Sept 2015 New User Contest (WIP-THREAD)

Linwelly

Joe Webb said:

Finally was able to get this one together. A major stumbling point was the chess set. I didn't get one from the Daz store (I reached my budget grabbing sale stuff ) and the free one I got here, nice as it is, just slowed my system to a near halt. Otherwise the lighting is simple - two light mesh panels, the main one behind and below the man. Getting the HDRI dome to place and light properly is tough, I'm need to figure out how/if the Sun Dial works with it, but I think its the dome lighting the pillars. That was just luck. 

Someone had mentioned a ball handle to help with the focus placement but I'm not seeing that tool or where to turn it on. I'm still using a second camera and adjusting while looking through that.

I tried putting some ball/lights in the background for a bokeh effect but they looked awful. I guess post is the best way to put those in.

I'm no expert on Iray so take this with a grain of salt, but from my experiments if you want to use the sun light you better don't use the dome, it shuts the sunlight out and the hole direction settings for the sun are nearely unseen

Xangth

WIP 

Xangth

Here is my WIP for this contest, It is a Bryce and Daz Studio combo. The depth of field setting was 0.01.2  for this to blur the background seting. Comments and suggestions are always welcome.

 

The image is called "Jungle Jane"

Joe Webb

Linwelly said:

Joe Webb said:

 

I'm no expert on Iray so take this with a grain of salt, but from my experiments if you want to use the sun light you better don't use the dome, it shuts the sunlight out and the hole direction settings for the sun are nearely unseen

I think I used the wrong term, or confused the term. I'm not using a skydome, I'm using the "Dome and Scene" under Environment Mode to light the scene. Now I do have the Environment Intensity set to 0.50, and the Environment Map set to 0.25, since at the default settings the scene was way too bright. I'm not sure which controls the level of light better, Intensity or Map, or if they feed off each other, or what. And like I said I can't figure out how to control where the sun in the HDRI image goes and if at those low settings it even makes much difference.

Joe Webb

icecrmn said:

ok,,I stopped my render after 24 hours running,It reached 25,672 itterations, and the fireflies are still there :(

I think I'll need to do something with the lighting to get rid of them.

Hey icecrmn did you ever get that image to render out? I'm really looking forward to the finished product.  Are all the lights messing with the render time? Or is the room itself fully enclosed? If iray doesn't like enclosed areas maybe taking out the back wall would help?

 

ewcarman

Joe Webb said:

icecrmn said:

Hey icecrmn did you ever get that image to render out? I'm really looking forward to the finished product.  Are all the lights messing with the render time? Or is the room itself fully enclosed? If iray doesn't like enclosed areas maybe taking out the back wall would help?

 

One thing I did in an enclosed area was to make the ceiling an emissive, change the temperature of the light and up the lumens. This worked to create a pretty even top-down lighting in the enclosed room. Then augment with other lights as needed. YMMV.

I found that trying to get the sun to come in through a missing wall can be tricky and then it wants to cast shadows sideways. Looks cool if coming through a window and casting little squares of light in the room, but a pain if you want it to light the whole room.

TreeDee

Joe Webb said:

Finally was able to get this one together. A major stumbling point was the chess set. I didn't get one from the Daz store (I reached my budget grabbing sale stuff ) and the free one I got here, nice as it is, just slowed my system to a near halt. Otherwise the lighting is simple - two light mesh panels, the main one behind and below the man. Getting the HDRI dome to place and light properly is tough, I'm need to figure out how/if the Sun Dial works with it, but I think its the dome lighting the pillars. That was just luck. 

Someone had mentioned a ball handle to help with the focus placement but I'm not seeing that tool or where to turn it on. I'm still using a second camera and adjusting while looking through that.

I tried putting some ball/lights in the background for a bokeh effect but they looked awful. I guess post is the best way to put those in.

I love the composition in this one... kinda eerie :)

IceCrMn

Joe Webb said:

icecrmn said:

ok,,I stopped my render after 24 hours running,It reached 25,672 itterations, and the fireflies are still there :(

I think I'll need to do something with the lighting to get rid of them.

Hey icecrmn did you ever get that image to render out? I'm really looking forward to the finished product.  Are all the lights messing with the render time? Or is the room itself fully enclosed? If iray doesn't like enclosed areas maybe taking out the back wall would help?

 

I started messing with the shaders on the charater and got a bit side tracked. :) We cut down a tree in my back yard yesterday, and had to finish cutting it up for removal today.

