render as an HRDi scene easily using all modeled meshes and Sun & Sky.
So basically overlay some sort of globe grid mesh with polar degree markings as you rotate the camera around. Guess it wouldn't be too hard without that though.
Thanks Bob, you can render backplates from my HDRI and have better result , just render them with pixel filter set to 0 , and use the low resolution for lighting and for rendering the alpha scene with dome off, the workflow get faster .
Something I did with club scene pic using feild filter in PS then used with enviro BD