Realistic Renders... NOT!! 12 "And we're back in the room!"
This discussion has been closed.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Just a pretty simple two-light setup. An UberEnvironment light for ambience and a single distant light. The UE was tinted pale blue, while the distant light is tinted pale yellow. The result is a nice colour-balanced image which still gives a nice warmth to the sun. I had to model and texture the ice creams held by Sam myself, since I couldn't find a decent cornet-style ice cream prop anywhere.
...UE makes setting up ambient lighting so much easier. I remember the old LightDomePro employing something like 27 individual skylights plus another 20 - 24 ambient lights to create the same effect.
Drivers & updates are quite different I dont get why there is 30 when there was like 6 or 7 for the new tower. Love the SSD 109 updates took less then 10 minutes on the beast! Hence why I am most likely going pop a 250G SSD in my notebook and run all other storage and stuff off of my 2T passport eternal. I pretty well use it with both machines so I can keep working without interruptions. Thats the nice thing about using an external render engine start them on one resume them on the other. Herold UE is what gives a render quality anything I do in 3Delight is UE based I think R3 will be here soon..
"Come up to the lab, and see what's on the slab.."
Great render there, so much in it. I'm guessing only the beast would be able to cope with something like this.
Well done
CHEERS!
LOL indeed for example on the notebook if I try to render more then 6 characters Lux struggles sometimes with too many it crashes with the beast it just glides..
Just how it should be!
I'm worried mine will spontaneously combust if I try a Luxus render!
CHEERS!
LOL Lux can be tricky but once you learn how to work with it its not so bad. I made tons of renders with the notebook
...OK, so when I went to DL Lux there were two different files.
One is named "LuxRender OpenCL Setup" and the other just "Luxrender OpenCL" (my GPU supports OpenCL). Do I need both of these files?
This one at the top 64 open cl http://www.luxrender.net/en_GB/standalone
...so did I download the wrong ones?
Below is a SS of the page where I downloaded from. I DL'd both the Archive and Installer files for OpenCL 64 bit. (the files are highlighted in red)
Thats fine the archive is just the zipped files vs the installer im using version 1.2.1.17 for months
I WILL give it a go someday, my other project seems to take one step forward and several back. I now have to fully rethink the diorama.
CHEERS!
Hi everyone, some advice please.
Been working with Reality 2.5 and Luxrender.
Trying for photo realism and I hvae rendered this about 5 times with varying result, however, each image rendered takes over 36 hours and still only gets to 400s/p, this is with 6 threads and GPU.
Is it better to use the sun Reality add-on Sunlight or use a few pointlights instead?
Any advice would be muchly appreciated.
Thanks
Equally as important as the lighting are the materials you use in the scene. If you use too many overly reflective surfaces, not only will you get washed out colouration, but it will also take longer to render as the light bounces repeatedly around the scene. As a rule of thumb, a few simple things will help you reduce the render times of any given scene.
1) Ensure there is enough light for the camera to properly view the scene in its entirety. To use Paolo's own words, you need to light the scene for the camera so ensure there are enough lights and that they are correctly positioned.
2) Check your materials. Use the appropriate materials for any given part of the scene. Unfortunately, Reality 2.5 doesn't have the best material support compared to its successor, Reality 3 or to Luxus. That said, you can still edit the files manually or select the next-best material from the list. Glossy is pretty much a catch-all solution to most materials, but you'll need to be careful about the specular strength, since unlike in biased render engines, the specular also affects the IOR for light, so you should keep this low in general.
3) Remove unnecessary geometry. If it's not visible to the scene by the camera, and isn't needed for reflections, remove it from the scene. Luxrender will light everything in a given scene, so larger scenes will take longer to finish even if not all of the scene is in view. Keeping this to a minimum will reduce the needed calculations.
