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So i fiddled around with the test scene, moving the sun so that the elements behind the camera (buildings and a tree) get enough light.
The result after 32 minutes:
...apparently the light produced by the Reality "sun" is more "uniformly" directional compared to a standard "distant light".
The trees I have behind the camera are billboard types (from the Ecomantics set) not full meshes which is probably why the sun is not illuminating them enough as the horizontal angle of the sun's rays is almost parallel to the angle I have the billboards set to. The other issue in my scene compared to yours is that I don't even see a reflection of the wall at the back of the shelter leading from the side facing the camera as I do in yours and my 3DL version.
Unfortunately, if I moved the sun to the position you have it in your test, the shadow angles would not match up correctly with the photo backdrop. I basically placed the sun in the same location where I the Advanced Distant light was to get the proper shadow angle.
Going to change the scene elements behind the camera to full mesh trees as well as adding a wall or small structure to see if that shows up better. Barring that not sure what to do for as I mentioned an IBL sphere by itself may illuminate the scene better but won't produce the the directional shadows I need.
One thing you might also try is lighting the elements behind the camera as well ;-) That way you'd still get the correct shadows and enough illumination so that the mesh trees and wall/small structure would show up as a reflection :)
EDIT: I'd recommend a mesh light; you can always scale up the intensity if need be :P
One thing you might also try is lighting the elements behind the camera as well ;-) That way you'd still get the correct shadows and enough illumination so that the mesh trees and wall/small structure would show up as a reflection :)
...thought about that but adding more lights kind of defeats the notion of simplicity (and I'd have to match both the luminosity and shadow angle of the sun as well).
In the 3DL version, I used just a single Advanced Ambient and Advanced Distant light to illuminate the entire scene. The only other light I added was an Advanced Spotlight set to 360° spread with a 1 m custom falloff directly in front of the girls to add some fill light.
Going to have to play with this more. Interesting that getting the reflections to work in 3DL seemed so much simpler. (even if it was a bit of a "hack" in a way).
Obviously there's a difference between 3Delight and Reality. I make no claims of familiarity with the former, but with the latter a scene is lit for what the camera, and not the eye, sees, the way photographers and cinematographers do it.
Break a leg and I hope you get the effect that you want :coolsmile:
Obviously there's a difference between 3Delight and Reality. I make no claims of familiarity with the former, but with the latter a scene is lit for what the camera, and not the eye, sees, the way photographers and cinematographers do it.
Break a leg and I hope you get the effect that you want :coolsmile:
..so basically it sounds like no matter what I put behind to create the reflection with, if the rendering camera does not "see" those elements, they won't have an effect on the scene at all as the lights will only illuminate what is directly in the focal plane of the camera?
In RL, the sun and ambient light scatter from the sky illuminate everything in front, to the side, or behind us whether we are viewing through a camera or not. Even in space where there is no light scatter, the reflection say, of the earth in the visor of a space helmet still show in a photo even though the earth is behind the photographer
...well just had my system lock up in a "not responding" loop that degraded into a critical error in Windows just after I launched the latest test. Even Task Manager wouldn't respond and Windows went into reboot mode. Not sure what caused it but I lost a fair amount of work rebuilding the part of the scene behind the camera.that to have been reflected in the windows of the shelter..
After the system rebooted never got the MB mode icons that usually pop up moments afterwards so ended up manually shutting down and restarting. When I still had Task Manager responding the memory usage was pegged at 10.9GB (out of 12 GB).
After I reopened the scene, I noticed memory usage was still high (around 50%) with a bunch of tdlmake processes hammering both the the HDD and CPU (don't know why as I am not even using 3DL) as well as several postgreSQL processes and a whole lot of "host processes".
Studio will still run tdlmake on everything when you load a scene, even if you don't intend to use 3Delight to render it. This is a Studio thing.
....gumblemumble. Looks as if, after last night's experiences, I may need to max out my memory. It's an older MB so it only can support up to 24G in tri channel mode. The memory cost isn't the issue though (24 GB is actually cheaper than what I originally paid to get the 12 I currently have), as I have only Win7 Premium (got it as a free upgrade from Vista) which can only support up to 16G. I need to upgrade to Win7Pro to use the full 24G and since 8 is out, the cost for that upgrade has gone into the "legacy" category (meaning "more expensive") Don't want to switch to 8 because of all the "bugginess" (it also has an ugly UI) and I'd have to wipe the drives and reinstall all my software/content as well as rebuild my 3D database.
The render ends when you quite LuxRender. Make sure that you read the Reality User's Guide, it's fundamental if you want to understand how the process works. As you noticed, LuxRender works in a different way than most renderers.
Cheers.
The serial number is in the order page or in the "Your serial numbers" tab of your account. The order number is the DAZ order number.
Hope this helps.
The output paths are set anew for each scene. Before you hit render check the paths and change them as you wish.
That is the same in LuxRender. Maybe if you give us an example of what is the scene we can understand better what's happening. A couple of screenshots would help.
To have reflections in the glass you need:
- Set the glass surface to be of type Glass
- Set the IOR to something between 1.3 and 1.5
- Set the reflection color to pure white
- Set the transmission color to white or a tint of your liking
- Place objects in front of the glass. If you use an IBL map then the whole environment will be reflected.
Hope this helps.
...I have done everything suggested except for the change in the IOR setting. Setting the IOR above 1.0 tends to distort the scene elements seen through window glass.
