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Great to see you up and running with your new system Ron! You won't have any time to get a coffee anymore between renders ;)
Now I'm mystified. The Casino environment is an iRay scene. Maybe I did something wrong?!
The environment itself might be 3Delight only or when you built it initially you might have chosen the 3Delight materials. But that looks very much like a scene converted over using the ubershader. It is an older scene you created when you were doing everything in 3Delight right? If so just go through and apply the iRay materials to everything and render again.
No, the Casino environment is iRay materials. I loaded directly from the set... no conversion.
It's probably just the lighting. Iray handles light very differently from 3DL, so experiment with brightening the scene up a bit, and placing lights more strategically.
Have fun dodging the 'gators. (Every new wave of technology rolls in with aligators swiming in the surf.)
I just assumed the scene came with lights already loaded.
iRay lighting takes a lot of practice to get a feel for. Make sure you have the camera headlamp turned off for starters.
I just load a scene, add my character and render. There are actually several different versions of the scene that you can load. I just loaded the promo scene, and it's taking awhile to render. I think this will show the true potential of the scene. It's much better than my own render. I'll post it here later.
For now I'll take a nap. I've had a rough day running aroud, getting my flu shot, and getting my latest delivery from Amazon.
Before you get into complicated lighting (which is a pain at first, but then gets fun!) just try rotating the default HDRI to get different effects. In indoor scenes it could get blocked so you may want to hide the ceiling and walls. Also it’s simple to create a spotlight then look through the spotlight to make sure it’s focused where you want and you can add a simple rim light doing the same thing and have it focus on the side/back of the subject. There’s tons of more complicated lighting, but that’s a good start. And then you can start playing with tone mapping. And you can, of course, make the lights brighter and have different temperatures. I never really used 3DL and got frustrated that you couldn’t see lighting live as you change it so iRay is actually much easier! I’ve been using DS & iRay for four years now and still discovering new lighting tricks and discovering lighting can really make or break a scene!
Here is a render of the Promo Scene. This is clearly better,, out of the box, than my previous render. I reduced the size for the forum post. It makes a big difference if I start with the right version.
If you load the content into an empty scene, rather than opening one of the sample scenes, then you will get the default render setting - which include tone mapping set for a bright day outdoors. I think the first render would have been much improved by something like upping the ISO value in Render settings (unlike a real camera it doesn't matter which exposure cotnrol you adjust as there are no trade-offs)
That is obviously an iRay render. The shadows and the reflections just scream PBR.
I have much to learn. Some of my work will be much simpler. Many of my Marlin Fingle characters were created from Genesis characters. They use 3delight textures. In this image, Marlin is my creation. The short order cook is a Michael 5 character "out of the box." Bitti Botti was created by me
3Delight materials using the standard shaders should convert to Iray automatically. Glass and metals may need tweaking for best results but most things should be at least tolerable. Items that use true custom shaders (literal RSL code or Shader Mixer) will need to be redone.
As Kenshaw said, always check the Camera Auto Headlamp set to 'Never'
One good rule with Iray lighting is don't be afraid to add lights - The more lights in the scene, the faster it goes. Unintuitive, but true.
When I'm doing promos, I spend half my time in the Viewport menu going from light to light to check they're correct - always in Iray preview mode. And yes, it does get to be fun once you get the hang of it. Try spotlights with different geometry - Disc, Rectangle, etc, and vary the size. The larger the Height/Width, the softer the shadows will be.
DS is actually good at auto conversion of materials. Load anything with 3DL materials, and DS will render it pretty well in Iray. Although as Richard said, glass & metallic materials need tweaking.
Happy rendering!
Maclean, it's always great to hear from you. Have a wonderful day!
I'm not an expert like some here but I'll add my advice FWIW. I often get away with an HDRi and a single spotlight in IRay. This is difficult to manage when your scene is indoors but there are useful things called IRay Section Planes which, carefully placed, can let the light in. Render times can vary wildly in IRay - often just because of an area of the scene that is difficult to light or some surfaces having far too much reflectivity causing white spots and long render times. So I often spend some time toning down the gloss settings. I also use a lot of IRay shaders instead of the supplied textures - especially on flat surfaces like walls and funiture. I've lost count of the times when I've had a scene take over an hour to render and then, after changing the lighting and surfaces, getting the render time down to a few minutes.