4) Avoid using skydomes and skyboxes, or convert them into image based lights. The worst contender for rendering times are skyboxes and skydomes, because these tend to be very large structures which extend a long distance away from the main scene. Lux destroys and forgets photons which are fired into the 'void' but not those which are heading towards a surface. In this case, the surface of the skybox or dome encompasses the entire scene, so photons effectively keep bouncing around until they fade out. This really canes render times.
For what it's worth, your example image could benefit a lot from the carpaint material which is designed specifically for vehicles. It's a shiny reflective surface, and well mimics actual car paint making it ideal for the police car.
I could have sworn that I got an email saying that Paolo was doing a Q and A somewhere soon, sadly I deleted the email and don't have the details. Does anyone else know about it? The man himself would be best placed to answer Cheletenham's questions.
I do have one for Cheltenham though: Where can I find that cool police car!?
CHEERS!
Thanks for this HerladofFire, have switched over to Luxus and applied the car paint material, see how it pans out over the weekend.
Rogerbee the vehicle is The Nemesis (Daz sku: 11240) has plenty of skins that can be applied to it.
If you can understand and use Luxus bonus. I am waiting for R3 due to the fact I like how Reality simplifies the process. I am not interested in manually having to type in scrips and formulas I am happy with R2 results I dont worry about SSS or whatever I find that only seems to give more realism in portrait style renders which is not what I do...
You can get some pretty sweet results with the car paint material, as shown below. In terms of workflow, I do agree that Reality can streamline the process somewhat. Luxus could probably do this if it had a conversion tool which could be fine-tuned, but as it stands you can only copy the Daz Studio settings verbatim rather than use build off the auto-conversions it does. It's a bit of an all-or-nothing affair, but it's had frequent updates to improve the system, so maybe that will change too.
That said, I do love the extra level of control over the final images.
Sounds like R3 is not too far away so i dont mind waiting looks good though. Edit sides for me its going to be an upgrade price which should be under $20.00 im spending close to $2500 for the beast and changing the drive to ssd in my notebook so I dont think its going to kill me LOL!
Ah, thanks for that, I couldn't find it before as I was specifically looking for it as a police vehicle.
CHEERS!
The Q and A with Paolo was at RDNA, you missed it, but you might find the text here:
http://forum.runtimedna.com/addonchat.php
CHEERS!
Equally as important as the lighting are the materials you use in the scene. If you use too many overly reflective surfaces, not only will you get washed out colouration, but it will also take longer to render as the light bounces repeatedly around the scene. As a rule of thumb, a few simple things will help you reduce the render times of any given scene.
1) Ensure there is enough light for the camera to properly view the scene in its entirety. To use Paolo's own words, you need to light the scene for the camera so ensure there are enough lights and that they are correctly positioned.
2) Check your materials. Use the appropriate materials for any given part of the scene. Unfortunately, Reality 2.5 doesn't have the best material support compared to its successor, Reality 3 or to Luxus. That said, you can still edit the files manually or select the next-best material from the list. Glossy is pretty much a catch-all solution to most materials, but you'll need to be careful about the specular strength, since unlike in biased render engines, the specular also affects the IOR for light, so you should keep this low in general.
3) Remove unnecessary geometry. If it's not visible to the scene by the camera, and isn't needed for reflections, remove it from the scene. Luxrender will light everything in a given scene, so larger scenes will take longer to finish even if not all of the scene is in view. Keeping this to a minimum will reduce the needed calculations.
4) Avoid using skydomes and skyboxes, or convert them into image based lights. The worst contender for rendering times are skyboxes and skydomes, because these tend to be very large structures which extend a long distance away from the main scene. Lux destroys and forgets photons which are fired into the 'void' but not those which are heading towards a surface. In this case, the surface of the skybox or dome encompasses the entire scene, so photons effectively keep bouncing around until they fade out. This really canes render times.
For what it's worth, your example image could benefit a lot from the carpaint material which is designed specifically for vehicles. It's a shiny reflective surface, and well mimics actual car paint making it ideal for the police car.
