Can't get any lights to work in Iray

digitalprowler

i'm generally just making renders of still images to use as a reference for painting in photoshop....but i cannot get any lights i add to my scene to render...the ONLY light that ever renders is the sun/sky or dome light...i used it for the first couple of images i made (working on a graphic novel) but for my "indoor" scenes i generally just make a few textured props for references i can paint into whatever i want in GIMP....

i've tried spotlights with all manner of configurations, into the millions and millions of lumens...even put one right up in my characters face like a "foot" away and set it at 1mil lumens and it will simply not render the light on the character at all...i've followed many tutorials on the subject and not a single one has worked...

my scene set up is a wall with a window in it and my character crawling through the window....if push comes to shove i'll just move the sun around and completely scrap the idea of ever having any other light source in my @#$@%@^ scenes lol....i'll post an image so someone might be able to tell me what is going on...i've tried for 4 days about 6hrs a day to get another light to work and i'm thoroughly @#^&'d at this point. 


 

Richard Haseltine

I would set Environment Mode to Scene only - if the set up is open enough then most domes will swamp any scene lights. You will almost certainly then need to adjust the Tone Mapping, since it iss et for a bright day outdoors by default.

digitalprowler

thx, i'll give it a go, but pretty sure i tried that, but will try again i may have just missed that combination in ernest

 

digitalprowler

HAH! i could kiss you square on the mouth....i used scene only and set my luminosity to 100k for one light and my backlight i set to 150k and it worked!!! could have sworn i had tried scene only, but it must of been before i learned about the jacked up luminous flux and changing from point to rectangle or disc

btw, it also reduced my render time by the thousanth degree haha....last time i tested a render i left and came back 2hrs later and it was still on trucking along...this one took me bout 2 min, it must have been going crazy trying to calculate light bounces off the surface of the moon and back ;) (distance jokes, sorry) lol....anyways, thanks for giving me the push to try again. below i will give you an example of how i'm using these renders....can't show my best one cause it's the cover of my book :) 

hmm, it didn't post the image? /scratches head lemme try again.