Natural Iray lighning for rooms

BeeMKay

Er... sorry but my English is not very good, and I really did not understand what you try to say, except that you subdivided the emissive light plane?

Just a word of caution that the more surface polygons your light pane has, the longer will be the render time. It will not give more light with more subdivision than a single polygone.

Apologies if I misunderstood, but it is really hard to understand what you write.

bdproductions

BeeMKay said:

Here's a very, very simple setup for a closed room. I've set up a closed romm and put a G3 character into it for demonstration. If you work with a room that has an opening, light will behave differently. Also, light from the default HDRI (or whatever HDRI/sun you use) will flood into the scene. As the HDRI is not needed in a closed environment, and actually slows down render times:

Set Render Settings to "Scene Only".

Then, create a plane from the primitives. I made mine 1x1m. Make sure that the number of divisions is set to 1 only, as more divisions will increase the render time.

The plane has axis, and you have to rotate it so that the y-axis (green arrow) points down. This is important as I'll turn the light to single sided later, and the green arrow is the direction the light leaves the plane surface. Then, open the surface tab so you can change the surface to light emitter.

This is where you'll find it the light emitter that comes with DAZ Studio. Apply it to the surface.

The plane now has become emissive. Scroll down to the emissive settings and locate the button for "single side". Set it to "Off". If you leave it to "on" light will come from both surface sides.

Rendering with the default settings gives not much light:

I change the emission temperature to the default 6500K to get a bright white light, and switch the lumiance units to kcd/m^2. As a result, my character is nicely lit, and even part of the room has light.

When I move the character, the natural thing happens, and I get a lot of shadow.

To remedy that, I add more light sources by selecting the plane and creating instances (Create --> Node Instances) in my case, I added 5.

Move the lights so they cover the room. You also need to change the y-rotation to -180. I left the y-rotation at 0 for one of the instances, so I will get some ceiling light.

Suddenly, there's a lot of light! You can also see that the one plane has a dark surface where the light doesn't emit.

Some fine tuning.

1. move the planes out of the camera view (unless you want to keep them visible)
2. select the original plane.
3. change the emission temperature to 4500 and the lumiance to 4000 (or whatever suits your scene. Experiment a bit).

The light is less bright now and has a warmer color.

when you move the character around, he's still nicely lit.

But as evilded said, this type of light setup is not really anywhere near natural looking light. You can use it to get a base light amount in the scene, though, and then use "highlight" spotlights or something like that to make the character and image "pop".

EDIT: Set "Cutout Opacity" to a very low value, like 0.00001 to make the light invisible, but still emitting light. Then you don't have to hide them outside of the camera frame.

That was a faboulous job you did using that method!!!! If I had time I would study your method . But as it stands, I will have to export my simple concept set/ scene to Max to get the quick but effective results that you have in your demonstration.

bdproductions

bdproductions said:

BeeMKay said:

Here's a very, very simple setup for a closed room. I've set up a closed romm and put a G3 character into it for demonstration. If you work with a room that has an opening, light will behave differently. Also, light from the default HDRI (or whatever HDRI/sun you use) will flood into the scene. As the HDRI is not needed in a closed environment, and actually slows down render times:

Set Render Settings to "Scene Only".

Then, create a plane from the primitives. I made mine 1x1m. Make sure that the number of divisions is set to 1 only, as more divisions will increase the render time.

The plane has axis, and you have to rotate it so that the y-axis (green arrow) points down. This is important as I'll turn the light to single sided later, and the green arrow is the direction the light leaves the plane surface. Then, open the surface tab so you can change the surface to light emitter.

This is where you'll find it the light emitter that comes with DAZ Studio. Apply it to the surface.

The plane now has become emissive. Scroll down to the emissive settings and locate the button for "single side". Set it to "Off". If you leave it to "on" light will come from both surface sides.

Rendering with the default settings gives not much light:

I change the emission temperature to the default 6500K to get a bright white light, and switch the lumiance units to kcd/m^2. As a result, my character is nicely lit, and even part of the room has light.

When I move the character, the natural thing happens, and I get a lot of shadow.

To remedy that, I add more light sources by selecting the plane and creating instances (Create --> Node Instances) in my case, I added 5.

Move the lights so they cover the room. You also need to change the y-rotation to -180. I left the y-rotation at 0 for one of the instances, so I will get some ceiling light.

Suddenly, there's a lot of light! You can also see that the one plane has a dark surface where the light doesn't emit.

Some fine tuning.

1. move the planes out of the camera view (unless you want to keep them visible)
2. select the original plane.
3. change the emission temperature to 4500 and the lumiance to 4000 (or whatever suits your scene. Experiment a bit).

The light is less bright now and has a warmer color.

when you move the character around, he's still nicely lit.

But as evilded said, this type of light setup is not really anywhere near natural looking light. You can use it to get a base light amount in the scene, though, and then use "highlight" spotlights or something like that to make the character and image "pop".

EDIT: Set "Cutout Opacity" to a very low value, like 0.00001 to make the light invisible, but still emitting light. Then you don't have to hide them outside of the camera frame.

That was a faboulous job you did using that method!!!! If I had time I would study your method . But as it stands, I will have to export my simple concept set/ scene to Max to get the quick but effective results that you have in your demonstration.

Sorry about the typos. It;s been a long month!

That was a fabulous job you did using that method!!!! If I had time I would study your method. But as it stands, I will have to export my simple concept set/ scene to Max to get the quick but effective results that you have in your demonstration.