I turns out that it was the lack of light causing those fireflies.I let it render out to 40k samples and had no change.So I'm actually working on getting a better light setup right now.

The room is fully enclosed.I was using the Sun-Sky only mode so the room was light almost completly with ambient light from the windows and the small orbs.

 

IceCrMn

The little trackball handle is in the middle of the focus crosshair you see in your viewport.It's at the end of the blue focus line. Select the camera you are working with in the scene tab, switch to "Perspective" view then you can see the DOF planes with the little crosshair in the middle.Click and hold the center of it and a small trackball appears under the cursor and you can drag the crosshair around.It's a small target and easy to miss.Hope this helps.

Joe Webb

ewcarman said:

One thing I did in an enclosed area was to make the ceiling an emissive, change the temperature of the light and up the lumens. This worked to create a pretty even top-down lighting in the enclosed room. Then augment with other lights as needed. YMMV.

I found that trying to get the sun to come in through a missing wall can be tricky and then it wants to cast shadows sideways. Looks cool if coming through a window and casting little squares of light in the room, but a pain if you want it to light the whole room.

I'll have to try that, it sounds like it would create a nice lighting effect.

I'm sure there is a way to turn off cast shadows, so that getting sunlight in the room wouldn't be that tricky. BUT that would make the rest of the room look weird, I'd imagine, if the shadows aren't falling correctly.

Fishtales

Joe Webb said:

Linwelly said:

Joe Webb said:

 

I'm no expert on Iray so take this with a grain of salt, but from my experiments if you want to use the sun light you better don't use the dome, it shuts the sunlight out and the hole direction settings for the sun are nearely unseen

I think I used the wrong term, or confused the term. I'm not using a skydome, I'm using the "Dome and Scene" under Environment Mode to light the scene. Now I do have the Environment Intensity set to 0.50, and the Environment Map set to 0.25, since at the default settings the scene was way too bright. I'm not sure which controls the level of light better, Intensity or Map, or if they feed off each other, or what. And like I said I can't figure out how to control where the sun in the HDRI image goes and if at those low settings it even makes much difference.

This might help to understand the Environment settings.

http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/interface/panes/render_settings/engine/nvidia_iray/environment/start

If an HDRI is wanted to create light within the room then use Finite Box Dome and lower the height until it is below the ceiling of the room. 5 = 5 meters, 3 = 3 meters etc. the dome can also be set to fit inside the room if the dimensions are known. There is also a Visualize Finite Dome setting which, when turned on, allows you to see the size of the dome compared to the scene and also what position the HDRI is taking on the dome, obviously Perspective mode and outside the dome to see it is required.

I did that with this one to get light behind the car showing the pillars.

Fishtales

Joe Webb said:

Linwelly said:

Joe Webb said:

 

I'm no expert on Iray so take this with a grain of salt, but from my experiments if you want to use the sun light you better don't use the dome, it shuts the sunlight out and the hole direction settings for the sun are nearely unseen

I think I used the wrong term, or confused the term. I'm not using a skydome, I'm using the "Dome and Scene" under Environment Mode to light the scene. Now I do have the Environment Intensity set to 0.50, and the Environment Map set to 0.25, since at the default settings the scene was way too bright. I'm not sure which controls the level of light better, Intensity or Map, or if they feed off each other, or what. And like I said I can't figure out how to control where the sun in the HDRI image goes and if at those low settings it even makes much difference.

This might help to understand the Environment settings.

http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/interface/panes/render_settings/engine/nvidia_iray/environment/start

If an HDRI is wanted to create light within the room then use Finite Box Dome and lower the height until it is below the ceiling of the room. 5 = 5 meters, 3 = 3 meters etc. the dome can also be set to fit inside the room if the dimensions are known. There is also a Visualize Finite Dome setting which, when turned on, allows you to see the size of the dome compared to the scene and also what position the HDRI is taking on the dome, obviously Perspective mode and outside the dome to see it is required.

I did that with this one to get light behind the car showing the pillars.

 

isidorn

Now I finally got something together. Advice, comments or rotten tomatoes are all equally welcome :)

This is by no means finished. To do list includes posing the spiders and putting more focus on them (blurrier background) and making the bed look used.

