Can we have some basic IRAY lights in DAZ Studio Basic?
RKane_1
Posts: 3,039
in The Commons
Can we have some basic IRAY lights in DAZ Studio Basic?
There are a lot of people who only pretty much use IRAY to render but have to search for basic lights to use or modify the existing far. spot, and point lights to work better in IRAY renders. I have made a toolbar with IRay Lights I purchased for myself but, shouldn't this be included in Basic DAZ Studio?
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The basic lights in DS are iray as well as 3dl, you need to have the iray renderer selected for the iray parameters availble.
@RKane_1
Studio also uses a default Iray HDRI that is usable for mose scenes. This HDRI will be used with the default Iray render settings, once you select the iray render engine.
So I don't understamd your question.
I think the main problem a lot of people have with the basic lights in Iray, is if they don't realise that you often have to increase the intensity/lumminosity values to huge numbers in order for them to cast the expected amount of light.
On the other hand I think that many HDRI light sets are heavily "overexposed" so you have to turn Environment Intensity down.
Something else that's easily missed is that the default HDRI (unless you turn it off) gives moderately bright outdoor daylight, and the default Tonemapping parameter settings are suitable for a bright sunny day. If you're lighting your scene for something different, it's a good idea to check these settings.
Mesh lights and other lights like spotlights can really slow down renders, imo. I use HDRIs almost exclusively to light scenes. Iray Section Plane Nodes can easily hide off-camera geometry to let light in, and most indoor sets come with separate sections that are easily hideable if you don't want to use Section Plane Nodes. The HDRI that comes with Daz Studio (DTHDR-RuinsB-500) gives nice lighting, imo. Rotating the dome 65-100 and bumping up Burn Highlights and Crush Blacks (in Tonemapping) a little bit can make for some lovely and quick lighting. There are also some really nice freebie HDRIs that can be found online (some are junk, but there are a couple of sites that have nice high-quality HDRIs for free).
Yeah but maybe OP meant something similar to "light kit" that luxrender users were getting with Reality for DAZ?
this freebie is the base I use as a starting point http://www.valzheimer.info/2016/11/va2016-rgb-hdri-soft-lights-for-daz.html
Okay, apparently some of you ar under the impression this is my first rodeo.
It is not.
I am well aware of HDRI .
I well know about increasing the luminosity of the lighting in DAZ to get it to achieve the same effect it would have in 3DL. I am ask for a second set of lights within DAZ, READY TO USE, suitably bumped up already for use in IRAY.
Isn't it time they get added? IRay is quickly becoming the default renderer yet the lighting system is still stranded in 3DL. I don't want to ABANDON 3DL, just have a set of lights ready to go in IRAY. The lights we have know are for 3DL, obviously as they are not setup for Iray without special tweaking. Pre-tweak the lights.
I hope that clarifies some who may have missed the gist of what I was specifically asking for or assumed I was asking for something different.
Thanks, FSMCDesigns. I always appereciate freebies. My ask is for DAZ to incorporate a set of Iray ready to use lights in their taskbar from the get go. I have programmed my own set and will likely use these as well. Many thanks.
That would be nice, but more just a set of lights like spotlight and such PRE-TWEAKED up so that they light a scene properly in Iray Renders.
Thanks, Divamakeup. Well aware of mesh lights and HDRI and how each impacts performance. I enjoyed your post and thanks for sharing info with the others.
I am asking for Iray ready to use spotlights and distant lights pre-tweaked so that they work in IRAY properly. Even if we had the SAME lights but they were rigged to operate with different setting depending on what render type was chosen so that the approximate light in each was the same would be lovely.
The lights just need a suggested default for Indoor lighting... which was stated above as "a lot more" and quantified often as 1,000s or even 10,000s increase. Why? Because iray is basically real light, with accurate falloff happening quickly.
Inside an iray room the light comes from VISIBLE LAMPS or CANDLES or GLOW from a computer screen. Using a scene setup for 3delight is NOT setup for iray... but that is NOT a "lighting issue" from lack of say a couple of portrait or mesh lights.
The default values of the various lights on the tool bar only get one setting and they are current for 3delight, but they are not 3delight lights and so there is no corresponding iray lights because they are the same... they just need luminosity incresed "a lot".
Maybe this reads as Symantics but in this case it kind of is... we do not 3delight lights and we do not have iray lights we just have lights that have defaults suited to the older 3delight render engine.
Now once that is clear as mud... LOL... there are quite a few inexpensive iray light sets pretty much ready to render (DAZ Originals and maybe even PC+) or you can find some common settings and standard basic setups here in the forums.
First of all it's "semantics".
Second of all everyone here seems to think that I am asking for a set of lights to be pointed out to me.
I am not.
