what am I doing wrong with lighting?
I'm having some general trouble with lighting. It seems like the lights I add have little effect. I'm attaching a low-resolution render of a scene that has four spots and a distant light. I've toggled up the lumens. I've gone into render settings and changed to sun-sky, scene only - all four options, basically, with barely any difference. If I am in texture shaded mode, it looks like the scene is flooded with light - but when I switch to iray, it's just like being in a closet. You can see that the candles on the Santa Lucia crown are putting out a huge amount of light compared with all of my spotlights. This seems to happen with many of my renders. I feel like it's probably some render setting I'm not familiar with? Thanks and happy holidays!
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Try turning off the headlamp under Camera > Headlamp Settings (or something like that).
Thanks - so I went selected "camera," went into parameters, and switched headlamp mode to "off" and ... still looks the same. Good thought - any other ideas?
Just out of curiosity, I went into the scene and switched off all four of my lights - three spots and a distant light. In texture shaded mode it was pitch dark, but in iray mode it looked exactly the same with or without lights.
It sounds as if you could have an HDRI in the Environment map and are rendering with the Dome turned on, try rendering with it set to Scene only.
Thanks - I just did that and I'm in the process of doing a low-res test render, but it seems actually darker. I'll send it when it's done.
Here is the render on "scene only" with no other changes made.
Look through the lights and make sure they are pointing at the figure, they look a bit low. Also if you have an HDRI in the Environment Map turn the Environment map and or Intensity down.
Sorry I don't know what that means exactly - having an HDRI in the Environment Map, and how to determine if I do or don't. Most everything is on default settings. I'll check. As for how the lights are aimed, that's a good point, but at least one of them is pointed directly at the face. And really with four sources of light, we should be seeing *something* and not just a black hole. If I look at the texture shaded mode for this scene, it looks like floodlights are on - it's way over-lit. It's only when I go to iray that everything goes dark.
If you are on default then there is no map and it will be set to dome and scene which means the dome will be set for a bright sunny day and will probably wash out any light from the lights. Try setting the Environment Intensity to 0.2 which can be found under Render Settings.
I wonder of you have put up the lumens high enough, they need to be pretty high.
Can you show a screen shot of the lights settings also a screen shot of your viewport with the lights positions before rendering.
The slot FishTales is talking about is irrelevant if you have the mode set to Scene Only but it this one
I think maybe the lumens were the main problem. I drove them up to 30000 to 50000 and it's looking better. I deleted my original lights and went back in with three that seemed closer and more balanced. It's still a work in progress.
I am going through a similar issue. You might want to check my thread out:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/298056/indoor-lighting-difficulties#latest
Particularly the point about making this adjustment:
Go to Render Settings> Tone Mapping and check the setting. It's probably at the default of 13.0 which is the value for a cloudy bright day. Indoor scenes need a lower value, probably around 6.0 - 8.0. If you have Iray preview switched on and change the Tone Mapping value, you should see the scene brighten up, and you can tweak it from there.
As with my rendering it lightened things up considerably, but it might make the crown on your character VERY bright. As it was with me, it made the candle lights on my Christmas tree, in the rendering, very bright. I just had to balance that with other lights I put in the room to get the results I wanted.
Hope that helps.
Geo
You may want to try even higher... I generally start at 100,000 for the main lights and tweak up or down from there when using spotlights in Iray.
I don't know if anyone mentioned this, but lights don't work in sun/sky mode, ghost lights work, I believe, but spotlights won't work in that mode. I'm not sure about distant lights because I never put those in a scene.
Other than that, I usually start my keylight lumens at one million always and see what that looks like, then I scale that down to where the key looks right (it usually ends up around 500K but it's better to start big and scale down). And then the other lights, depending on what they do, I start them off between 250000 and 500000 and then scale down appropriately.