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After a bit of looking around I got the Luxrender engine, can I do the "render to RIB" option mentioned by Mark128 with lux, or is that only an option for 3delight?
The LuxRender engine uses a completely different way of describing materials and lighting than 3Delight. You need to translate the DAZ description into the LuxRender format. There are two different DAZ studio plugins available that attempt to do the translation automatically.
The newer plugin that is available in the DAZ store is Luxus (http://www.daz3d.com/luxus). The older plugin is called Reality and is by Pret-a-3D. Reality is sold on other sites. The current version of Reality for DS is 2.5, although there is a Reality 3 for Poser. There are lots of threads on the forum discussing the pros and cons of these two plugins.
The two plugins try to automatically translate material descriptions from DAZ to LuxRender, but to get good renders you will have to learn how to tweak the material translation.
LuxRender is slow, generally a lot slower than 3Delight to get a high quality image, but the advantage of LuxRender is it renders the whole image at once. While it may take many, many hours to get high signal to noise in LuxRender, you can get a good idea about the lighting for the whole image after 5 or 10 minutes. If you have the lighting screwed up, LuxRender will let you see that faster.
You also need to use different lights and different lighting techniques in LuxRender.
LuxRender has its own window, so you can run it without DS running at all, and probably you can run it without any window.
I'm using luxus, for no other reason than I found it first :D I went for luxrender because it was reccommended to me for its ability to achieve higher realism (because its unbiased)
I did discover yesterday that luxrender is slow, and will continue rendering until told to stop or reaches a preset sample number? Whats a good sample preset to set it for?
What do you mean about having to use different lights? not the ones installed in daz?
Luxus comes with lights that will work in both DS and LuxRender. Basically, Luxus knows how to translate those lights to LuxRender. I'm not sure if Luxus can translate other DAZ lights.
If you stand outside on a sunny day, there is a single light source providing all the light, the sun. The sunlight though is not a simple distant light. It is reflected, refracted and scattered off the atmosphere, dust, the ground and other surrounding objects. LuxRender has a complicated model to approximate the interaction with the atmosphere and dust in the air. You have to have other objects around for the light to reflect off of. Then LuxRender can ray trace the light from its sky 2 model to give an accurate representation of lighting in the real world. As you have discovered, that can be slow.
In a biased render engine like 3Delight, if you just put in one distant light, you get really harsh shadows. The distant light does not create the ambient light created by scattering and reflection. You have to add other lights, like UberEnviroment2 or other distant lights to simulate ambient light. You don't want to add those other lights in LuxRender.
This is what I mean when I said you have to do lighting differently for 3Delight and LuxRender. In LuxRender you want to minimize the number of lights you are using. In 3Delight you need more lights or a global illumination light like UberEnvironment2 to simulate ambient light, because 3Delight is not going to ray trace the light forever.
Ok, I have a little more understanding of what you mean now but....Can I still use daz lights (like a spotlight, distant light etc), but I can't use uberenvironment? sorry if thats a stupid question.
Also, most of the renders I do involve nudity, I know that is not allowed here, but if I was to put basic v4 clothing on my model (sports bra, boy shorts for example) would I then be able to post them, rather than having to make extra images/poses specifically for posting on this forum?
You can post using a bikini.
As for lights, they work VERY differently in Luxrender than they do in 3Delight. Lights in 3DL don't automatically fill a room, for instance, but lights in Lux will bounce realistically off scenery and objects as well as interact with translucent solids. For that reason it helps to think more like a real world photographer than a 3D artist when working with Lux lights.
Mesh lights are arguably one of the more common. This is basically an object, which could be a flat plane a sphere or even something complex, which acts as a light source. With those such lights, the light is emitted away from the object. A sphere would emit light from all sides, while a plane would emit light in a single direction.
Spotlights translate to Luxrender, but not very accurately. Unfortunately, due to the way lux works, spotlights aren't terribly 'realistic' and typically need an IES file to properly control where the light goes. With that in mind, you're better off using a mesh light and blocking off the areas you don't want the light to shine using objects to essentially create your own 'real world' spotlight.
UberEnvironment is a 3Delight shader and has no effect in Luxrender.
