Dark scene; stays dark

May Dawney

Since this was still a test (LOL!), I've killed the render. It's better! Not perfect, but it can be worked with. 
The angle is slightly off, so I'll run it again, just to be sure.This time with a preview window. I'll check that CPU thing. 

BeeMKay

Looks good!

The render will revert back to CPU mode when your scene doesn't fit into the VRAM. That can happen if you have a lot of large textures, or lots of normal maps, or high level of subdivision. I usually use this to reduce scene sizes: https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer

(by the way, also a good investment when you do more posing is  https://www.daz3d.com/ultimate-pose-mixer)

May Dawney

BeeMKay said:

Looks good!

The render will revert back to CPU mode when your scene doesn't fit into the VRAM. That can happen if you have a lot of large textures, or lots of normal maps, or high level of subdivision. I usually use this to reduce scene sizes: https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer

(by the way, also a good investment when you do more posing is  https://www.daz3d.com/ultimate-pose-mixer)

Saved and wishlisted! I really appreciate it, thank you! It's been rewndering fro ummmm, five hours now. It's ar 250 iterations and looks grainy af, so I'll leave it going until tonight at least. Fingers crossed this is the last render on this thing and I can get to work in photoshop! 

odastein

 

BeeMKay said:

Looks good!

The render will revert back to CPU mode when your scene doesn't fit into the VRAM. That can happen if you have a lot of large textures, or lots of normal maps, or high level of subdivision. I usually use this to reduce scene sizes: https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer

(by the way, also a good investment when you do more posing is  https://www.daz3d.com/ultimate-pose-mixer)

I had the scene optimizer in my wishlist, but had completely forgotten about it. And I didn't know about the pose mixer, which seems a very interesting tool, given that I spent a large part of my time adjusting poses. 

The OP has a lot of patience. I'd kill a render long before 13 hours. And anyway, given my limited talent, "grainy" is probably going to be the least of the flaws of my renders.

May Dawney

odastein said:

I had the scene optimizer in my wishlist, but had completely forgotten about it. And I didn't know about the pose mixer, which seems a very interesting tool, given that I spent a large part of my time adjusting poses. 

The OP has a lot of patience. I'd kill a render long before 13 hours. And anyway, given my limited talent, "grainy" is probably going to be the least of the flaws of my renders.

I ended up running the second render for eighteen hours, It made a huge difference and now it's actually something that cn be used! I still need to up my lighting game severely, but I'll get there. At least I can deliver my client with a book cover that'll work now ^_^

I'll show off the results as a token of my unending gratefulness! <3

onceyoufall

May Dawney said:

Dropping these to show what happens when I do add some lights, then going back to comments. 
Thank you!

This is very useful ! Thanks

 

I don't know why but I was using distance light which always worked then since last week it ceased to work, and rendering was kind of dark.

But with setting Exposure value lower it improved lighteining, thank you !!!

wjpblathwayt

chris-2599934 said:

OK, first thing, if you're looking to light your scene entirely with emissive surfaces and you want to see what you're doing while you're composing it, go to the Window menu and make sure "Preview Lights" is not selected. Preview lights don't take account of emissives, which can leave you looking at a black hole.

You need to give the surfaces high values in the Luminance parameter for them to light the whole scene - the default value of 1500 really doesn't cut it. I generally put my scene into iray mode, then increase luminance amounts by factors of 10 until it's too bright, then drop them down till they're right.

Interior scenes often need a bit of help though. One option is to add spotlights (increase the "Luminous Flux (Lumen)" parameter if you want to make them more powerful). Another is to use "ghost lights" to supply some fill-in lighting. There are a couple of Ghost Light Kit products in the store that make it easy to use them, but you can brew your own free ones too - see this thread: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/127056/ghost-lights-interior-lighting-tutorial

Finally, you can use tone mapping to make your camera more sensitive to low light. I tend to adjust the EV figure - lower numbers = greater sensitivity. Note, though, that Iray tends to render faster in lots of light - so you can get faster results by boosting the amount of light to unrealistic levels than by keeping it real and changing the exposure, even if the resulting pictures look much the same.

Thank you!!