Thirdly, people seem to think that that fact that the lights are a lot dimmer in IRAY escapes me and I just need to be told ONE MORE TIME LIKE A SIMPLETOIN THAT I NEED TO TURN THEM UP. I do not. I know they need that. I want.... and I am going to say this with really big letters in bold so perhaps some people can stop offering the same information thinking they are either being witty or helpful.
I WANT A SET OF LIGHTS READY-TO-USE IN BASIC DAZ STUDIO THAT ARE PRE-TWEAKED TO OPERATE IN IRAY IN A WAY THAT DOES NOT REQUIRE I GO MANUALLY CRANK THEM UP. I DO NOT WANT YOU TO TELL ME HOW LIGHT WORK IN DAZ. I KNOW HOW IT DOES. I HAVE MY OWN SET EVEN PRE-TWEAKED AND READY TO GO FROM MY TASKBAR WHICH I PROGRAMMED. I THINK DAZ SHOULD HAVE A SIMILAR SET IN THEIR PROGRAM WITHOUT THE NEED FOR THE PERSON USING THEIR PROGRAM FOR THE FIRST TIME TO FIGURE IT OUT THEMSELVES.
Now... is everyone clear or must I use heiroglyphics? :)
Then perhaps you should move this thread to Product Suggestions? Or Submit a Feature Request ticket directly to Daz.
Have you ever adjusted the CM^2 setting in tone mapping? It changes the intensity of all lights simultaneously by multiplying the luminosity setting by whatever number you set. Here's a series of renders of the exact same scene, with completely stock settings on the light itself.
Headlamp off, scene only lighting, no lights. Total darkness, as would be expected.
Added a point light, with the CM^2 factor at one, which is the default. The light barely shows, which is what DS Iray users are used to.
Throw a zero on the CM^2 factor (10), and now we're starting to get some illumination.
Another zero (100), and now we've got a more accurate representation of what 1500 lumens would look like.
Another zero (1,000) and we've got good, even lighting that one might see in an actual room.
Yet another zero (10,000) and now our standard DS light is totally blowing out the scene.
Not only does this spare you the trouble of having to adjust every single light individually, it also lets you keep your luminosity settings at manageable numbers, without having to crank them into the millions to see anything. If you use an HDRI, though, remember to scale back the environment intensity accordingly.
edit: whoops, accidentally skipped over 1,000.
I vote for heiroglyphics , becaue you know, fun. Also stick the exposure value on there on your wish list for ready to go light sets, because one little number throws all the works out of whack.
Also Mt Rkane, you failed to mention if the wishlisted lights are mainly for indoor portraits, indoor interior scenes or outdoor either one, because that makes a difference too.
*DG refrains from pointing out various lihgt sets already in the store for any eventuality.*
But I 100% agree that the default spotlight should be at a useable light intensity out of the box, becuse really it is just silly that you have to crank the Lumens up to several orders of magnitude before it has any effect on the scene, which is the entire point of the thread.Change 1500.00 default lumns to 30,000-50,000 amd we have located a solid ballpark.
Also, here's the same scene, with CM^2 set to 1,000 and environment intensity at .01, with and without a default spotlight pointed at the wall.
Probably correct this shoud move to suggestions... But iray... Cuz light... Acts differently for every scene... So you really can't have one solution. We have a base that can be changed. Op sounds like they have their own base using additional lights. This is why iray scenes say they are optimized for iray... The creator has tweaked the environment, used shaders and possibly extra lights to create a good baseline for their scene.
Iray requires a shift in thinking away from 3delights faked ligting... A candle in an iray scene gives off real candlelight at a realistic level... No point lightneeded. Distant light is already part of an iray with windows, skylights, lamps and more I mentioned above.
Dreamlight today just dropped an amazing training set combining a couple of his classes... He gives actual numbers to a live scene... Explaining some things to be aware of with iray.
FOR ME iray needs a different way of thinking. I had to learn iray as an ENVIRONMENT... Not a type of render engine.
Thank you for posting this.
Studio needs tool tips that actually tell us what the parameters do.
Exactly! As a 3DL user, I'm surprised this problem has not been adressed. Reading all these "my renders are dark" and "lights are not working" threads and seeing the "crank it up" and "add zeroes" and "remove ceiling" solutions is getting a bit boring:)
IMO also 3DL requires the same shift. Unless you like faked lighting. Every 3DL user can use the free arealight shader with realistic falloff, make candle flames emissive etc, but for some reason most won't bother
. And the fact that shadows are off by default in 3DL for the standard lights isn't exactly helpful if you want atleast some level of realism in your renders
.