Luxus has tools to create very unique and interesting light sources which work differently to the 3Delight versions. Such things can include hemispherical lights, such as those used in my IBL presets. 'Sky' is basically a very simple IBL light, and 'sun' lights have a unique property in that the colour changes based on its rotation. Sun lights near the horizon will appear more reddish as though the sun were setting or rising while sun lights high above the scene will appear whiter like daylight. The sun colour settings can be overridden somewhat in the Luxrender GUI using Black Body colour.
For best results with Luxus you ideally want to be using Luxrender light types rather than relying on the autoconversion done by the plugin.
ok thanks for information on both topics.
Does anyone know why luxrender is crashing or giving me a "[2013-07-26 16:11:25 Severe error: 47] Parsing error in file 'C:/Users/me/AppData/Roaming/DAZ 3D/Studio4/temp/d57.lxs' at line 768: syntax error" everytime I try and render a scene in which a model has subd switched on? Luxrender doesnt give me this error at base resolution, but If I raise the resolution lux will give me that error everytime so far
The syntax error means that Luxrender can't understand a line of code in the output file (with LXS extension). Luxus essentially converts everything you do in Daz Studio into a format readable by Luxrender, so there shouldn't be any errors if it's not using custom settings. That said, it would be a lot easier to find out what the issue is if we knew what was on that line.
If you have Notepad++, open the LXS file it saves (it will either be in your Daz Studio temp folder or in the same location you saved the image if you specified a filename) then scroll down to line 768, as Notepad++ numbers the lines. Post that line for us so we can see what's going on and hopefully find a remedy for you.
I havent typed anything into the extra settings, downloaded notepad++, at line 768 it says the following, I dont have enough space in the reply box to paste the 22 pages of numbers in that line
"integer quadindices"
I dont have enough space in the reply box to paste the 22 pages of numbers in that line
Basically that line joins the points of a model into four-sided shapes (quads) for the render engine. It should just be an array of numbers, which makes it all the more curious as to why it's causing problems. Firstly, scroll up from that point until you see a line beginning with a # symbol and the name of the model. This will tell you which item is causing the error. Try hiding it and see if the problem persists.
If it goes away, then make sure you look at the surface material settings and double check that you haven't accidentally entered anything into the extra settings for that object. Even one misplaced character can cause problems like this, so it never hurts to look again.
Other than that I really can't think of anything which could cause this problem. Syntax errors by definition are where the engine has difficulty deciphering what it should do, which are most often caused by simple typos or missing close-brackets. If it's doing this on an automatic conversion then something is very wrong. If the issue persists I'd file a bug report and offer your LXS file to someone who can figure this stuff out.
It would probably be a ToS breach to give your LXS file to just anyone though, as it contains all of the polygon data for any figures and content you're using, so be sure it only gets sent to officials.
Among the many things I need to get better at is hair. A friend of mine told me to adjust the bump maps, spec, and diffuse lighting. Those comments were made in reference to the attached image, in which the hair was described as flat and fake looking
I'd like to know the specific effects those settings have on the look of hair. I'm still very much a beginner, and have no real knowledge of the contents of the surfaces tab yet
Apologies for the double post, but I've locked myself up in the rendercage for the last few weeks trying to get better, this is the most recent result.
My lighting results are still very "hit and miss" The image was lit with Uberenvironment, 3 distant lights, and rendered in 3delight. Any tips to help me improve further would be appreciated. Knowledge on making hair look better in a render is especially welcome.
Thanks to those on this forum who've helped me so far, particularly HeraldOfFire, Mark128 and Scott-Livingston!
Is that the Reby Sky Elite hair?
If it is, I can fiddle around and see if I can find some settings that give better renders.
Yes its the Reby Sky Elite hair, but as you can see I'm not doing it justice, I'd like to get it to look like the same quality as I got the skin, if that makes sense. At the minute it looks "fake" in comparison
I have done some experiments with the Reby Sky Elite hair. I used the V4 Character MRL Elena, which I believe is from the same vendor as the character you are using.
My guess is that you have the UberEnviroment to strong and you have shadows turned off on all your distant lights.