Gun

Fishtales said:

Joe Webb said:

Linwelly said:

Joe Webb said:

 

I'm no expert on Iray so take this with a grain of salt, but from my experiments if you want to use the sun light you better don't use the dome, it shuts the sunlight out and the hole direction settings for the sun are nearely unseen

I think I used the wrong term, or confused the term. I'm not using a skydome, I'm using the "Dome and Scene" under Environment Mode to light the scene. Now I do have the Environment Intensity set to 0.50, and the Environment Map set to 0.25, since at the default settings the scene was way too bright. I'm not sure which controls the level of light better, Intensity or Map, or if they feed off each other, or what. And like I said I can't figure out how to control where the sun in the HDRI image goes and if at those low settings it even makes much difference.

This might help to understand the Environment settings.

http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/interface/panes/render_settings/engine/nvidia_iray/environment/start

If an HDRI is wanted to create light within the room then use Finite Box Dome and lower the height until it is below the ceiling of the room. 5 = 5 meters, 3 = 3 meters etc. the dome can also be set to fit inside the room if the dimensions are known. There is also a Visualize Finite Dome setting which, when turned on, allows you to see the size of the dome compared to the scene and also what position the HDRI is taking on the dome, obviously Perspective mode and outside the dome to see it is required.

I did that with this one to get light behind the car showing the pillars.

 

Great, Now I know something new again. Thanks for advice :D

Limun

and here is mine wip , not finished yet - any TIP?

btw , i started to work for amazon.it so i dont have so much time anymore :(

Linwelly

Limun said:

and here is mine wip , not finished yet - any TIP?

btw , i started to work for amazon.it so i dont have so much time anymore :(

Nice idea! I think I would reduce the DOF a little bit so that the woman holding the handy is a tad less blurry.  Other than that there is little to add, maybe think about a different format, either you go for a repetition of the selfie format or you go for contrast and make it a landscape.

Joe Webb

Fishtales said:

Joe Webb said:

 

This might help to understand the Environment settings.

http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/interface/panes/render_settings/engine/nvidia_iray/environment/start

If an HDRI is wanted to create light within the room then use Finite Box Dome and lower the height until it is below the ceiling of the room. 5 = 5 meters, 3 = 3 meters etc. the dome can also be set to fit inside the room if the dimensions are known. There is also a Visualize Finite Dome setting which, when turned on, allows you to see the size of the dome compared to the scene and also what position the HDRI is taking on the dome, obviously Perspective mode and outside the dome to see it is required.

I did that with this one to get light behind the car showing the pillars.

 

Thank you, that helps. I'm still struggling to understand it, but at least I've got an idea of what is what now. Basically I'm just running a series of renders with different settings; some of the differences are pretty subtle and some of the controls effect things I wouldnt' have thought they would - scale multiplier really effects light levels in a facinating way, something I would not have thought of.

Joe Webb

Limun said:

and here is mine wip , not finished yet - any TIP?

btw , i started to work for amazon.it so i dont have so much time anymore :(

Very clever! Image looks great!  (and grats on the job - let us know if its the "bruising work place with no perks" that has been in the news lately )

IceCrMn

I think I got the fireflies fixed YaY !!! :)

here is a screen shot of the WIP baking

Joe Webb

icecrmn said:

I think I got the fireflies fixed YaY !!! :)

here is a screen shot of the WIP baking

Very nice! I really want to steal am inspired by those glowing spheres.

IceCrMn

It's finally finished ( I think :) ))

"Playing with Magic"

along my journey to make this one I learned a few things about iray/PBR render engines in general.

1) Fireflies are caused by lighting.If you get them in your render, no amount of iterations/samples will remove them, you have to fix the lights,Before I did that I had let this one render to just over 50k samples with no change in the fireflies.

2) The better the lighting the faster the render will "clean up".This one looked pretty good at 7k samples, but I was going to bed anyway so I set it 50k.this morning it was at 16k and 89% convergence.I stopped it there because I liked the way it looked at those numbers.

JimmyC_2009

It looks really well, and thanks for posting these tips.

The better the lighting, the better the image is a rule of thumb for these PBR renders i think.   It's nice to have an atmospheric render, but there always has to be 'enough' lighting.

Linwelly

icecrmn said:

It's finally finished ( I think :) ))

"Playing with Magic"

along my journey to make this one I learned a few things about iray/PBR render engines in general.

1) Fireflies are caused by lighting.If you get them in your render, no amount of iterations/samples will remove them, you have to fix the lights,Before I did that I had let this one render to just over 50k samples with no change in the fireflies.

2) The better the lighting the faster the render will "clean up".This one looked pretty good at 7k samples, but I was going to bed anyway so I set it 50k.this morning it was at 16k and 89% convergence.I stopped it there because I liked the way it looked at those numbers.

That came out really nice, I love the lights.

