Small Lighting Issue Help

HellishAbaddon

So I;m not entirely a new user , but with iray I definitley feel like one lol

Basically havent touched DazStudio in about 5 years. Loaded up my old runtimes and some new content and played around a little bu my test renders are having a very weird pixelated effect and I'm not sure hot to fix it.

You can see in the pic what I mean.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

SpottedKitty

Was that scene originally 3Delight or Iray? It looks like it needs to cook for a little bit longer. Did you let it run to one of the default stop conditions (2 hours, 2000 iterations, or 95% convergence) or stop it manually?

Sevrin

The lighting is a bit dim, but the bigger problem is that nothing in the image is in focus.

You might want to check out Sicklyield's channel for some Iray basics.

HellishAbaddon

Sevrin said:

The lighting is a bit dim, but the bigger problem is that nothing in the image is in focus.

You might want to check out Sicklyield's channel for some Iray basics.

Nothing was in focus because it was a crop from a bigger image to focus on my problem area. Here's a link to the "final" version which still has the same issue. https://www.deviantart.com/hellish-abaddon/art/Carefully-848650828

HellishAbaddon

SpottedKitty said:

Was that scene originally 3Delight or Iray? It looks like it needs to cook for a little bit longer. Did you let it run to one of the default stop conditions (2 hours, 2000 iterations, or 95% convergence) or stop it manually?

I stopped it manually. I'll admit, I'm learning about iray as I go and usually without any tutorials which had been my way of doing things lol The assets in the scene were originally 3delight but I added the iray shaders to everything. The most it ran was to about 38min but it completed the render so I'm not sure how I could get it to run for 2 hours.

Fishtales

Looks as if the camera you are rendering through has DOF set. The female is sharp and the background is out of focus. Open the Cameras Tab and select the camera and see if Depth of Field is set to on.

SpottedKitty

HellishAbaddon said:

SpottedKitty said:

Was that scene originally 3Delight or Iray? It looks like it needs to cook for a little bit longer. Did you let it run to one of the default stop conditions (2 hours, 2000 iterations, or 95% convergence) or stop it manually?

I stopped it manually. I'll admit, I'm learning about iray as I go and usually without any tutorials which had been my way of doing things lol The assets in the scene were originally 3delight but I added the iray shaders to everything.

Note that only adding the Iray shader is exactly the same as letting the Iray renderer do its autoconversion of 3Delight materials. You need to understand what the differences are between the two renderers, then adjust the converted Iray materials. One common outcome of autoconversion is things coming out too flat or too glossy, with miniscule bump and no displacement. Most of these glitches can be fixed manually.

One gotcha I'm sure you're thinking of (I did at first) is adjusting the original 3Delight materials then let the autoconvert have its way. Doesn't work like that — adjustments made while the materials are still 3Delight don't translate reliably into adjustments of converted materials.

HellishAbaddon said:

The most it ran was to about 38min but it completed the render so I'm not sure how I could get it to run for 2 hours.

The three stop conditions I mentioned work on a first-one-gets-it basis. If the render stopped itself after less than 38 minutes, it must have tripped one of the others, number of iterations or convergence %. Look at Render Settings>Progressive Rendering to confirm you are actually running with the defaults for Max Samples, Max Time (in seconds), and Rendering Converged Ratio.

Note also that these default values, especially the ones for Render Quality and Converged Ratio, are supposed to be for quick test renders. When I'm doing a final render, I usually bump these values up to 4 and 99.5%. Quality should never be too high, and Converged can approach, but must not reach, 100%.

HellishAbaddon

SpottedKitty said:

HellishAbaddon said:

SpottedKitty said:

Was that scene originally 3Delight or Iray? It looks like it needs to cook for a little bit longer. Did you let it run to one of the default stop conditions (2 hours, 2000 iterations, or 95% convergence) or stop it manually?

I stopped it manually. I'll admit, I'm learning about iray as I go and usually without any tutorials which had been my way of doing things lol The assets in the scene were originally 3delight but I added the iray shaders to everything.

Note that only adding the Iray shader is exactly the same as letting the Iray renderer do its autoconversion of 3Delight materials. You need to understand what the differences are between the two renderers, then adjust the converted Iray materials. One common outcome of autoconversion is things coming out too flat or too glossy, with miniscule bump and no displacement. Most of these glitches can be fixed manually.

One gotcha I'm sure you're thinking of (I did at first) is adjusting the original 3Delight materials then let the autoconvert have its way. Doesn't work like that — adjustments made while the materials are still 3Delight don't translate reliably into adjustments of converted materials.

HellishAbaddon said:

The most it ran was to about 38min but it completed the render so I'm not sure how I could get it to run for 2 hours.

The three stop conditions I mentioned work on a first-one-gets-it basis. If the render stopped itself after less than 38 minutes, it must have tripped one of the others, number of iterations or convergence %. Look at Render Settings>Progressive Rendering to confirm you are actually running with the defaults for Max Samples, Max Time (in seconds), and Rendering Converged Ratio.

Note also that these default values, especially the ones for Render Quality and Converged Ratio, are supposed to be for quick test renders. When I'm doing a final render, I usually bump these values up to 4 and 99.5%. Quality should never be too high, and Converged can approach, but must not reach, 100%.

Thanks for the tips. They really helped. I found that taking max samples down for test rendering speeds it up quite a bit. I've been doing some lighting tests which have been going good so far and this render was done with your suggestions for a "final" render. The results are pretty good. I used to be pretty good with 3delight but iray is way more different than I thought it would be. I'm having fun though. Thanks again for the help and if you see anything in the render that could use work or I'm doing wrong then please share.

HellishAbaddon

I should also note that for the render above. I used the environment and 3 point lighting. The 3 points were spheres with the "emission" shader. Spotlights and regular lighting tricks from 3delight don't seem to work in iray? There's probably a better way to do this right?

SpottedKitty

HellishAbaddon said:

I should also note that for the render above. I used the environment and 3 point lighting. The 3 points were spheres with the "emission" shader. Spotlights and regular lighting tricks from 3delight don't seem to work in iray? There's probably a better way to do this right?

All three standard lights (Spot, Point and Distant) work in Iray; they should switch automatically between 3Delight and Iray mode when you change the render engine. Check the lights settings in your scene to make sure they all have the Photometric Mode switch set to On.

Although... one thing that can trip up Iray newcomers is that Iray-mode lights load quite faint, and they don't use the Intensity setting; instead, you need to use Luminous Flux. And don't be surprised if you need a ridiculously huge number in there, one lumen (the default light unit in Iray) isn't a very large amount of light. Your "doesn't seem to work" might be just because the lights are too faint.

Note there's also a small gotcha when you use objects as emitting mesh lights; every polygon of each emitting surface acts as a separate light, so if your spheres have lots of segments, you can end up with what is effectively hundreds of lights in your scene. This will slow down the render drastically.

Edit: just remembered — were you using Uber lights or AoA Advanced lights in your 3Delight renders? They don't work in Iray, you'd have to replace them with standard lights.