In these images I have a distant light that is the 'key' light. It is camera left and from above. The fill light is a distant light. It is camera right and from above. There is a back light that is almost directly behind the model. I also have UberEnviroment 2 loaded, set on Occlusion w/soft shadows. I could have used Occlusion with directional shadows and setup the KHPark HDRI to align with my key light, but I was in a hurry. I also used the 4XHi preset on UE, which may be overkill.
The first image shows what happens when you make UberEnviroment too strong. On the left is UE at 90% intensity and the distant lights turned down. Turning down UE to 50% and turning up the distant lights immediately gives more realism in the image. On the right we see what happens when we make all of the distant lights have ray traced shadows with 1% shadow softness. The ray traced shadows improve the 3 dimensionality of the image and makes the lighting look more real, but there is a problem. We have double shadows. Both Key and Fill light are casting shadows on the face. The result is not really pleasing.
The second image shows the image using raytraced shadows only on the Key light, leaving the fill and back light with no shadows. You probably lose some amount of realism, but you get ride of the objectionable double shadows.
This image still has shadows that are too hard for a traditional portrait. The last render show what happens when you turn the shadow softness up to 50%. This now is starting to look like what a portrait show look like. You could also turn raytraced shadows back on in the fill light, but make softness very high, in the 80-100% range. The last pic is the setup information for all the lights. I just set this up quickly, so it can be optimized for sure. I also included the camera settings, because the camera is in a strange position, and the light angles are only meaningful retaliative to where the camera is.
I should add, if I were setting up this portrait, I would use UberArea lights because they act more like softboxes used by studio photographers, but you can get pretty far with shadow softness on distant lights or Linear Point lights (This show work with spot lights too, but every time I try, it does not work).
Unfortunately, all of this has not made the Reby Sky Elite Hair look amazingly realistic. I'll say more about that in the next port.
There have been a lot of advances in creating realistic skin textures in 3D modeling. Many of the currently available textures are based on scans of real people's skins.
Unfortunately, the 3D modeling of realistic hair has lagged. Almost all the pre-made hair available today has geometry that looks like a bunch of ribbons. The hair strands are textures that are applied to the ribbons and their are transparency maps for the ribbons so the ribbon becomes transparent between the hair strands. A lot of the hair available today renders ok from a distance, but in a closeup portrait the hair looks fake. You have to select a hair that looks good in a close up portrait. I have spent a lot of time trying to find hairs like that. You can try to figure out what hairs are used in promo renders for characters that you like. Sometimes it turns out to be Poser Hair Room hair or something like that. Poser hair Room is similar to the Garibaldi Express or Look At My Hair Plugins for DAZ Studio. I have used Garibaldi Express and you can get more realistic looking hair with it, but it is a long learning curve and takes a lot of time to create a hair. Poser Hair room is suppose to be even harder to use.
I have attached a comparison render with exactly the same lighting and a couple of other hairs. The Reby Glamour is by AprilYSH and I have usually liked her hairs for realism. The Sissy Le Beaux is from Rendo and you see it used in quite a few character promos there, because it looks more like real hair in a close up render, although it is a rather messy hair style.
Thanks. this is all very useful information, and the diagrams will make it easier to understand what the settings are affecting, but it will take me time to absorb this information.
If you want I can post the exact settings I used for that image if that will help, but basically shadows were turned on, but I set the shadow softness very low (10%) because when the softness was higher it was making the skin look very blotchy. (even though all UE values such as occlusion strength, occlusion samples, shading rate were set for maximum quality)
UE was set at 85% because in a lot of previous image lighting tests, the image turned out very dark. I also didn't change/set up the environment mode, because if I'm honest I have real trouble actually finding that menu option in daz.
That Sissy Le Beaux hair definitely looks more like real hair, but does it have a lot of morph/styling options? I put my characters in a lot of different poses/positions, and need to move the hair accordingly to make the image look right. Thats one of the reasons I love using the Reby hair...its very flexible in terms of shape.
btw thanks mark for telling me about the 3delight standalone render engine, theres no way I could have rendered an image like this without it!
Posting the setting you used for UE and distant lights would be helpful.
