Getting lights to work in Iray renders.
music2u4u
Posts: 2,822
Hi all. I have been rendering with Iray a lot lately and I have a problem I need help with. I setup a scene to render and I need to add lights. Most Daz lights won't work in Iray. The Daz spotlight will work if you color the light. Direct lights do nothing here. Render comes back completely dark. I have ghost lights but they only work as lamps and such, no direct lights. I have tried using some lights from other sets but they are usually pointed all wrong and not the right kind of lighting. I have downloaded freebie Iray lights but they are also usually just for close up portraits of humans. I need room lighting. What do I do? Here is a render I did of shirley Temple I made dancing at the Paragon Club while Dolly Parton and Marilyn Monroe watch her. I tried everything to get light but the only light that shows are the table lamps (point lights) and the red stage spot light. The room is completely dark. I tried Uberenvironment 2 settings and tons of light sets from other stuff and it still comes out dark. So after hours of failing, I finally gave up hope and just rendered it in 3d Delight. Can anyone help me here? I have tried so much stuff.
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The types of lights you mention as not working in Iray do indeed work -- I do it all the time. So it must be something in your settings or selection of light types. (UberEnvironment lights are only for 3Delight, so delete those in any Iray setup.)
As your example was a closed set, you should really start out simply, and experiment from there. Start a new scene. Select Iray as the render engine and hit the Defaults button to go back to the defaults. Add a character, and try rendering with just the default environment. You should definitely get something. From there you try adding more scene lights. Discover how things work before trying to render finished scenes.
If the ghost lights aren't working as light sources, maybe you have iray set to Interactive mode rather than the default Photoreal mode. In Interactive emissive lights will not produce lighting that illuminates other objects. Specific settings like this can get accidentally changed as you experiment. This is why it's important to start from square one.
I did a render using the Deco Club set in Iray and all I used was the Emissive lights on the wall and table lights, a Distant light behind the curtain and a Spot on the singer.
The base strength of Studio lights is too low to compete with the default HDRI. Min of 1500 lumens, but more like 15,000 or 150,000 are needed. Mind, this is for lights reasonable distances away. As they get closer, the square cube law applies. This is not a lighting rule, but you really need to fiddle with the numbers to get it, or cut the HDRI down.
The spot in my image is 2500 Lumens at 3500 temperature, it is a Point Light at a Diameter of 6.00 and a spread of 31.9. The Environment Map HDRI is a black star field.
Hmmmm...I use the Uberenvironment 2 lights all the time with Iray. They work for me only limited. They equalize the scene lighting. You can see a definate differance in the overalllighting with them on.
Fishtails, I noticed that your render overall room lighting is similar to the one I got with Iray. I also used the table lights and the red stage spot is a spot light and works great. I had to size it down and unbright it. I did not use any wall lights though so the room was a bit dark. The idea was to set off Marilyn Monroes face in the lights to be recognized. I noticed your "George" is a bit dark like mine was. I will play around with all this and maybe re-render it in Iray and post it for you to see.
Thanks to anyone who tries to help...I need it...lol.
Music
Here is an Iray render with a beach shore background image and my dial spun girl character. I used uberenviroment 2 as one part of the lighting and a distant also. If you look very closely, you can see two different sets of shadows. One from the distant (behind her) and one from the uberenviroments (to her left from her feet and softer). They work for me in Iray jjust fine.
...for outdoor scenes I use the Iray Sun/Sky setting with the Sun Dial (found in the render presets). The Sun Dial allows you to manually set azimuth and elevation at the viewport "world's" centre point (similar to the old LDP). Even when using a photo backdrop, be sure to have "Draw Dome" turned on as this also produces the overall ambient "skylight" effect. The Sun/Sky setting will not work with an HDRI or skydome.
Photometric lights do take a bit of "fiddling" to get the proper luminosity.You can also use them to create soft box effects by increasing their size. Emissives are convenient, but tend to be resoruce hogs, so the more of them you have in the scene, the longer the render time (particularly if like me you are rendering on the CPU). I try to keep them at a minimum.
