Spot Light & Head Lamp not working.
Cenobite
Posts: 206
I have setup spotlights with bright lumens & they effect nothing in Iray, I have locked the head lamp, and reloaded the scene changed angle and still no light appears in my renders, hs daz3d made all renders dark & near unseeable... whats the point of doing this to the editor, one minute it works fine then it's like one minute of you have changed the settings and nothing works. Can someone explain why these strange things happen making this editor near useless because you can not work with it to because nothing is working. Explain why one scene works completely fine with the lighting in iray while another scene which starts out fine then darkens to a point nothing can be scene in the render. I have added spot lights to the scene below yet no light appears i have set the intensity yet nothing works, i can't highlight characters in light & the render doesn't complete as the graphics are blurred, do i have to light up the whole scene to get it to finish detail in the render and have no dark shadows in scene.. I feel like i'm being scammed while i see near perfect renders being done on machines half as good as mine yet i get these bogus no light renders WHY? i have to add 100 point lights in the scene to get any illumination, why is daz3d changing the light settings and all the time, the head lamp works one minute then even if you lock it i fails to work again, then other times it's set so bright it washs the scene out, seems like its on purpose to get me to waste time fixing something i shouldn't have too.
I have an i9 10th gen processor 10 physical core's 20 logical, i have 256gb DDR4 ram on the mainboard fully usuable with windows 10 pro, the video card i'm using is a nvidia 2080ti 12gb DDR6 vram, i'm using evo ME SSD hardrives that slot directly into the mainboard they are the size of a usb stick but have like 2TB space they are the fastest drives you can get, i'm running my OS on it's own disk for speed, the whole PC has been built to render yet you give me this half finished can't render shadows picutre my 15 year old pc can do.
The bottom render i add in another character and a more intense spot light that shows illumination in texture mode but when i go to render in Iray the render is incomplete after 3 hours waiting then the render just stops half finished with zero light, infact it's gotten darker in this recent render even tho i added more light why is this happening, why does this choose to render some pictures while others it leaves half done.
Can someone explain why it's gotten darker in the next render when more light has been added to this scene?
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Comments
Can you post your Tonemapper settings and an examle of a spot light setting?
In general I would not use the headlamp for a final render. It is meant as a helper light to see the scene while you set up your figures etc. The headlamp can't be adjusted which makes it not very usefull for final lighting a scene.
When I started with DS I was very confused by the headlamps' auto settings. Sometimes they contributed light, sometimes not. What I understood after a while is:
"No scene lights" only refers to DS build in light types (Spot, Point etc.) but not mesh emitters. So, if there is no build in light in the scene but only mesh lights, the headlamps kicks in.
I decided for me that those headlamps are not helpfull for final lighting and switched them off completely.
Unfortunately they are off for scene setup as well in that case. So, I got black scenes when I used mesh emitters only. But there is a trick to get the headlamps back without disturbing the render:
I see very little difference between the two images you posted other than the camera angle which is changing the angle of the reflected light on the male characters face and making it look darker.
Judging by their shadows, the brightest light in the scene is actually the emissive corner lamp behind them.
So, define "bright lumens".
1,000? 10,000? 100,000? 1,000,000?
The amount of lumens you need depends on the size of your spotlight. The bigger the surface area, the more spread-out the "light rays" it emits will be. If you have a spotlight 100cm by 100cm, you'll need to jack the lumens up much higher than a 10cm by 10cm spotlight.
Try setting the spotlights to 100,000,000 lumens and then check if there's still no light.
Here's another shot, i have kept the head lamp on but it's not working anyway, the light is coming from a spot light i created just in front of the models, i set the width to encompass the entire crew plus i made sure the light was extended past the characters so the light would hit them all basically square on i even added a flame thrower prop for the extra light, the picture hasn't fully rendered, i increased the intensity of the spot light to 160 the lumens are set to 9000 & the tempreture is set around 9000 for the spot light, there seems to be enough light now but the picture is not fully rendering detail, all the textures are blurry & pixelated messy crud, most of the detail isn't in the outfits or models, i can't even finish this scene because it just dosesn't render, 3 hours each render it's like the render just stops and doesn't clean up the picture leaving it looking unfinished, If i added close point lights it seems to render better but this sci-fi set is just bad to render anything in.