A nice 3 point lighting set up ready to use is actually not too much to ask
most softwares including Poser have one
all these tutorial scenes such as at the beach etc and no simple lighting rig with maybe a chair, a Dforce towel and a wall to pose your sexy model
As others have said, the issue is not that the lights are "dim" and need cranking up - it's that they are lights like real lights, and so the tone mapping needs to be adjusted. I think a better approach might be an obvious Render Preset (maybe even some kind of new scene wizard) to toggle between the default bright-day-outside and inside-a-room-with-local-lights. However, there are various options that could be used for this already - I just can't recall what comes with the base and what was added later.
You'll find those point lights, spot lights, & such in photometric mode need not be cranked up much more than a few lumums if you turn off "Spectral Rendering".
I agree though that several common 3 point and other standard lighting setups using those photometric lights should be supplied as a DAZ Studio Essential. Similarly a few Sun-Sky settings and HDRIs should be part of the DAZ Studio Essentials, maybe 4 each. All with the tone mapping and camera settings set at standard industry professional values for those lighting scenarios - something that hobbyists would have to spend weeks and months research by doing dumb search engine searches that might or might not take us to the appropriate professional answers for those settings anyway.
You know, a small but diverse enough sample of lighting & camera & tonemapping (which I consider part of the camera) settings that we hobbyists know have been professionally researched by by experts at DAZ 3D and set to the appropriate professional value which we can look at and copy or edit when make new scenes rather than just continually be in the dark everytime we make a new scene. Something that is lightweight and easy to use like Painter's Lights was/is (although it used environmental intensity in the render settings a lot to simulate cloud cover and/or being in northern latitudes).
As far as lighting going in the DAZ 3D Store there are a lot of lighting products in the store and I like some of them but they are rather difficult to use consistently outside the constrained environment they were designed to look good in. They are also difficult to edit. The instructions on a lot of those products leave lots and lots to be desired.
It might also be worth remembering that movie lighting is almost never just the 'natural' light motivated by the lamps and other lights in the room. For that matter, if a photographer is shooting someone outdoors on the beach, they will still add more lights and reflectors to get things right. And night photography is a whole separate black art.
Agreed! This was helpful. :)
THIS! :)
Right, lighting, whether it be either in 3DL *OR* Iray takes many tools and a comprehension of how light works *BUT* a set of basic tools tuned properly for the best results ready to use WOULD HELP IMMEASURABLY.
You do realise that if you are working in Studio using the default cd/m2 every time you increase the cm^2 setting by one you are multiplying the setting by 10,000. One cd/cm2 multiplied by 10,000 is = to one cd/m2, and if you are working in cd/cm2 it just converts it to cd/m2.
Film ISO - Controls the sensitivity of the “camera film” and is expressed as an index; the ISO number of the film, also known as “film speed.” The higher this value, the greater the exposure. If this is set to a non-zero value, “Photographic” mode is enabled. If this is set to 0, “Arbitrary” mode is enabled, and all color scaling is then strictly defined by the value of cm^2 Factor.
cm^2 Factor - In “Photographic” mode (i.e., non-zero Film ISO), this is the conversion factor between pixel values and candelas per meter squared. In “Arbitrary” mode, this is simply the multiplier applied to scale rendered pixel values to screen pixels.
I find all the ISO, F-stop, shutter speed, etc stuff precious and unnecessarily complicated. Image making in Daz isn't photography, so the conceits aren't necessary. People coming to Daz don't all have a photography background, and those who do will likely roll their eyes at the implemtation of these concepts. Well, at least I do. Shutter speed! Motion blur! Um, no.
It would be simpler if it were just:
Scene: Lighter/Darker, and then the filters, like bloom, caustic, etc.
Light: Lighter/Darker, along with the modifers that shape the light, such as beam spread, distance, shape.
Camera: Field of view, depth of field yes/no, more/less depth of field, focal distance. Distance would come from where you put the camera, obv.
Oh, and yeah. Documentation would be nice.
I have been surrounded by photography for nearly seventy years, between my dad and myself, and use the settings in Tone Mapping all the time to set up the Environment for a render. For Emissive lighting I use cd/cm2 which means I can use lower settings than those recommended on the forums. I find using that setting with the recommended lumen for the type of light works, for me. When using a photograph that I have taken myself as a Background I use the Exif data to set the camera up and the Latitude/Longitude, time of day etc to set the Environment Dome. The camera I turn to face the direction that I was facing at the time e.g. North, South, East or West, or anything in between :)
It works as in this image.
Click on image for full size.
I came across this render I did a long time ago when I was trying out bloom settings and I had taken a note of the lights and settings.
Point Light 1 (Portal Light window first wooden upright)
Linear Point Light (Portal Light window second upright near camera)
Distant Light 150000.0 Lumens shining through windows.
Spotlight on wall 1500 Lumens (E)
Linear Pointlight 2 on ceiling 4500 Lumens (C) I think)
Pointlight 2 on wall 5500 Lumens
Click on image for full size.