One technique I use for "fill" or ambient lighting in indoor scenes is a "ghost light". Easy to make, just create a plane of whatever size you need, add the emissive shader to it, then turn the cutout opacity of the plane down to something like 0.001 The light will still be visible while the plane itself isn't. There is also a commercial product in the store that does the same which gives you a visual reference of where the plane is and how it is oriented when in scene building mode.
@music2u4u
It's generally a bad practice to ask for help then refuse to try it. UberEnvironment 2 doesn't "work just fine" with Iray. Studio will do it's best to convert it to a photometric light, but what you are seeing should be the default Daz environment light.
Remove the distant light and the uberenvironment light from your beach girl scene and try with just the default Studio Environment light or an Iray HDRI if you have one.
Here's Molly with just a HDRI
So let's see... aren't you the person having trouble with lighting in Iray? You're told that UberEnvironment lights are for 3DLight, a completely different renderer. If you want to "equalize" the scene lighting use a light meant for Iray. Otherwise you're just wasting your time and not getting the quality you should. Your beach scene is easily reproducible with Iray lighting, and even improved. If you're getting any affect at all with the UE light shaders it's only luck, and that's no way to render a good scene.
The first version of Ghost Lights has a plane mesh light (easy to make yourself also, as kyoto kid explained), works great for direct ligthing in indoor scenes. I usually just use one of those and nothing else in my indoor scenes, like here:
I re-endered the scene in the Deco Club to show the wall lights and the table lights.
Received update to 00806 iterations
2017-08-11 16:19:43.463 Total Rendering Time: 8 hours 11 minutes 30.60 seconds
..here's the outdoor beach scene I was going to post (was really tired and turned in early last night then remembered I was going to post it)
Used the beach plane from the Beach Pod with bump and displacement turned up. For the water used the water disk from Sea Scapes with an Iray water shader. The backdrop is a photo attached to a plane primitive
Lighting is using the Sun/Sky environment and Sun Dial along with a ghost light to provide a little more fill light on the characters.
The entire scene rendered with freebie Iray fog camera.
Not really contributing to the topic, but that render is simply wonderful. Everything is so 'right'.
--ms
Oh, thanks. Was just testing new stuff and as it often happens when I do that it started to evolve and ended up like this. :)
You are so right Fastbike. My bad. I retried the render using the uberenviro light and it was black. So, I rendered it with Delight and got the same result I posted. One direct light with shadow on and uberenviro. I am such a dumbie...lol...I am kinda new at this, but I have worked with Reality that my friend owns and created. He gave me free copies back when it was first presented. I was interviewed in Dec 2010 by World Hobby Magazine, a world wide published magazine for my realism in my renders. They posted a few in the article. The motorcycle posted here. So I have a lot of experience with Lux and baking renders. I have been using Daz3d since the very first build. The Ness and Richard Hasltine were my mentors and teachers. I am not new to 3d at all. I ran the Daz freebie challenge in the forums here for 7 years and have many models I made as contest prizes over at sharecg.com, just put music2u4u in the search to get some of my free stuff.. I put it all down for a year and now it has all changed. I do appreciate good help, but I have gotten help in the past that didn't help much because the info I was given was incorrect. I learned to be very careful...lol. So, my beach girl render is a 3d Delight render after all. I am still going to re-render the Paragon club with Iray and post the outcome for you to see. I just got some free HDRI Iray light spheres and will try to use them. I am going to try to make me some ghost lights also. Please do not think I don't appreciate good help...I do. I am just used to experimenting and learning things the hard way...haha. I do, however take advice when I get stuck. Thanks Thanks Thanks, and did I say Thanks?
Render shown above is from the Dec 2010 World Hobby magazine article on my "realistic renders". Lux render engine.
Here is something I have noticed working with Daz lights and Iray. Only the spot lights work ok, but you have to turn up the lums to about 30,000. This and Iray emissives work ok indoors. If you do alot of indoor renders I would suggest buying the Ghost light system and use them for indoor scenes only. (https://www.daz3d.com/iray-ghost-light-kit) For indoor Iray lighting they work great. For outdoors Iray lighting nothing beats HDRI's they make fast work of lighting you just have to spin either your scene or your dome to get the shadows where you want them. Go on youtube and do a search on Daz Iray and lighting.
I find ghost lights help outdoors too, depends on the effect you are looking for.