...so if a skydome is not a good option, what does one use if the scene requires the sky to be seen? Photo backdrops aren't the best solution as one usually needs to take the photo yourself or purchase/obtain permission to use one someone else shot. Also Photo backdrops are fixed in relation to with the camera view plane that is being rendered through and thus do not respond to the normal transition/rotation sliders during scene setup.
With SSS and other advanced surfacing/lighting features now being included with, and/or tailored to Daz Studio/3Delight (as well as recent improvements to the3Delight engine), I am beginning to wonder if waiting a day and a half or more for a render to complete in Lux is worth it when I may be able to come pretty darn close in much less time.
Thats an experience thing quite often I can get faster times with Lux now. Having said that its nice to have 2 decent rendering engines
...well looks like it is installed properly as I ran a quick test just to see if it would start rendering. Now I have to go over the Reality user manual and tutorials so I know what I'm doing with it, and no doubt have to DL a lot of shader updates from the site before I try to redner one of my scenes. The downside is most of them use skydomes (usually Cloud9 or the RDNA free ones) and the AoA Atmospheric Cameras (which have become so bloody useful) so not sure how that will work.
As mentioned in my post, an option is to convert the skybox into an image based light. In that regard, the light will be cast as the same colour as the skybox and projected inwards, so that the camera, and any needed reflections, can pick it up and affect figures as normal. You'll want to play around with the gain and intensity settings, but you can get a good result using this method, and it removes the concern for render times as the box itself won't be considered geometry.
I can sort of see what you're saying, but, in terms of actually having a sky in the render, what are your options!?
CHEERS!
I sometimes just alpha render the scene I had saved some of my LD2 skies I just merge them in PS or use sky pics from the net or take pics outside with my cam. here is merged with LDP2 sky http://fav.me/d5msexw
I guess that works, seems a bit of a hassle though.
Can anyone confirm if LDP works in DS4.6?
CHEERS!
Precisely what I said. By using the environment as a light source itself, you automatically get the sky you want. Below I've cobbled together a quick example done in Luxus. The 'Skydome' is basically a sphere which encompases the scene with a null material set to an infinite light with a HDR map plugged into the environment map. The HDR serves as the skydome image, while also providing ambient light to the scene from all sides, making things look more integrated to the scene than otherwise.
Please excuse the relatively low quality, since I didn't leave it rendering for very long, since it's only intended to show that it can be done.
Ok, but, what if you want a cloudy sky and to get the lighting effect you'd get from that?
CHEERS!
By choosing the appropriate HDR you can have any kind of lighting you want in the scene. It's all relative. In 3Delight, you'd have to mimic the settings by altering the light positions and colours. The alternative in 3DL is to use UberEnvironment, of course, but this effectively turns your HDR map into an image-based light which is pretty much the same effect you're trying to achieve in Luxrender. The difference here is that in Luxrender, the light is genuinely light rather than a faked shader-based solution, so you get all of those wonderful colours behaving as they would in the real world.
Here's a simple seven-step solution to getting an HDR map into Luxrender. Note that this uses Luxus, not Reality. I've so far been unable to reproduce the same results in Reality yet, but I'll update as soon as I figure it out.
1) Create a distant light and position it where your sun would be (I chose a distant light because you can 'aim' it).
2) With the parameters tab selected, click the options button where the Luxus conversions tools are hiding. Select 'Luxus - Luxrender Light' and convert it into a Sun. No sky, just sun.
3) Create a new null.
4) Again on the parameters tab, change the null into a Luxus light, but this time choose an 'infinite' light.
5) Under light settings on the Infinite light plug your desired HDR map into the Environment map texture
6) Render.
7) Adjust the gain on the sun and the environment map until they match. You'll need to use Linear for this to work.
Here's a better example which uses the above methodology. I added the walkway not merely for aesthetics, but also for bounce light which is otherwise missing if you use pure environmental lighting. You may wish to do something similar.