Realistic Night with high luminance
Granville
Posts: 698
How do you create a night scene with iray that has light the color of the night, but isn't too dark. My efforts so far haven't been great. If I can't do it natively, I can take it into premier pro with a day for night preset. But I'd love to eliminate that step.
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Comments
Assuming IRAY, the easiest way is to look for a nice HDR image of a night scene and use it as the Environment map in the iray settings. There are a few sites that have free HDR images.
Are you doing an outdoor scene or indoor. I would assume outdoor if trying to get a realistic night nighting.Figure out what direct you want the moon to shine light. Add a spot to the scene with a slight bluish color tone to it. then add a point light with light grey as the color set to about 35-45% unless you are trying to highlight a specific piece. In which case a low intensity yellow set at about 8-10%. All of this is using 3DL. If your looking for iray lights then it will be a slightly different process. If you have some of my packs they may have a nice outdoor night light preset in them. I do a lot of night scene lights. What I described about is just a starting point.
Using a starry night HDR in Environment map is probably the best. The fact that it won't set distinct shadows becomes a feature, not a bug. ;)
Unrelated to iray, for night scenes in general, consider cheating. If you make a very realistic night scene where you can't see anything because it's dark, then it will probably be too dark to see anything in your render too, which while totally accurate kind of defeats the purpose of having artwork. So raise the light levels a little higher than they should be. Not so much that it looks totally fake, but just enough to help the viewer while remaining subtle.
Depending on the nature of your scene you may be able to cleverly arrange light sources to help.
For example, you could use rim lighting, side lighting or backlighting (or whatever the official terms are) so that just the very edge of characters/objects are brightly lit. This will allow them to easily stand out against a dark background, while the bulk of the object still remains dark and blends into the darkness on one side and thus gives the impression of it being darker than if the object was even faintly lit fully.
Or, maybe it would be reasonable for there to be a lantern, torch, streetlight, flashlight, glowing object, etc. immediately adjacent to the primary subject. That would illuminate the subject so it could be more clearly seen, while still allowing much of the rest of the background to remain dark.
Or, place objects between the viewer and a light source (silhouetted against the moon or a distant city light spread or a bonfire) so while it remains dark, the black outline stands out clearly.
Alternatively, rather than playing with your lighting, you could try playing with your camera settings. Remember that Iray is trying to emulate real world conditions. Think photography. How would a photographer deal with low light or nighttime conditions for exterior shots? They wouldn't try to illuminate the scene (unless they were shooting a movie or television show), they would adjust the camera/s settings - film speed, exposure, aperture. To get the full advantage from Iray one really needs to look into photography a bit, if you don't already possess such knowledge.
Dark scenes and shadows are an issue for Iray. Your render will likely take a long time, even if you get the right balance.
You might consider over-lighting the scene to closer to normal levels, and then adjusting it in Photoshop as a "day-for-night" shot. Done right, it sould look good.
Depending on the scene, there can be shadows, and very heavy ones. Street lamps and the moon can cast distinct shadows.
in this thread are some examples which might help...
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/58920/iray-moon#latest
There is another way but requires one to have Poser or access to Poser that can save in HDRI.. As one of the things that it good about Poser is that you can create a render and have it save the rendered image data in HDR format and jpg format for the backdrop.. The reason I went to this extent of creating my own HDRI's was that could not find a decent enough one on the net and was lucky enough to own Poser Pro 2014..