What extra light you think you get out of Ueberenvironment is probably the default HDRI. You can test that easily: In render settings, change from "HDRI & Scene" to "Scene only". That will show you which of your scene lights actually do deliver light, and how much.
You might find these two threads useful for getting the basic ideas on how lights work in Iray:
EDIT: Just noticed your second post, so... :-) I hope you still can make use of the two threads. They deal with indoors, but it should give you a general idea about gw the lights work in Iray.
As for Iray lights being too dim: tone mapping is your friend.
Iray lights are only too dim if you can't get your mind beyond the fact the lumen values in Studio do not correspond to real world lumens. This seems to trouble people no end.
..exactly. Took me a bit to stop thinking like a stage lighting tech and thinking more like a photographer. I find ghost lights indespensible for ambient and soft box effects indoors and providing fill light outdoors. You can also scale width and height of photometric spotlights to create soft box effects.
(Edited to fix typos as this was originally sent from my phone and my stiff arthritic fingers are even less accurate on that tiny virtual keypad
)
OK....I have learned a lot from you guys up in here in just a few days. It turns out that the beach girl render was done with no lights applied. An Iray though. I found that, when no lights are present, Iray will supply you with lighting automatically to cover for it. That is what the render is.
I have gone back and rendered the Paragon club scene in Iray. (The last one was 3d Delight.) It took a while but with all your help I got, here is what I did....There are two exterior HDRI Iray spotlights. One is facing Marilyns face, the other is pointing down from the ceiling over Dolly's table. I colored both of them a soft light blue and took the brightness down to 90. There are two Iray ghost lamps on the tables with emission temperature set at 3000. The luminance is set down to 800 for their brightness. There is one more exterior HRDI Iray spotlight pointed at the stage from the back of the room. I recolored ir to a soft tan color. The white was way too bright. Then I changed the light geometry from a rectangl to a disc to get the roundness of it on the curtain behind them. I then reduced the spread of the disc down to where it was just showing teir hands joined. After the render it grew to full size it is. I turned the render quality to "off", Turned the max time to "0", set the minimum samples to "15,000" all in the progressive rendering....ten I rendered it for 3 hours and got what you see. Boy was that tough...lol. I learned so much from just doing this one render about HDRI and Iray rendering. I got the effect I was looking for. So, there you have it.
Thank KK. The funny thing about this whole 3d thing is, once you realize something, it opens the door for so much more. Not just in Daz, but in all 3d modelers and programs. I remember when I got familiar with .3ds models and Poseray, the way I could take a model in there and weld the vertices and recalculate the normals and smooth it like glass. Then there is Blender....ARG. I have 3d Max 9 and it is a tough one to navigate, still haven't figured it out but the results are phenominal! I love my Daz though. I use it exclusively. I make alot of characters from TV shows and movies. Here is one I did yesterday and rendered her in Iray with an HDRI backing of blue and three different positioned Iray spots. That is the Daz python with her. She is Santanico Pandemonium (Salma Hayek) from the movie "Dusk Till Dawn". She's a vampiress dancer for the desert club they went to. I have All the characters made from that movie including Sex Machine, the guy with the gun on his beltbuckle who turns into a vampire. George Clooney looks exact except for the big neck tatoo. If I could find it layed out flat, I could apply it to his texture in photoshop, but I have yet to find it. Thank all of you for your help, please feel free to keep posting here if you like. I am open to anything 3d related. If it will help folks...post it. Or if you just have a render you are proud of and wanna show us, post it. BTW...KK...I have always loved your girl and bear GIF....too funny!
...the only HDRI environment I use is a neutral ambient freebie created by Mec4D which works well for photo studio shots. MY set up is the HDRI two ghost lights to the left and right and a single photometric spotlight behind the camera.
Bugger, stupid forum software logged me out before I could get the pic uploaded then it removed the attachment when I attempted to put the full view in the post. How many years have we been dealing with this kind of rubbish now?
/complaint
This render is lit only with https://www.daz3d.com/pro-studio-hdr-lighting-system
The attached is significantly reduced in size from the original.
Wow, there's a lot to like about her and the lighting works very well.
(One thing I noticed about the model... her shoulder blades are an inch too low to be mechanically functional in real life. Otherwise, very nice.)