Just bad lighting setup workflow

pauldempseyartist

I'm sure others have had these issues.  Setting up a scene, or even a single figure and getting it lit the way you want is a nightmare in this application.
If you use the iray renderer.. which is the only one on this app that makes what I'd call a reasonably good render as compared to lightwave, formz, modo or other apps I use, is very very frustrating.   The interactive renderer is absolutely zero help.  It doesn't give even close to a representation of the general light balances, brightness, etc.  Sometimes I make a small change to one light and the test render is completely blown.  Then any subsequent change to that light makes no change, I have to delete the light and start over.  I've gotten to the point where I write down the numercial placement xyz and rotational values of each light so I can quickly set one back up when this happens.   Even with a fairly robust computer (dual core 3.2gh cpu with an nvidia geforce gpu with 4 gb of ram, solid state hard drive etc) even small test renders (like 400x500px) take 10-15 mins to get any feedback from.

Certain UI issues abound.  The ISO/ Shutterspeed, focal length etc are CAMERA attributes, and each camera should have them.  Not the render UI.  It took me forever to figure that out.  This is one out of dozens of glaring examples of real confusing things about daz studio.   I usually use the renders I do as reference for art work I then hand paint analog (on paper / board etc) or bring into photoshop.  This means print res files are needed.   I can render a simple figure for DAYS and it never gets close to 100% rendered at 3000x4000px.  God forbid I'd ever need to render something for actual print output at sizes over 8x10.

I see that Daz now has a bridge to some of the higher end packages like 3DS and Maya.   What it really needs is a simple export to LightWave with texture and UV's intact.  I saw some scripts somewhere that do this, but they are no very intuative to use.  

Are their plans to improve or fix the interactive vs rendered lighting problems?  Or do I need to just accept an entire day to correctly light a figure as part of my workflow?

Richard Haseltine

pauldempseyartist said:

I'm sure others have had these issues.  Setting up a scene, or even a single figure and getting it lit the way you want is a nightmare in this application.
If you use the iray renderer.. which is the only one on this app that makes what I'd call a reasonably good render as compared to lightwave, formz, modo or other apps I use, is very very frustrating.   The interactive renderer is absolutely zero help.  It doesn't give even close to a representation of the general light balances, brightness, etc.  Sometimes I make a small change to one light and the test render is completely blown.  Then any subsequent change to that light makes no change, I have to delete the light and start over.  I've gotten to the point where I write down the numercial placement xyz and rotational values of each light so I can quickly set one back up when this happens.   Even with a fairly robust computer (dual core 3.2gh cpu with an nvidia geforce gpu with 4 gb of ram, solid state hard drive etc) even small test renders (like 400x500px) take 10-15 mins to get any feedback from.

Ypu may want to compare the Render Settings (cotrnol the render) and dDraw Settings (control the Iray preview, if that is what you are using) - if you are usign Texture Shaded then you really can't expect a match for lighting and the more advanced material settings used by recent content.

A 4GB geforce card, or unspeicifed model, is not - for Iray - at all hefty I'm afraid - especially if it's a pre-RTX model as Iray now passes extra code to such cards.

pauldempseyartist said:

Certain UI issues abound.  The ISO/ Shutterspeed, focal length etc are CAMERA attributes, and each camera should have them.  Not the render UI.  It took me forever to figure that out.  This is one out of dozens of glaring examples of real confusing things about daz studio.   I usually use the renders I do as reference for art work I then hand paint analog (on paper / board etc) or bring into photoshop.  This means print res files are needed.   I can render a simple figure for DAYS and it never gets close to 100% rendered at 3000x4000px.  God forbid I'd ever need to render something for actual print output at sizes over 8x10.

The camera settings control both exposure and optics. Since Iray allows them to be split they have, for user convenience. If that doesn't suit your workflow someone might be able to write a script that would sync them, so that adjusting exposure would also affect depth of field (or if you wanted ISO to affect noise you could always stop the render early).

pauldempseyartist said:

I see that Daz now has a bridge to some of the higher end packages like 3DS and Maya.   What it really needs is a simple export to LightWave with texture and UV's intact.  I saw some scripts somewhere that do this, but they are no very intuative to use. 

I fear Lightwave (and modo) have a more limited user-base. of course the bridges are open source so you could adpapt one of them for Lightwave, or hire someone else to do so.

pauldempseyartist said:

Are their plans to improve or fix the interactive vs rendered lighting problems?  Or do I need to just accept an entire day to correctly light a figure as part of my workflow?

As I said above, some at least of your issues may well be a matter of settimgs. According to the change log Daz is working on implementing Google's Filament - given your limited hardware that may offer a partial solution, it depends on how closely it can match Iray.

Sevrin

The camera-ish settings in Daz Studio are weird, but they follow their own internal logic.  It doesn't help that the F-Stop control in Iray Render Settings do one thing and the same control in Camera settings does something else.

Anyway, for an introduction, the lighting stuff in this playlist covers Iray lighting pretty well.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPcx_LSSGfZeCEvFO0spfYc3DzjpJyIzY

PS: I never use Interactive preview and consider it a waste of time.  It's either texture shaded or wireframe for object manipulation or photoreal for lighting previews.  While it's slower, especially on a relatively low-end video card, photoreal is more inaccurate.