How to fuse properly the layers of an image?

odastein

So, my last picture was too "heavy" for my computer to render it (mostly the figures and their clothes). So, I rendered separately three layers. The problem is with the characters rendered without the ground : the lack of shadow and reflection shows : they look glued on the picture, not part of it. Of course, I can't render them all with the ground, since then the ground hides the characters situated behind when I combine the layers.

I'm not sure how I can solve this issue. I assume it's a common problem, so is there a known way to handle it?

LosingSignal

I'm not sure I'm picturing your scene right, but this should work.  Under the Render Settings tab, go to Environment, then check to see if the Draw Ground button is set to on.  Ground Shadow Intensity should be at 1.0 automatically.  Rendering a figure should then generate a shadow, even if there's nothing else in the image.  Example:

Then putting them together in gimp with a blue background for fake sky results in

Depending on the ground and the lighting, though, the shadow just might not be visible.  Dark earth, concrete, metal... anything that's the same shade as the shadow will make spotting it difficult, even if its rendered all in one go.

odastein

I verified that Draw ground was set to "on" and ground shadow intensity at 1. But when I render the image, I just have the grey "transparent" background, and no shadow. That's what I always see when I render an image without a background. For instance here's what one of my figures looks like (hastily dressed to follow the forum's rules) : in fact, the transparent background is grey when I render, white when I save it to a folder, and black in this forum for some reason but in any case, there's nothing more than this transparent background, and in particular no shadow.

odastein

OK, so I was mistaken. Even though the shadow doesn't appear during the render or when I open the file normally, it does when I open it in a 3d software. The reason why I didn't notice it previously was that the "ground" where my figures are staying is significantly higher that the "real" ground, so the shadow was below my frame (first image). I guess that in theory I could lower "my" ground to the level of the real ground, but "my" ground being dark and metallic, I'm not sure it would actually appear. In fact I'm not sure if the "shadows" appearing on my ground are actually shadows, or a blurred and dark reflection (maybe both, second image).

In any case, I solved the problem by doing renders with and without the ground, and cutting ands assembling them so that the part of the ground where the shadow is is kept while the rest of the ground that would hide props and other figures isn't. It's not perfect because there's a difference of lighting of the figures' skin between the "with ground" and "without ground" renders and also a difference in the tone of the ground itself between the first first layer with the complete ground and the bits of ground from the other layers, so one can notice where I made the cuts and paste. Still, it's not as noticeable as the absence of shadow/reflection, and it's not like my image is otherwise perfect anyway. 

Thanks for the answer, I learned something.

LosingSignal

If you're willing to do the renders again, you could save the entire scene for safety, then delete everything but the characters.  With nothing else in the scene, Iray seems to treat the ground as being maybe half an inch under the lowest character's feet, or legs in your case.  Though I suppose if you have multiple characters at multiple heights, that won't work, unless you render each character individually.  Either way, now I learned something about Iray too. 

odastein

 

 

LosingSignal said:

If you're willing to do the renders again, you could save the entire scene for safety, then delete everything but the characters.  With nothing else in the scene, Iray seems to treat the ground as being maybe half an inch under the lowest character's feet, or legs in your case.  Though I suppose if you have multiple characters at multiple heights, that won't work, unless you render each character individually.  Either way, now I learned something about Iray too. 

In fact all figures are at the same level, so in theory it would be doable, but again Im not sure if what I see on the floor is actually a shadow and if the actual shadow would be visible on it. More importantly, I've done these renders I don't know how many times, and I had other problems with the picture before the shadow issue, so I'm totally fed up with this image. It's the one I spent the most time on since I began playing with Daz 3D, and I definitely didn't expect nor intend to spend that much time on it, at the contrary. On top of it I'm not even happy with the result. So, I'm going to move on. As I said, at least, I learned some things.

I'm wondering what you learned, by the way.

LenioTG

When you set draw ground, it means that you'll have shadows on the ground! Those shadows depend from the environment, particularly from the hour and the sun position.

Just press CTRL+D and the selected character will be at the ground level! They usually spawn them a little bit higher because they'll wear some shoes. It doesn't work with heels!

I have the same problem with the shadows too, maybe we could play around with the "show in render" settings...maybe there's a way to not render the character, but just its shadow