Iray Light Probe Kit - Support and render thread (Commercial)
KindredArts
Posts: 1,229
Late last year, I released my unidirectional diffuse lighting kit (Iray ghost light kit). I put together this kit to bridge a problem that heavy duty path tracing render engines, and that's heavy duty render times. ILPK is geared towards the same purpose, in a slightly different way. Even with my previous sets, large areas are very difficult to light evenly, often resorting to countless duplications and a lot of separate elements to keep track of.
ILPK is a collection of spheres, rigged to one central hub, forming a small network. These spheres can be dotted around your scene by hand, or with the help of preset poses. Once the ILPK network fills out your scene, it will bathe it in balanced ambient light. Each probe can be controlled manually, or the probes can be changed uniformly. With only one central lighting hub to worry about, you can change your scene colour and intensity all in one place.
If you have questions, need support, or as always, want to post some snaps!? Please do so here. You can also PM me privately or contact the email address given in the documentation if you prefer.
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Comments
So each probe is uniform? In the set-up shots it looks as if they have a mark on ne side, as if they ar directional, but that's not wht the description seems to say.
How does this differ from your Ghost light kits (and I have both). The second Ghost light set has a light ball and a light dome, how do the probes in the new set differ from these?
I'm glad you posted this. I have to admit that I almost didn't even look at the product as anything with "Light Probe" in the name usually means an HDRI set here in the DAZ store. Is there a reason you didn't use "ghost light" or something similar like "ghost sphere"?
Each probe is omnidirectional, the setup textures are just for show. Each one acts in a similar way to point lights, but they have almost now shadowing (or very soft) and there's no specular output either.
They use almost an identical shader, the main difference is purpose. If you were to use the spheres from IGLK2, you would have to load in each sphere manually, control each material manually and place each one manually. IPLK is meant for large, complex environments (Although that doesn't have to be the case), so you don't need to load a crazy number of ghost lights or sphere props. Instead you can just load the network, pick a preset pose, and move any probes that are out of place. It's a workflow i've been finding quite useful, and i wanted to share it with the store. If you have a good workflow with IGLK/IGLK2 then by all means, continue to do so, that's what they're there for.
I probably should have in hindsight. "Probe" on the daz store seems to have a different connotation than it does elsewhere. I intended them to work more like GI probs, but with manual input from presets. They are essentially another ghost light tool though.
I also would have skipped even looking at this except your branding got me to at least click on the thumbnail. I now think this may be a day one buy... it sounds fantastic for Tomalin sets.
It's very useful for big sets. Small rooms are much easier to deal with, even if you have the base IGLK, but big areas are always a headache for me. If it can save a few headaches for other people, it was worthwhile. Thanks for picking it up DF!
Want, want, want, want, want, want, want, want,want,want,want,want,want,want,want,want,want...
Bought, bought, bought, bought, bought, bought...
Ill have questions, im sure. Must play first!
lol, i was worried you weren't going to show up
. Thank you for picking it up, and i'll be here if you have any problems.
This is a really straightforward product so far. Its really good at lighting up dark patches and evening out light levels. Excellent for corners. Great job KA! This is another staple lighting product in my opinion.
I'm having trouble setting each probe individually. It doesn't matter whether I select a probe with the universal tool or the surface selection tool. When I set intensity or color, it applies to all of them.
Hi there!
The material presets provided for ILPK are for the network only (as a whole), however the network is split up into material zones which can be edited independently. Here's what to do, step by step....
1. Make sure you have the surfaces tab open, and the ILPK object is selected in the scene.
2. Now, in the surfaces tab, find which probe you want to change. They are numbered 1 - 12 and you can double check which probe you want to edit by clicking it in the scene view and looking at what the corresponding number is in the scene tab.
3. Once you have the right probe selected in the scene tab, you can edit the values however you wish. There are only three values you should focus on - Emission color, Emission temperature and Luminance. The first two options control the light color, and luminance is how bright the light is.
I'm going to leave an image below as a bit of a visual guide. I know it can be a bit jarring if you've never used the surfaces tab before, but i'll be here if you get stuck or have any more questions.
