Daz Studio Lighting not working.
Sigurd
Posts: 1,089
Alll of a sudden I cannot get any of my Daz Studio lighting to work. Exterior environmental works but nothing else. Old scenes that I saved do not work either. If I select a surface and use Real Lights the surface will glow but not cast any light.
This is really frustrating. It is like there is a setting somewhere to disable all lights that is selected but I cannot find anything like this. I have been using this for a couple of years now and have not had this problem
I tried re-installing to no avail.
Any ideas?
If possible can someone give detailed instructions to uninstall and re-install if you think that would help.
Thank you.
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Comments
Reinstalling won't affect settings. If you are using Iray then by default the Environment mode and Tone mapping will be set for a fairly bright HDRI - if you switch that off (or work in an enclosed space) then you may well find that lights are too didm to see, you need to adjust Tone Mapping or the light Luminosity.
I do not recall doing anything with these settings. Could you give ma an example or screenshot of what these should be set for?
Thank you.
Try resetting Render Settings to Defaults. Here is a screenshot showing the Tone Mapping that Richard mentioned. Make sure Tone Mapping Enable is On.
I reset to default and ensured that tone mapping was enabled.
No dice. Really frustrating having thousands of dollars tied up in this and being unable to use any interior scene. Bad words are starting to form in my head.
I really do appreciate all your help, time and effort.
Ok, now that we know you have tone mapping enabled and no wonky render settings, we can get to the next step.
Indoors, the only light you will get comes from scene lights (photometric spot, photometric point, etc.), emissive surfaces, and HDRI or Daz Sun that comes through openings in the room, like windows.
Richard mentioned that tone mapping default is for bright outdoor scenes. Since you are indoors, you will need make adjustments, just like you would do with a real camera in a real room.
Try these things:
Here is an interior scene I did with Sun Sky Only, default tone mapping (EV 13), and several emissive surfaces. Look at the Iray Light Manager Pro window to see how bright I set the emissive surfaces for this render. Some or all may be ridiculous not physically correct values, but I got the effect I wanted. I set the sun angle so it would stream through the large window. This interior is Comfort Living Room.
Here's another interior scene using Dome and Scene. It also used default tone mapping. It has an HDRI streaming light in the windw, a photometric point light in the fireplace, and many (!) emissive surfaces. This scene is based on Simple Living - Living Room.
I have tried all these and still nothing works. For example I have used Stonemasons Contemporary Apartment with the lighting set I got with my Arch lighting kit. Nothing. I double checked all the settings and they were similar to the ones you suggested. When I crank the lights up huge all the do is glow but do nothing to illuminate the surrounding environment.
I have been using interior lights for a couple of years now and using the Iray ones since they came out and have not had this problem before.
I was hoping someone else might have encountered something similar and knew how to solve it.
Else total removal of Daz and re-install might be in order.
I am using a GTX 980 card if that info helps.
Thank you.
What are the Tone Mapping settings for your scene?
EV 13
Shutter Speed 128
F stop 8
F ISO 100
cm^2 Factor 1
Vignetting 0
WP Scale 1.0
WP 1.0 1.0 1.0
Burn Highlights ON .25
Crush Blacks .2
Saturation 1.0
Gamma 2.2
These
Shutter Speed 128
F stop 8
F ISO 100
Are too low for indoor lighting.
Setting them to something like this should at least let you see what the lights are doing.
Shutter Speed 60
F stop 4
F ISO 400
I am using a GTX 980ti, so our cards are similar.
Are you using Stonemason's Contemporary Living? (Or is there a different one called Contemporary Apartment?) I have Contemporary Living. It was released before Iray, so some surfaces will benefit from Iray shaders. I will attach a dropbox link to a scene file here where I added some emissive surfaces, a couple photometric lights, and no HDRI in the environment. The Tone Mapping is adjusted a lot, to EV 9 to lighten the dark interior. I changed a few of the surfaces to some of the car paint surfaces, just to play around. I changed window glass surfaces to Iray glass. I was very happy with the resulting render. You can see it in my Gallery. I did this way over a year ago, but it still renders fine in the latest DS 4.9.
What is Arch lighting? Is it this? If so, I don't have that to test.
Iray Scene
IG Iray Lights and Shaders - Architectural Lights. It has a setup customized for Stonemasons Contemporary Living (my mistake earlier sorry) for IRAY.
I also have Real Iray lights and a dozen or so more Iray light setups. These all worked in the past. What I am wondering is what happened so that nothing is working now.
Fishtales, thanks for the settings. It is brighter now inside but none of my lights will work yet. But at least I can see. I know zip about cameras so that really helped.
Thanks
@Sigurd, can you download and try the scene I linked to at the end of my last post? Then we will be comparing the same thing, I think. Although there may be some settings that are not saved with the scene.
I'm using Windows 10 64 bit OS, how about you?
I don't have the IG lights either. The product page says "As a bonus there are also included presets to add these lights to the Dreamhome's Greatroom & Kitchen, Stonemason's Contemporary Living and The Pool House, plus material presets to turn the lamps included in these sets into working Iray Lights and Shaders lights." (emphasis added by me). Is there a chance that you loaded the lights but didn't use the preset to turn them on?