You can see in background the light is casting a shadow in some places so it's there so why doesn't it complete the renders clean like other pictures? do i have to add point lights close to the characters because thats the only light that seems to work to bring out detail and stop messy blurred pictures.
In this render i used points lights close the characters set at around 8k lumens and the textures came up nice & clean, the actual scene is fairly clean too which helps lighting compared to the above scenes where the corridor is dark and just doesn't seem to render the shadows well.
Using the point lights made sense in this scene due to the teleport pads and the light that would emitt from them but in the dark corridor scene it's hard to brighten up the whole area without destroying the effect of having a dark corridor with highlighted characters using spot light sources.
This is a render I did with that exact same set. One bright, green-colored spotlight to the left, one dim, red-colored point light to the right. Even though I was very new to Daz at the time, I still think it looks good (for an amateur).
I can tell you right now, if you made a spotlight wide enough to cover all five characters, 9,000 lumens isn't enough. Turn it all the way up to 1,000,000 to start with. Also, temperature doesn't work the way you think it does for lights. A temperature of about 9,000K will be very blue, since it's almost in the ultraviolent spectrum. If you want the light to mimic the flamethrower, you should set it about 2,000K to 3,000K. Daylight is 5,600K to 6,500K.
As to point lights, they do help a scene render faster because each one contributes more light rays to the renderer. Add some throughout the scene, make them dim and wide (about 50cm to 100cm). It doesn't matter if they seem like they don't belong. You just want to create a low-level dim ambience to help Iray, so you don't have to turn them up too high.
Finally, having six characters with 4K textures will take a hell of a long time to render. You mentioned your impressive specs, but Iray will still need to calculate all the lights bounces between them. I'd recommend just doing one at a time first, and then once you've gotten the hang of Iray rendering, add some more.
In this render i have the spot light on 9k i also have placed point lights 8k close to each character which should highlight the detail yet the render is fuzzy, my guess there is to much emissive light in this scene causing distortion & blurr because even if i blast the area with light i still get speckels of firefly light, i use another scene say an outdoor scene with no obstuctions to light the render will typically reveal most detail on many characters, i do find as you as more polys in scene it does reduce quality so by the time you have 16 or 17 models in all with hair peices and fur coats the render still only takes me about 4 or 5 hours, good light will reveal most the detail but i find if anything in the scene is casting emissive shader light it will cast out a bunch of white dots that seems to ruin the quality and take so much longer to render the pic because it's refecting every dot when using options like ray tracing and if you have environments with high shine or gloss matrials the light is bouncing of every poly which drags down render time.
Some pictures seem to stop rendering i think this is because of those emissive shaders they diffuse the textures to much creating way to much distortion. The lights in the corridor in the scene below use emissive shaders i'm thinking they are my main issue here.
I took a look at that set, and I agree with you there are problems using the emissives out of the box, so I had a go at fixing it.
Here's what I did:
There's still a lot of specular highlighting on the floor near the door and in his hair, but this is just a viewport render. That should go away if you let it render for a good amount of time. Alternatively, you could reduce the gloss or brightness of the surfaces.
Turns out it was the emissive shaders used in the corridor scene so i changed scenes to one i knew doesn't use emissive shaders only luminosity shaders which light up differently & don't cast specks of light like emissive shaders do. Any scene that uses emissive shades in lights to light up a scene tend to distort the scene too much, as you can see in the new scene i added more detail is rendered i one hour then 3 hours of rending emissive light scattering every direction off all pieces of high gloss mats or anything shiny or reflective.
Emissive shaders broadcast more light then luminosity but the luminosity shader is clean i use them on outfits and such because it doesn't cast firefly so any scene that uses emissive light must be changed for Iray because it creates way to much distortion over the whole picture that even point lights won't render out.
Make sure you have Dome and Scene Selected
Headlamp will not work if you have Scene only selected
I found this thread when searching for Daz3d headlamp not illuminating.
Headlamp wasn't blocked, I set it to 100,000, tried creating new cameras with new headlamps... nothing was working.
Then I deleted environment options and tonemapper options from the scene tab. Since I was in Iray view mode, daz automatically created new enviro/tonemapper options tabs, and headlamp worked instantly.