Thanks, now I understand. I'm very happy with this product.
Here's my test render. This is Summoners' Cathedral of Sorrow. I manually changed colors and used luminance values as high as 10,000. It's a rather large environment. This took 1 hour to render.
Interesting to note, that the render was significantly darker when the probes were visible.
Wonderful renders Dracorn, i've never seen that set before but its quite special. Looks like a Tomalin set. One tip i would give you is to scale the probes. You can do this by using the scale parameter for each individual probe, or you can use a push modifier....
Add a push modifier by Going to edit / object / geometry / add push modifier. You can now scale the probes uniformly with one slider.
Your render came out brilliantly, but i have a hunch that larger probes would have had an impact on render speed. Just a hunch mind you! I'm happy to be proven wrong. Did you find render speed faster than normal at this size?
Probably gets darker with probes on because you have burn highlights and crush blacks on.
that is gorgeous, dracorn!!
So if I am understanding you correctly, scaling the probes to a larger size would eliminate the need for high lumin values? I will try that.
Last time I rendered this set it was in 3Delight and took an hour and a half. It didn't look nearly as good as Iray, though. I am going to play with it to optimize the textures in Iray. I just did a quick conversion using Iray Uber.
The Catheral of Sorrow was created by Summoner (Poser items) and is available for FREE on Share CG.
http://www.sharecg.com/v/85867/browse/11/Poser/Summoners-Cathedral-Of-Sorrow-Fan-Art-
Yes! The bigger the lights, the lower intensity you need. It should have a significant impact on performance, just give it a try.
Thanks for the linky as well! Beautiful set, i'll download it for later
I am relatively new at Iray, agent unawares, since I had been using 3DL until recently. Could you explain what 'burn highlights' and crush blacks' are? Thanks!
Go Here .... They are both at the bottom.
It's in Tone Mapping settings. What it does is tries to brighten up highlight areas and darken shadow areas so the image has more contrast. I think because your first image had no super bright places in it highlights across you whole image got brightened, and with the second one beause you had bright white spheres in the scene there was very little brightening in other parts of the image. This is just a guess, though.
Just got this today, so looking forward to giving it a spin. If it's half as good as ghost lights, I'll be using them a lot.
Thanks Rich, much appreciated! Best of luck to you, and be sure to report back from the field.
It worked great! The brightest probe was set to 20,000 lumins. I increased the scale to 500% and reduced the lumins to 900. I had to play around with scale and lumins to get the right balance, which is a little more subtle with this one. Total render time was reduced by two thirds at 24 minutes.
Well hey, thats pretty good going dracorn! I know its a fair bit of fiddling around to get it right, but once its done, you can just save the probes out as a scene/scene subset and load them in whenever you use that set. That's what i do anyway. Thank you for testing that out, it looks great
By the way, when I created the push modifier with ILPK selected, when I scaled up all the probes at once, they moved out of position. Not sure what I did wrong.
So I selected them individually and that worked.
Ohhh sorry, they might be pushing from center (i thought they pushed individually). Ok scrap that idea!. Yes, just using the per bone scaling, that works best. Plus you dont have to do it one by one, just select them all in the parameters tab and use the scale slider, it should apply to all of them.
I think this version looks the best so far. As you say, it's more subtle. But it also looks as if all the light is coming in from "outside" via windows and skylights, etc. I really love how it looks. (Go even darker, add a light blue tint, and I'll bet you could make it look like moonlight!)
Fancy Shmancy!!! Great work!
I'm already in love with this set! I use Fabiana's Glow helpers a lot from her Alter Glow set (Rendo) to add extra light to faces. I've been wanting to experiment with doing more with something like that for an environment. You nailed that with this product! I'm doing a promo render now that uses the ironman13 barn. The probes made a huge difference, along with Fabi's Glow Helper. The results are fabulous! Will post once it's released (in a couple of days.)
Hey Llynara! I've got i13's barn, so if you get stuck, just give me a toot. Thank you for picking the set up, it's very much appreciated, good luck!
Ps. Oh, and remember the scaling tip above! If your scene isn't converging as fast as you'd hoped, scale up the probes, it makes a difference.