Harsh shadows of the type you get from direct sunlight or with the default setting of shadow softness on a distant light does not make for good portraits. I have some experience in lighting for studio photography. There you use umbrellas and softboxes to make the light source appear larger so it will give soft shadows. Soft shadows make for a more pleasing portrait. If you just fill in the shadows with ambient light, you get very flat lighting that does not look good. The shadows are what make the object look three dimensional. You want to make the shadows soft, so they are not very obvious but they still give that 3 dimensional look.
I did this fairly quickly last night. I would probably turn the UE2 light down to 35% intensity and the Distant lights up a little, maybe 80% and 40%. You could also turn shadows on in the fill light but make them very soft also. Some people add another distant light to represent bounced lighting from the floor. This would angled up at a 45 degree angle or so and would not have shadows turned on. Intensity would be very low, 5-10% or so. This could fill in a little under her chin and where the hair blocks the key light, but you want to keep the intensity low.
In general more ray traced light will make your images look more realistic.
The Sissy Le Beaux hair has a lot of morphs in it. Like most hair, it takes a lot of fiddling to find the right morphs to get the hair to do what you want.
I downloaded and tried the standalone 3delight. It is a year or two old version of 3delight, so there may be some problems working with some of the newer features in DAZ, like the AoA Subsurface shader. I had some problems with UberArea lights in it and gave up on it. I'm glad it is working for you.
I'll post all settings for you tomorrow as its getting a bit late over here. I don't know if it makes a difference to your advice or not, but the picture isn't actually a portrait, it's a cropped version of a picture of her naked from her upper thighs to her head which I obviously couldn't post here, so maybe the lighting doesn't look like portrait lighting because it isn't meant to be.
Regarding shadow softness, what way do the number settings work? Is it like the glossiness setting where a lower number actually means more glossiness?
Heres the light settings I used for the image.
You are apparently using UberEnviroment 1, not UberEnviroment 2. I don't even have UE1 in my content library any more. I did a search and could not find it.
I'm not really sure what all the differences are between UE 1 and UE 2. It does not seem to have the Environment mode selector. Does UE 1 have HDRI presets? Did you use one?
You appear to be using one distant light and the other two distant lights are specular booster lights, which you need when using that much UE.
Maybe I should step back and ask, what kind of lighting are you trying to achieve?
Do you want to make it look like a sunny day outside? A cloudy day outside? An indoor scene? Something that looks like a glamour shot?
I take it you don't want harsh shadows, beyond that I'm not sure.
The attached pictures show what is in my uberenvironment/lights folders, I don't know what an HDRI preset even is. I'm pretty sure I just picked Uberenvironment base, then added the other lights.
As you can see theres a couple of other lighting products in there, but the "PRO" lighting packages are way beyond anything I understand or know how to use currently. I only started using Daz 2 months ago, with no prior knowledge of 3d or photography/lighting at all.
What I would like to do first and foremost in terms of lighting is to actually have a basic level of understanding how to actually light a figure, everything I tried up till now has been semi-educated guesswork, using what other 3d artists have told me, or by looking at some photography lighting setups (but those don't have any precise instructions on exactly where to place the lights) To be able to produce consistently good results.
Out of the options you listed, I suppose "indoor" and "glamour shot" would be what I want to emulate. To be able to light a 3d figure the same way a photographer taking a similar picture of a real-life model would light her.
Ideally, the way I want to light a figure would be "warm" and "bright" and "soft", something that makes skin look good, eyes and hair shine bright, and brings out/accentuates the curves of a figure. the last render I posted is the closest I've come to what I want to do (re lighting) and is a good indicator of the direction I want to go. The kind of lighting you would see in a beauty product ad on TV would also be good examples.
Outdoor lighting, sunny or cloudy, even night-time would all be things I'd like to be able to do, but they wouldn't be my main focus, so I would hold off on those until I had the skills to do the main thing I want to do.
I hope some of that makes sense.
I don't have that folder anymore. Perhaps this has something to do with switching over to use DIM.
In my installation, UE2 is in My Library -> Light Presets -> omnifreaker -> UberEnvironment 2 or something like that. That is from memory, since I am at work. UE2 is a replacement for UE1 and UE2 should be part of the free content that comes with DS. Can you check if you have it?