I have the workstation powered down for now as it has been rendering for the past three days (which also may have been contributory to the crash) so I can't post an SS at this time.
IOR stands for Index Of Refraction. Refraction is what happens when light goes through the glass so an IOR of 1.3 or 1.5 is appropriate. The issue here is that the windows have no thickness, a fallacy of many Studio/Poser models. Since bjased renderer don't account for thickness many modelers don't model windows in a physical way.
If you use a volumetric glass, either the hyper-realistic or the standard one, each pane of glass is considered the boundary of the volume and so, in your case, the whole room becomes the thickness of the glass, which produces the excessive distortion, or refraction.
Fort his reason LuxRended, and Reality, include the architectural glass, which is what you need to use in this case. When using archi glass the IOR increases the surface reflection without producing any refraction.
You will also find that using arch glass requires much less time.
Hope this helps.
..thanks for the information. I originally had it set to "architectural" but was told by someone to not tick any of the glass "type" boxes. That might have accounted for the high memory usage l experienced Friday when I initially launched the render process. Should I do the same for the windscreen and windows on the bus?
Yeah, glass seems an afterthought to many content creators as they either use a simple plane with a "glass" shader and reflection map or sometimes just with a specular and diffuse colour with the opacity turned down and the lighting model set to "glossy plastic".
The only model I actually saw with any thickness to the glass was freebie bus shelter I downloaded that was created in .3ds (which I converted to a .obj in Hexagon). It required me to set up both sides of all the glass sections as a surface using the Geometry editing tool. That was a lot of work as the model was very nicely detailed.
Put into my suggestions for Daz Studio5 that a .3ds format import.be included so e could use the textures provided. Would be nice to see how that bus shelter renders in Lux.
Yes. If you uncheck the boxes then you are left with standard glass, which still computes volumes and that accounts for the effect that you noticed. If you find that any part of the model has real thickness than you can experiment with the standard or volumetric glass. Also, if a piece of glass is not close to the camera it's generally best to set it to archi. It will still give you nice reflections and work as glass but it will not compute the complex IOR+volumetric absorption.
Cheers.
Hello!
What is a good way to get spotlights in Reality/Lux?
The mesh lights tend to flood the whole scene with a lot of light, even if they are scaled down in size. So sometimes I wish to have a good old spotlight to light a character, but not too much of the background.
I have read several times, that the DAZ Studio spots do not work well in Reality/Lux, because they are much too harsh and produce unnatural shadows.
So what can I do to get a good old spot in Reality/Lux?
When you add a spotlight to the scene, that light is converted to a Lux spotlight. Lux provides spots, although they are not physics-based, strictly speaking. They are fine if used sparingly. The "warning" about them is because in a biased renderer they are used very often and in high quantity. Used appropriately they are fine. You could also try to download a IES profile from a manufacturer and apply it to a light in Reality. That will give you a physically-accurate spot.
Very informative thread!
I just want to share this image. I learned a lot making it (I am a newbie concerning Reality).
Feel free to give me any advice to make it look better.
bring up the lighting so it's brighter, there are ways to do this.
Post a snapshot of your LuxRender settings for your Render Tab:
Imaging/Tone Mapping
the skin on your figure is a little soft but it could be the lights in your source image are not enough to bring them out.
post a snapshot of your skin setting from Reality to get an idea of where they are set.
...wouldn't a mesh light work, or does that illuminate too wide of an area?
...wouldn't a mesh light work, or does that illuminate too wide of an area?
A mesh light will work very well as a spot, but you need to apply an appropriate IES profile to it. There is a place to do this in the Lighting tab of Reality. There are spotlights in Callad's Reality Light System available at ShareCG which use an IES profile. Note that the 3 spots in this collection are all the same. There are three copies to make it easy to add more than one to your scene.
...nice, thanks.
A mesh light will emit from all faces in all forward directions (e.g., rays can launch anywhere from 0degress to 90degress relative to the normal). So you get a lot of spill. Using an IES profile, you can influence the launch pattern of emitter rays, allowing you to create spotlights.
For those that don't have it, I highly recommend downloading Callad's Reality Light System. It has many types of light shapes optimized for use in Reality/LuxRender, including a spotlight that uses an IES profile to achieve the affect, a variety of gobos, a round light with a snoot (which when extended can also give a spotlight-like effect), etc. It can be found over on sharecg (sorry I don't have a direct link, but it should be searchable).
Edit: And Hiro beat me to it, and even provided a direct link. :)
Thanks for you answers and suggestions. I will have a look at the light set, as well as IES profiles.
Meanwhile I have tried another approach for a spotlight. In the image below I have used a soft box, scaled it down to about the size of a head and made the snoot very long to give the light much direction. Does not look too bad :-)
Just to mention, this is a very quick and dirty test render (only 50 s/p) just to show you the resulting light.
It can but if the artists is after the classic round, conical effect of the spotlight then the meshlight would not work. Of course you can add a circle to the scene and then set that as a meshlight. That might give the right effect.
That is indeed a good technique.
Callad's Reality lighting set has been mentioned, and it's great :cheese:
Did a test for materials and lights sometime ago (on a now abandoned project :down: ), using the 3 spots, and am really happy with the falloff, something I hadn't been able to previously achieve to my satisfaction with other lights :red:
Thanks much for the input, Richard :) Tweaked the settings and subdivided all the hair and this will hopefully be an improvement.
You've made some great stuff and morphs; is someone planning to become a PA ;-)