Lighting too extreme in my scene
RAMWolff
Posts: 10,373
Lighting too extreme in my scene. It's been a while since I've truly been using DS, as I'm learning all the changes but this one has me stumped. Doesn't seem too matter if there are lights in the scene or not it's always lit. I'm used to the old days where you delete all the lights you have blackness and you then can measure each added light for what it will do to light the scene.
This newer way seems to have taken that control out of my hands. If I add my own lights or light preset I can move them around all I want but I don't see any changes to how it's affecting the objects I want to light. I found that there are Enviroment and Tonemapper bits added automatically to each scene. Upon some investigation I see that a dome with an HDR map is added under the Enviroment but lowering the values may darken the scene in the viewport but rendering it still has the object overly lit and blow out and that's really not pretty or acceptable in my eyes.
I don't mind doing all this by hand, never have really and while I'm sure there are scripts out there to help solve all this I don't have the money or inclination to learn another script right now, I just want easy instruction on how to get my scene back fully under my control to set up the lights they way **I** want to set them up or load one of my light presets and not have the two mentioned above auto loading into the scene.
Thanks so much
Richard
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Comments
Check the Auto Head Lamp?
- Greg
Two nodes of Environment Options and Tonemapper Options are auto-loaded into the Scene if you Iray Preview or Render... this behavior started from DS 4.14 or 4.15, IIRC. It's not a big deal.
Actually the scene and all its Render Settings, lighting patterns as well as their settings are still 100% under your control. I know the Render Settings (esp. for Dome settings...) coming from lots of products are not optimal but you just need to tweak them as needed.
For instance, you can simply switch to Dome Only to check if the ambient light is too strong... then reduce the intense / map values, and/or adjust the dome scale and rotation, yada yada ~. Then switch back to Dome and Scene, tweak your light settings. With Iray Preview, each change is WYSIWYG in the Viewport... only the lighting effect with NVIDIA Iray drawstyle is a bit stronger than the final render, so just give it a better setting before going for the final render.
If you use Scene Only mode, that'll be much easier. You don't have to care about the Dome related settings at all.... These workflows are pretty straight-forward and not complex.
Edit: Then better post a screenshot if you still have the issues.
As a general rule, I like to go Scene Only for interior, dynamic lighting shots and Sun Sky only for exterior lighting shots. 2 recent renders I shared are both examples of this. I tend to remove the default environment settings for preset products and customize it myself.
For this example, the camera was set to no headlamp, but when I turn it on (setting 1)...yikes. This was Scene Only so I can see every single light I made, such as the spotlights around Cecelia. Very good for this kind of thing.
The problem you have sounds like it's the Sky only, because it prevents you from seeing any other lights you create throughout the scene. If you want to have a sky and use lights, a trick is to set to Dome and Scene, then delete the environment texture. Click to draw the default dome and there ya go. Maximum lighting control.
Yea, turned off the Headlamp on every single camera and it's still blown out. I've tried deleting the Environment Options in the Scene tab, still blown out. Lights are set to normal settings. I've even tried to delete my light set up, still lit and blown out. It's all very strange to me. Too much
Ah, this brings back memories! I have to admit that I am still terrible at 3Delight lighting. Fortunately, iRay lighting is quite rational. So let's try a few steps:
Attaching the scene file may be helpful.
if you are using Iray preview with the default perspective camera then a headlamp will still be shown even if turned off all the the other cameras. Try switching to Dome only and turn the environment intensity to zero. In this case you should get black through any camera (Unless you have emissives in the scene, they always illuminate regardless of the settings)
I had strange lightning for some weeks. A bit too bright and very yellow. Didn't know why it happend and it happend in all scenes. Found a reset tonemapping button in a lightning product, don't remember which though. Clicked it and it was all back to normal again. Don't know how it happend but somehow the tonemapping was saved somewhere and used by default.
Did you recently update to a more recent version of Daz Studio ?
At one point, Daz decided to change the value of Burn Highlights and Crush Blacks in the tonemaping options, so if you created your lighting setup with the former default values (0.25 / 0.2), the new default values (1 / 0) will show a very different result.
About tonemapping in Daz Studio:
Maybe that is what happend to me, and the reset fixed it.
Ah, sorry RAM, I thought that would have helped. Lighting is both my best friend worst enemy for these exact reasons.
Some more good suggestions. I'll look at it after I've had my coffee! LOL
Started a new scene and it seems to be cleared up. I was working with an older scene file but again I removed all the lights, reset what I could and still had that blown out effect. I was using iRAY by the way, not 3DL. I did look for the crush blacks and burn highlights but couldn't locate where that would have been. I'm just relieved I can get on with my promos and icon creation without all this weirdness!
Thanks folks!
Richard
For burn highlights and crush black you need to either Create > Tonemapper Options or have done a render.
Ah, I see them now. Thank you