IceCrMn

Thank you :)

I decided today I would start putting things in my gallery.So I posted it there as well as a few others I did.

Limun

Joe Webb said:

Limun said:

and here is mine wip , not finished yet - any TIP?

btw , i started to work for amazon.it so i dont have so much time anymore :(

Very clever! Image looks great!  (and grats on the job - let us know if its the "bruising work place with no perks" that has been in the news lately )

yeah , i alredy have few "no" this week 

KA1

icecrmn said:

It's finally finished ( I think :) ))

"Playing with Magic"

along my journey to make this one I learned a few things about iray/PBR render engines in general.

1) Fireflies are caused by lighting.If you get them in your render, no amount of iterations/samples will remove them, you have to fix the lights,Before I did that I had let this one render to just over 50k samples with no change in the fireflies.

2) The better the lighting the faster the render will "clean up".This one looked pretty good at 7k samples, but I was going to bed anyway so I set it 50k.this morning it was at 16k and 89% convergence.I stopped it there because I liked the way it looked at those numbers.

Your hard work on this one really paid off, it looks great @icecrmn !! My 2nd entry is at iteration 4554 closing in on 48 hours and 23% converged!!! I'm pleased with how it's looking but chomping at the bit to do some more work!!

Limun

Linwelly said:

Limun said:

and here is mine wip , not finished yet - any TIP?

btw , i started to work for amazon.it so i dont have so much time anymore :(

Nice idea! I think I would reduce the DOF a little bit so that the woman holding the handy is a tad less blurry.  Other than that there is little to add, maybe think about a different format, either you go for a repetition of the selfie format or you go for contrast and make it a landscape.

Thanks for answer, 

ok, i understand about DOF , but i dont understand this part "Other than that there is little to add, maybe think about a different format, either you go for a repetition of the selfie format or you go for contrast and make it a landscape."

Joe Webb

Limun said:

Thanks for answer, 

ok, i understand about DOF , but i dont understand this part "Other than that there is little to add, maybe think about a different format, either you go for a repetition of the selfie format or you go for contrast and make it a landscape."

The rendering settings with the preset dimensions for the render. Actually I agree, it might look a little better if the dimensions where rectangular, like the phone screen. Either upright, portrait, or longways, landscape. The square is fine, but maybe it could be a little bit better rectangular.

Linwelly

Limun said:

Linwelly said:

Limun said:

and here is mine wip , not finished yet - any TIP?

btw , i started to work for amazon.it so i dont have so much time anymore :(

Nice idea! I think I would reduce the DOF a little bit so that the woman holding the handy is a tad less blurry.  Other than that there is little to add, maybe think about a different format, either you go for a repetition of the selfie format or you go for contrast and make it a landscape.

Thanks for answer, 

ok, i understand about DOF , but i dont understand this part "Other than that there is little to add, maybe think about a different format, either you go for a repetition of the selfie format or you go for contrast and make it a landscape."

In the render settings under the topic general you can change the format of the picture you take. As you used a render for the phone screen in a different format I was under the impression that you found that formatting option already. You will see a white frame with the actual frame you selected.

Limun

Joe Webb said:

Limun said:

Thanks for answer, 

ok, i understand about DOF , but i dont understand this part "Other than that there is little to add, maybe think about a different format, either you go for a repetition of the selfie format or you go for contrast and make it a landscape."

The rendering settings with the preset dimensions for the render. Actually I agree, it might look a little better if the dimensions where rectangular, like the phone screen. Either upright, portrait, or longways, landscape. The square is fine, but maybe it could be a little bit better rectangular.

 

Linwelly said:

Limun said:

Linwelly said:

Limun said:

and here is mine wip , not finished yet - any TIP?

btw , i started to work for amazon.it so i dont have so much time anymore :(

Nice idea! I think I would reduce the DOF a little bit so that the woman holding the handy is a tad less blurry.  Other than that there is little to add, maybe think about a different format, either you go for a repetition of the selfie format or you go for contrast and make it a landscape.

Thanks for answer, 

ok, i understand about DOF , but i dont understand this part "Other than that there is little to add, maybe think about a different format, either you go for a repetition of the selfie format or you go for contrast and make it a landscape."

In the render settings under the topic general you can change the format of the picture you take. As you used a render for the phone screen in a different format I was under the impression that you found that formatting option already. You will see a white frame with the actual frame you selected.

ahaa , thanks , what do you sugest something like eg. 1650x1000 or you mean eg. 1000x1650 ?