Having said all that, there are clearly things I can still learn about IRay but I'm also experimenting with Blender to try to get render times down even more. I still have a GTX 1070 and 8GB VRAM is my biggest limiting factor so I'm trying to be patient in the hope that a 16GB 3070 will appear in time for Christmas, then I can also hope for some Christmas gifting from my family to help towards the cost. :)
By the way, the photometric spotlights provided in DAZ Studio need changing to work with IRay. I usually change the settings like so:
I almost never use any lights at all in outdoor scenes but HDRI's. HDRIHaven.com is your friend.
Indoors I spent the time, after buying a set of lights that didn't quite do what I wanted, to create a set of emissive primitives that function as soft boxes and other sorts of photographer's lights.
The thing to understand is that iRay is very much about simulating, almost, how light really works so the closer you get to lighting a scene how a photographer or filmmaker would the better you'll do.
I agree, but its not always that simple, especially for those who aren't familiar enough with this kind of stuff to know how to do it properly without breaking or negatively affecting other software on the system. The hardware can be even more troublesome since components such as the motherboard & power supplies are proprietary and cost 30-50% more to replace if they go bad and are not under warranty. Try to hook up the exact same power supply(with the only exception that its a non-Dell) to a Dell laptop and the thing only runs at like half the wattage(cpu underclocks, etc.) and won't charge the battery. Sometimes I wish people would stop buying desktops/laptops for at home from these companies so they either wise up or stick to just building systems for businesses. Part of the problem is these big corporations cut cost at every opportunity they can. One way is they add all this garbage to their systems that allows some very cheaply paid clueless "tech support" over in India or the Philippines to follow a step-by-step troubleshooting guide(hey, they can at least read, no?) with often times an equally clueless & irate customer. A great tragedy was when Dell took over Alienware and turned their systems into cookie-cutter Dells sporting the same bloatware: Bloatienware.
I agree 100%, although don't be surprised if somebody swoops in to disagree this subject just came up. Back around 2000 when friends wanted gaming rigs I'd just pick up a copy of Computer Shopper and find the AlienWare ad and show it to them. I could build a gaming rig but their prices were pretty close to what it would cost me and they used top tier components. Now they are just Dells in ugly cases.
This is my most ambitious picture so far. I bought the iRay addons for Moonshine's Diner. I used a Promo Image, and inserted Marlin into the scene. I placed a sky dome outside the diner in order to make the view out the windows more interesting. This image took 2 hours to render. I need to make some improvements later.
Skydomes don't really work in iRay. You could probably delete it and get the exact same render.
I think you should check the CPU usage and see if you're using the CPU or GPU to render. When I first got my laptop, I assumed it was using rhe GPU because it was so much faster than my old computer. But it turned out that was just the effect of going from an i5 to an i7.
That is quite the camera angle. Moving from Poser's Firefly renderer to Iray in Studio took me a few months to get to where I felt like I had any command of my lighting. And that's with 15 years of Poser under my belt. Once you get the hang of lighting with Iray you can do amazing things. I used to spend hours faking reflected light in Firefly among other things that IRay does by default. Glad you are enjoying your new computer and having fun with renders.
My hardest issue right now is cameras. I tend to think in very flat and linear terms with camera placement. I've been forcing myself to try more dramatic camera angles and it's not easy for me.
I checked. The image is rendered in iRay! I had the sky dome because I didn't like the way the windows looked without a background outside them. Unfortunately, I had some unwanted lights in the image. I took out the sky dome. I don't like the look of the windows without a "world" outside the building. This was another 2 hour render. I need to reorganize my computers so I will have a free computer to use while this one is rendering.
I don't think I want to make many 2 hour renders. It really cramps my style. Sorry, I forgot how to get the larger sized image to show here.... without getting a duplicate post.
If it took 2 hours and your computer was completely locked up then it was rendering on CPU not on the GPU.
I'm not sure why you're getting reflections with a skydome and none without. That seems very odd. But for best results you generally want to use HDRI's instead of skydomes for iRay.
The computer was not locked up. I just don't want to use the computer while doing a render. The log clearly states iRay rendering. Moonshine's Diner is a wonderful scene. However, there is no "background" outside the windows. When I did a render, the windows looked like there were a bunch of dots in the. However, the final render doesn't have that problem. The only purpose of the Sky Dome was to keep from having that pixelated empty window look. Now it's apparently not needed.
I usually add an outdoor scene out the windows using the enviro plane. A poor man's HRDI..
I'm not sure what is going on here. I did another render, and it took only 23 minutes. Yes, it is an iRay render!