Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
224 S 200 W, Suite #250
Salt Lake City, UT 84101
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.Daz 3D is part of
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
224 S 200 W, Suite #250
Salt Lake City, UT 84101
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Yeah, making the skydome an emissive surface looked terrible. The better way was like you said, hiding the skydome and using its image map as the environment map. Unfortunately what seems to happen there is that the sunlight shines through the skydome map, causing the light to be really blue in colour and I can't see any way to alter the colour of the sun.
I'm beginning to wonder if all those skydomes I bought not long ago might be worthless now. I've noticed that in a lot of the Iray images people are posting theres either no sky showing, or the sky is just the plain blue default dome.
You may be able to reuse the textures from the skydomes in the environment map. The default emissive temperature is something like 2900K which is pretty yellow, 6500K is a more neutral lighting color.
Well, another option is to place a giant spotlight where the sun should be and do 'scene only' lighting.
You might also look into HDR and spherical projection maps. I've nabbed a few free ones, and they tend to look better in environment map.
Yeah, I was considering that too. If placed just infront of where the sun is on the skydome and set to a very high luminescence a wide-angle photometric spotlight could mimic the sun somewhat. The only problem would be the direction of the light wouldn't look as natural and the dome behind the light wouldn't be correctly lit but I'm going to give it a go.
Thanks for the tip about the HDR and stuff - I've seen that mentioned a lot.
Edit: Sadly it seems that the best method is just to remove the skydome altogether and just use the environment and the sun settings it contains. I guess I won't be buying anymore skydomes then.
Edit: nevermind - I didn't have the lights bright enough, thats all.
I'm new to the concept of HDR and spherical maps. Is there a tut out there? Kind of something that explains them and all that?
Lots of info here on how to make them : http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/archive.html
Peter.
I haven't seen many HDRs in the Daz store, it seems to be mostly skydomes with landscape scenes - are there many around?
There are free ones on the site I posted in my previous post + I'm sure there are other sites.
Just make sure you look for 'spherical' HDR maps, there are also other formats too (used by other 3D software).
Peter.
Thank you! Got the website loaded now. The concept looks WAY out of my experience here. I might drown!
All I did was download various spherical HDRIs and started sticking them into the environmental map until it looked good. ;)
There are free ones on the site I posted in my previous post + I'm sure there are other sites.
Just make sure you look for 'spherical' HDR maps, there are also other formats too (used by other 3D software).
Peter.
Sweet! Thanks Peter.
I'm a little disappointed that the skydomes I bought aren't going to be useful anymore, but I guess HDRs is looking like the way forward.
Omigosh I wish I could randomly stick things into the appropriate slot, as it were, until something looked good. But iray is super extremely slow over here. And if I turn on acceleration, it gets a lot worse. It's faster for me to spend days looking for presets, I kid you not. Crazy, huh.
Have you tried using the NVIDIA Iray view on the screen? I find it's a bit faster/easier to check how things will look than a full render.
But I have to be sure to shut it off if I'm going to move things around, or CHUG CHUG CHUGGA
Thanks, I didn't know that, that'll save me a lot of time. :lol:
Well the Thread title does say "for newbies". :)
Oh man, that is such a handy tip! Thanks timmins. :)
WHAT is this NVIDIA IRAY VIEW?????? People keep talking about it like it's this taken for granted THING and I have no idea what they're talking about and when I ask no one answers! I can't find anything on Google either!!! !!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!
On your viewport, next to the drop down menu where you switch between different cameras you'll see an image of a sphere that has a drop down menu attached to it. Click on that to bring up the menu and the nvidia option is the last in the list.
You are my HERO! LOL
So I switched it on. I can tell you what I get in this viewport is NOT what keeps slowly rendering. Alas. Oh wait, I see. It acts like a large spot render.
Omigosh it's just as slow. I sure wish I could figure out what it was about my system that's got it impossible to do this thing. Sadness.
Are you sure you've got Iray switched on in the render settings?
Bear in mind that what Iray does when you hit render is create a totally black image to begin with and then it gradually starts to fill that in with progressive rendering (progressively less and less grainy). At first I thought it wasn't doing anything, but you have to wait a while for it to start showing you an image.
If, however, what you're seeing when you use the "Nvidia Iray" view in the viewport is very different from the image you see when you actually start rendering..... then I have no idea I'm afraid, sorry. I'm just as new to this as you are :)
I can confirm that it is indeed very, very slow though... for me it is anyway.
OH it does it. And it's just as slow. So I'm sitting here looking at random pixels wondering to myself, is the hair shiny or not??? And then... it crashed. I think my system is just too old and weak for this. I'm gonna go kick rocks and pout.
...I know, the feeling. Back when 4.0 came out and everyone was playing with Genesis I was still stuck trying to create teen characters from tall buxom ol' Vicky 4 as with even one Genesis figure and a simple background, rendering would crash on my old system. Even in 3.1 I rarely messed with UE for the same reason (thankfully there was still "trusty old" LDP2).
Also know the feeling. I JUST upgraded, doubled my memory and got a half-decent video card fairly recently. Because most of my Iray stuff was 'get a vague idea, let it run all night and come back to it in the morning.'
I've got a pentium i5 4460 with 8GB memory and a GTX 660 nvidia graphics card and it still takes me around an hour to render a simple room with no figures in Iray that would've taken less than 10 mins in 3Delight. I'm hoping they're going to improve upon its efficiency before the beta ends because the results are very nice, but the time trade off is a bit daunting.
Well upgrading is out of the question for me, even on a small purchase that would only be $100 if that were possible. I'm not too terribly sad because most of what I do is using toon shaders. I can poke at the toy and learn the toy. A 600 pixel render was still too messy after waiting overnight to see what I could do with the toy. Alas.
It's the trade-off with an unbiased (physics based) rendering engine.
I tried out Reality/Luxrender, and... holy dear bleepity. It took me 10-15 hours to get a very grainy terrible image.
Yeah I remember lux. I loved it but couldn't devote my computer to it. Someday I'll have a 2nd computer just for rendering, and all will be much better. With chocolate.
...the i5 4460 is a straight 4 core CPU with no hyperhtreading. That most likely could be part of the slowness issue.
I have an older i7 (with hyperhtreading) with only 12GB tri channel memory and rendering a fairly complex scene with several characters will take between 2 to 3 hours in CPU mode.
Unbiased rendering is more efficient when using the GPU for the process. I am glad that Iray does have the CPU mode as even though it takes longer it gives me a chance to work with real world lighting and surfacing. Saving up for the updated GTX970, which as I understand, will have 8GB memory and over 1,600 cores.
...the i5 4460 is a straight 4 core CPU with no hyperhtreading. That most likely could be part of the slowness issue.
I have an older i7 (with hyperhtreading) with only 12GB tri channel memory and rendering a fairly complex scene with several characters will take between 2 to 3 hours in CPU mode.
Unbiased rendering is more efficient when using the GPU for the process. I am glad that Iray does have the CPU mode as even though it takes longer it gives me a chance to work with real world lighting and surfacing. Saving up for the updated GTX970, which as I understand, will have 8GB memory and over 1,600 cores.
Yeah, I'm sure you're right. Using cpu + gpu seems to be my fastest method but its still a lot slower than 3Delight. But thats the price you pay for flashy images with realistic physics-based lighting. I'm sure I'll get used to it eventually. It just means I'll have to be a bit more selective about when I decide to run a proper render because I can't really use my pc while its running.
The Nvidia Iray preview in the viewport should help a lot with that though because you won't need to actually run a render when you're just setting up a scene.