Animate NVIDIA Iray Environment Dome Rotation

rubenkotkamp

Hey All,

Quick question: Is it possible to automate the Dome Rotation button in the Environment section of Iray over time (frames)?

Hope someone can help!

Snuggins

I don't know of a way, it would be nice though. I originally had an idea here about a spherical mesh but then realized it wouldn't work unless you broke it into pieces and calculated the average color of the dome image for each piece, and on and on it soon became way too crazy! And if the script api has something, it won't be much help beyond doing it manually (render frame, rotate, render frame, etc). So the simple answer is no unless someone has a less involved solution.

Wait-- what about a rotating reflective surface that reflects rays from the dome onto the part of the scene where you need the dome lighting to change? But you'd need to be ok with the baseline unchanging dome lighting in addition to it.

rubenkotkamp

Thanks! The problem with the with the sphere is that I also need it to be without a background.

I fixed it by just rotation everything else around its axis!

Snuggins

omg brilliant and of course! I feel silly but glad you thought of it!

JonnyRay

I was going to suggest that since render settings (which is where the HDRI environment is defined) can't be animated, one idea would be to create a Null object located at (0,0,0) and parent everything in your scene to that, then rotate the Null as needed during your animation.

Richard Haseltine

There's the IBL Master product, I'm not sure if it supports animation but you could go back to the sample script from which it was dveloped and roll your own http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/scripting/api_reference/samples/start#post-load_callbacks

tomasball

What I would like to do is put a figure in a HDRI environment, with "draw ground" turned on, and have the camera fly around the figure in a circle.  I can't find a way for the figure to keep its relationship with the ground when I do that.  

WendyLuvsCatz

you all realise in all render engines including games a camera never actually moves, the 3D meshes do.

or rather the vertex points are recalculated 

I saw a video on YouTube on the topic once 

I am still puzzled why after all this time DAZ hasn't added animated textures to DAZ studio when just about every other software does them, yes know there are some third party scripts but none that can be used on the environment dome,

as a user of software that can do it I can assure you physically based image lighting does not actually take much longer to calculate animated than static either per frame, also a pity the free Octane plugin is also limited by DAZ studio's API.

Richard Haseltine

WendyLuvsCatz said:

you all realise in all render engines including games a camera never actually moves, the 3D meshes do.

or rather the vertex points are recalculated 

I saw a video on YouTube on the topic once 

I am still puzzled why after all this time DAZ hasn't added animated textures to DAZ studio when just about every other software does them, yes know there are some third party scripts but none that can be used on the environment dome,

as a user of software that can do it I can assure you physically based image lighting does not actually take much longer to calculate animated than static either per frame, also a pity the free Octane plugin is also limited by DAZ studio's API.

I've not tested, but I would think the psot-load proxy technique would work on environment settings.

What do you mean about the DS API and Octane?

WendyLuvsCatz

Richard Haseltine said:

WendyLuvsCatz said:

you all realise in all render engines including games a camera never actually moves, the 3D meshes do.

or rather the vertex points are recalculated 

I saw a video on YouTube on the topic once 

I am still puzzled why after all this time DAZ hasn't added animated textures to DAZ studio when just about every other software does them, yes know there are some third party scripts but none that can be used on the environment dome,

as a user of software that can do it I can assure you physically based image lighting does not actually take much longer to calculate animated than static either per frame, also a pity the free Octane plugin is also limited by DAZ studio's API.

I've not tested, but I would think the psot-load proxy technique would work on environment settings.

What do you mean about the DS API and Octane?

well Octane render natively supports animated textures even the standalone but the DAZ studio plugin, at least the free tier does not

I doubt very much it would have been a fuction that was actively removed in fact they added the spherical camera lens after DAZ added that to DAZ studio so one can only assume (as I have to admit I am) it cannot be implemented due to software limitations.

WendyLuvsCatz

it gets stranger that Carrara (which like Poser, iClone, Blender, Unreal engine... the list goes on) always has supported animated textures actually had a lot of functionality added to it by DAZ when they still developed it including stuff they still have not added to DAZ studio such as improved FBX import and a 64bit Mimic plugin which makes me wonder if there are licensing limitations involved like there was with that.

I am totally ignorant of coding I just reap the benefits of the work of others who do this stuff and the fact people like MJCasual can suggests it is doable but for some reason not being done.

Richard Haseltine

The Octane plug-in should be able to take advantage of the links established through something like the post-load proxy scripts, theya re not doing anything terribly arcane (as far as I know - it's just an ERC link), but it may be that the code hasn't implemented any kind of ERC parsing if it was just getting the current shape without worrying about how that shape was generated.