Iray - Tricking the auto/on/off headlamp
Fisty
Posts: 3,416
in The Commons
I just discovered this today by accident, forgive me if it's already been posted somewhere burried in some Iray thread.
If you add an uber environment light to your scene it will think you have a light in the scene but Iray doesn't know what to do with uber envionment lights so it will ignore it. You're then free to use just an HDRI for lighting your scene without having to turn the headlamp on your camera comepletely off, auto setting will work and you can see what you're doing for adjusting surfaces or dragging out spot render boxes for your final settup.
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That's the third very useful Iray tip posted today. :) Thanks very much! I was just using Ctrl-L to disable the light previews, but I'll try this too.
My default scene loads with a spot light parented to the camera with everything set to off and intensity at 0.00010%. I doesn't show up in any renders but shuts off every camera headlamp that is added to the scene.
OmniFreaker's area lights (come as part of the default lights and shaders) creates a primitive and a headlamp blocker, been using just the headlamp blocker since early DS3.0, works just the same with Iray as it does with 3Delight.
Under "General" in Render Settings, there's an option for Auto Headlamp. Just turn that to "Never", and you can use the camera without fudging around with the headlamp. I loaded a blank scene, changed that, then saved it as a default scene, and now it's always chosen whenever I open DS.
Strange, most of these methods don't seem to be working for me. I guess I'll stick to my method of using a camera with the headlamp on to work in the scene, and then switching to a "rendering" camera with no headlamp that's been parented to the first one (so they'll have identical views) when it's time to start rendering.
In what way are they not working for you? When you turn off the headlamp the scene will be dark looking through the camera but pressing Ctrl/L will bring the lights back on and pressing them again will make them go out.
Right, I was the one above who said he was using Ctrl-L as well. I just meant that the Uberenvironment trick wasn't working as expected (it does add a blinding light to the preview, although it doesn't render), and the 'invisible' spotlight on the camera doesn't help light the scene any. I probably misunderstood what you were all trying to accomplish; I was looking for alternate ways to view an illuminated scene with only HDRI lighting, not alternate ways to disable headlamps. Sorry about that.
You don't need to resort to tricks. Just set the Auto Headlamp to Never. With camera headlamps set to Auto (the default) they will not show up in renders.
If you have only emissive or environment lighting, and like to set camera headlamps to Off (i.e., in some scene preset you use) set Preview Lights to off. D|S will comply by providing a generic ambient light source that is good for posing.
I personally wouldn't put lights or other objects into an Iray scene that shouldn't be there. It may be true that today, certain 3DL-specific lights are ignored when rendering with Iray. But that may not be the case tomorrow. A future version of D|S could easily include a feature that helpfully converts all those lights to some Iray equivalent when rendering the scene.
I got mine as recommended from the Nvidia Iray website.
Thank you Val. I never noticed that. Checked it off now.
Unless your using a startup scene (which I have never used) then it will always default back to "When no scene lights" every time you start DS, that's why I use the headlamp blocker, it turns the bloody things off no matter what the Iray settings say.
Most of us from Poser-land routinely resorted to using a scene load, to keep from getting that dopey "Andy" character every time the program started. It was one of the first things I did when picking up D}S again. The default scene a good habit, IMO. It's super easy to specify one using Preferences->Startup. The default stores many things, not just headlamp setup, like dome type, rotation, and so on.
Thank you . . . its a simple thing, but I couldn't find it and was going nuts. Much appreciated!
There is also a headlamp setting in the Camera parameters menu, but it seems that the "General" preference over-rides that.
Sorry for the necro. This has been driving me nuts. And it works!
Speaking of headlamp-blockers, I have seen those show up occasionally in premade scenes, but never thought to look into how to make one myself, Is that something on the Create drop down, or is it something I have to go through hoops to get?
How old are the products with these scenes? Before Iray, many 3Delight lighting setups (especially using the old Environment lights) needed a blocker in the scene so the lighting would render properly. I didn't realise they were still useful for Iray renders.
I don't see why this is necessary at all. Turning Headlamp to Never in the general render settings works. If you're using a HDRI only and can't see, just use the preview lights (CTRL-L toggles).
I actually don't remember how old the particular products were, might have been old pre-iray stuff... I just notice that every now and then I'll load a premade scene or set and it arrives with a turn-off-the-headlamp object in it. I always turn headlamp off as a matter of course ANYway, so not a big issue, but somthing like that migt come in handy because sometimes I create a bazillion cameras in a scene I've made, because I'm working on a 3D comicbook narrative thingy. I did one of those once that eventually came to 180 or 190 frames of story. Yowzers.