I believe the preset like "!UberEnviroment1 KHPark" and "!UberEnviroment1 Kitchen" are HDRI presets for UE1. The KHPark preset is for an outdoor scene and it has a bright sun at one location. This is a useful preset for outdoor like lighting. Unfortunately, you cannot rotate UE1 to align that sun direction with your scene. You have to rotate your scene to align with UE1. UE2 fixes that. You can rotate UE2 to align with the scene, if you are using HDRI. UE2 also has some other improvements.
Glamour photography like what you see in makeup ads, ect, is usually done with very soft light. The light is creating shadows, but so soft you don't notice them. In the real world soft light means big light sources, like softboxes and umbrellas. Also the light is usually more uniform than regular portrait lighting. I had my Key light 2x my fill light in the scenes above. For Glamour you might use 1 to 1 or something close to that.
When I get some time, I could try something like that.
I don't have UE2, I explained why in this thread http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/25137/ I even asked daz if they could split it from the starter pack for me, they said no (perplexing, as its not a hard or costly thing to do)
So for the moment I'm stuck with UE1 and the other lights.
If I want to do something like glamour lighting, I would usually use UberArea lights, but since they are in the same package with UberEnviroment 2, I'm assuming you don't have them either. I tried using distant lights to see what I could do, and they seem to work fine.
This is basic three point lighting, with a key, fill and back light, plus UE to provide ambient lighting. The key, fill and back light are all set to use ray traced shadows.
Key light is distant light, rotate -30 deg in X and -15 deg in Y. The Y rotation was optimized for this pose to get the most light around her right ear and the hair on her right side. Different poses you would need to optimize differently. Intensity is 65% and shadow softness at 80%.
Fill light is also a distant light - it is kind of arbitrary which light I called the key and fill, since the intensity is the same. For a regular portrait, fill light would be about half the intensity of the key. For a moody, more Hollywood style portrait, the fill could be even less. For glamour you want the fill to be about the same as the key. You also want to keep the fill about 90 degrees away from the key. The key was Y rotate at -15, so the fill is Y rotate at 75 deg. The X rotation is the same -30 deg. Intensity is 65% and shadow softness at 80%.
Back light - you don't have to use a back light. As you can see, it is just putting a small high light on the edge of her hair and some rim lighting on her hand and arm. This is a light skinned, blonde model on a dark background, so there is no problem with separation between the model and the background. If you have a dark haired model on a dark background, you need back lights to separate the edge of the hair from the background and better define her hair. You might need back lights on each side for a dark haired model on a dark background. Important thing with the back light is keep it off of her nose. Portrait photographers consider it a major mistake to let the back light spill on the nose or face.
I used a spot light for the back light, just for a little more control where the light was going. Mine is at 100, 300, -300. It was rotate to aim it at the back of her head. Spread angle is 45 and intensity is 200%. Shadows are ray traced and 0% softness. You have to have ray traced shadows on your back light, even though the shadows to not show. Without ray traced shadows, the back light will go through the models head and light up the nose. Very high shadow softness will just make the spill problem worse, so keep softness at 0%. NOTE: when lining up the back light, do not believe the DAZ interactive display. The interactive display does not do ray traced shadows. The light will appear to be shinning through her head, spilling on the nose, when it does not in a render. Render an image with only the back light to see where it is going.
The UE setup is the same as before, except I turned the intensity down to 35%.
The attached image shows what each of the lights is doing and how the results image. I have found when trying to understand what your lighting is doing, rendering each light by itself can be instructive.
There is nothing magic about the light positions or settings, but they can be a starting point to try things. The light setup needs to be optimized for the pose and scene. You could also add a spectacular booster light aligned with the key light and at 20-30% intensity to make up for the UE.
The only disadvantage I see with using distant lights for the key and fill is lack of control where the light is going. If here are other objects in the background, the distant light will light them up too. You will not have separate control of the character and background lighting. But if you are just posing against a wall or JPG background, this should not be a problem.
Thanks, I'll try this setup on my next render and see how it goes. If you're still looking for more realistic-looking hairs. I have used this one, and it looks pretty good. http://www.daz3d.com/filosofy-hair
Although I'm pretty sure it added at least 1 hour to my rendertimes
P.S. do you have a link to that sissy le beaux hair you mentioned? Theres 4 products with that name on renderosity, I'd like to make sure I buy the right one