Thanks for the help. I am currently rendering your scene to see how it behaves on my system.As far as the scene in question is concerned, I checked the lights under the surfaces tab and they were Iray. I also loaded an old scene I had that used to work great with this same scene and the Iray lights and it does not work now.
What I am trying to do used to work and now it does not. That is why I am thinking it is some kind of setting somewhere or I need to reboot the whole thing.
I did not change any of your settings except to set the time for 19:00 to see if any of the lights are working.The lamps do not appear to be casting any light. I will send you shots in a few minutes.
Okay, here are the two scenes. I did not change the camera angle or anything else from how you had saved it except to change the time to 19:00.
I am suspecting the lights are brighter on your system as they are hardly visible in mine.
When I try to use Iray Real Lights on my scene, it only glows and does not emit at all.
What is the best procedure for removing Daz and then re-installing it? Would this help?
I'm not clear on what the two images are. Is the one on the left my render and the one on the right your render of the same scene? There is more difference between the images than one being darker than the other. The shadows are different. Look at the shadow n the floor near the couch on the right side of the image.
It looks to me like you are getting NO LIGHT from the environment settings. It is as if you have it in Scene Only mode instead of Dome and Scene. As a test, I changed my settings to Scene Only, and I get something nearly identical to your second image. Please check your Render Settings>Editor tab>Environment>Environment Mode and compare every setting to the screenshots I have attached. Are there any discrepancies? If not, have you loaded any skydome in the scene? Skydomes that were created for 3Delight can block all light from the Iray environment.
I should also probably ask what version of Daz Studio you are running. I'm assuming DS 4.9.2.70, the latest released version. Is that correct?
The two scenes are both your scenes. My render of the first is identical to how you saved it and the other is simply the same with the time on the environment switched to 19:00. That is why the shadows are different.
I checked my settings in the environment panel and they all check out.
I just created a photometric spotlight and it does work. I do not know why all my other Iray lights do not.
OK, so if you can render my scene with no changes, and it renders exactly like mine, that would imply that there is nothing wrong with your Daz Studio installation. That's good news. When you change the time to 19:00, that changes the sun position and it is evidently no longer shining in the windows. At 19:00, the sun might even have set, giving no light. So, I am not surprised that the scene is so dark. The majority of light in my image is coming from the sun through the windows. Take that sun away, and the room is dark. It is just like in your real house. During the day, the sun shines in and you don't need to turn on bright lights to see your furniture. At night, you do need those lights turned on. I did a different scene where I turned up the interior lighting for a night scene. You can see that render in my Gallery here.
Now, about why your old scenes that used to work don't work anymore. In Edit>Preferences, did you have "Render Settings: Record when saving a Scene File" checked when you created those old scenes? Maybe you didn't, and now when you reload the scene, it uses different render settings than you used before.
Ok. I did. Riddle me this. Everything looks fine when I render now but the interactive preview IRAY either photoreal or interactive, looks totally dark. None of the lights emit except when I spotrender or render. It was not like this before. Does this issue seem to make more sense.
P.S. Thank you for all the help. I really like being able to render indoor scenes again. Even if I cannot seem them before I render.
I don't know why that would happen, unless maybe your scene is too big for your graphics card. Does the same thing happen if you render something very simple, like a primitive cube with the default Iray render settings with the Ruins HDRI?
If you haven't done so already, you should quit D|S and reboot your machine. If you had working scenes before, and don't now, it might be a transient issue that can be corrected by a simple reboot. This problem is reported now and then in the forums, and much of the time, rebooting fixes the lighting issues.
Sorry if you've tried this -- you said you might in one of your posts, but didn't indicate you actually tried it.
I will have to do more testing in the morning, almost midnight here. Thank you for all your help. I will update you when I find something.
Evening.
for my case, my lighting and shadow doesn't change in render mode when i move the light source, is there any solution ?
I have a similar problem; I have no indication that render recognizes any lighting at all. My figure come out dark and I have to use Corel to put color and light into them. I've played with the settings suggested above and no change.
When I set the intensity of my lights bright enough for the viewport preview image to be slightly brighter, my figure is blown out on the viewport. No similar relationship between the settings on the viewport, the preview image, and the render image.
The non-Iray preiew missse a lot of stuff, you can't rally use it to adjust lighting. Even the Iray Preview may be limited, depending on the options in Draw Settings. The nVidia Iray preview mode does give you an exposure widget - click the +/- icon at top-right, then click on an area to dfine the exposure level.
3Delight, I discovered, is a much more accurate previewer. Fishtails gave me the best clue. The render settings that work are camera settings, but with a camera I have a meter. This is a huge shortcoming with DAZ. My camera can give me a meter reading and the result in seconds. If I have to rely on camera settings without a meter, white balance, and color balance, the camera is a hundred and fifty years old. And even then, the result is a crap shoot. I'm also guessing at the intensity of each of three hot lights on a image in the viewport is just a rough approximation of what might be rendered, good only for posing and shaping. The DAZ program may be free but the add-ons are not. This program has been developing for years. How can the developers be so incredibly incompetent? There are a bunch of render settings that mean nothing to end users. The image from the viewport to the render should be plug and play!!!! And I'm sorry that it is you and not the developers I'm talking to. It isn't your fault.
Another several days of guessing to come up with a formula for a descent rendering after hours of posing, shaping, lighting, etc. If I weren't aready heavily invested, I'd back out of this crap.