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marble, if you haven't yet, try light through the window and change the camera position that will work with the updated lighting angle. To my eye, it looks like a ton of light flooding in from the wall (or lack of wall) opposite the window compared to light from the window.
Exactly right. I have an Area Light to the front to light their faces. I have a quite bright spotlight coming from the direction of the window but it only lights the edges (rim?), leaving their faces dark.
This is the difference I'm finding between 3Delight and Luxrender. Light doesn't seem to reach places that are not facing the lights (there isn't much bounce back). It is also difficult to place cameras and lights in a closed room so I always have missing walls for lighting.
You can fake bounce with lights at lower level, the right color etc. You can place them behind walls, under the floor, etc.
That's one of those differences that save render time. The bounce will show in GI without faking it, but will take longer. Faking it saves render time, but not setup time.
I saw that in a tutorial but don't understand how to make light shine through walls/floors.
I saw that in a tutorial but don't understand how to make light shine through walls/floors.turn OFF shadows
Szark beat me! :) And some more things to try in this thread http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/17557/#258258
In the light settings? Ok - I'll try that, thanks.
Yes if there are normal lights from the create menu then yes the shadow off switch is in the Parameters Pane with the light selected. If the light are Area Lights then the shadow control is in the Surfaces Pane.
No need to fake bounce light
You just have to use An uberenvironment light in bounce mode
Example here I made a cube with a hole and just added an UE light with OM KHPark then switched to bounce light and adjusted trace distance
The scene inside the Box is getting all the bounce light.
The tools are inside DS. Use them
The tools may be there but sometimes we only discover them when we ask questions. Isn't that what a forum is for?
Thank you for this information which is also new to me.
The tools may be there but sometimes we only discover them when we ask questions. Isn't that what a forum is for?
I know. Omnifreaker's Lights and Shaders are not the most documented but that usually involves a lot more that just DS
Ok - it has taken a while but I'm starting to get a feel for this now.
I don't think of myself as an artist - it is just a hobby to me - but what we learn from attempting art is the fact that we can be creative without being realistic. So I have to stop and ask myself, what am I trying to achieve?
I'm making mini picture-book stories. Does it matter if they are a little cartoonish? Do they need have photographic realism? The answer is probably no. Artists have been telling stories via cartoons for centuries.
Luxrender and Octane produce photo-like images. The light behaves somewhat close to the way natural light behaves. Photographers are comfortable with Luxrender. But 3Delight seems to offer some things that Luxrender doesn't. I can turn off shadows or adjust fall-off and softness. I can shine lights through walls. So I'm thinking that, from and artistic point of view, why attempt to turn 3Delight into a physically realistic rendering tool when it has possibilities to tell the story in a slightly different way? If I want the picture to look like a photo - I can use Reality or Luxus. If I want a more stylised look, I can do some great things with the tools available already in DAZ Studio.
I've been playing with this software for years but only now am I starting to understand the creative options.
If you have the ability, instead of turning off shadows, use light linking, which is basically including or excluding objects from your lights.
You can only do that in Daz Studio via AOA Advanced lights or if you make them yourself in the Shader Mixer. ;)
I can agree fully and also disagree with this statement. Some tools are better suited for certain tasks than others for sure. Yes, indeed in 2015 we do have Lux and Octane to render scenes with mathematically accurate lighting models, making the task easier. But before the advent of these software's mainstream adoption people who wanted photo-real were stuck trying to derive those results from the more artistically inclined tools like those in 3Delight. The mark of a professional was an individual who understood lighting behavior well enough to fake the necessary elements in packages such as 3delight. Powerful skill. Even for the die hard Octane user, he/she would be wise not to forget the many lessons learned during the "build you own light rig" days.
What we need to remember is that for most people, the software they use is their go to software for everything they produce. Most 3Delight users who want cartoon style renders want 3Delight to have the ability to deliver them, and the same goes for those seeking photorealism, they want 3Delight to deliver that too. That is why we end up in these types of discussions, helping people get the realism out of the tools they have (since those are usually the only tools a person can afford)
In most cases it just comes down to time. For me, learning how to apply materials in an unbiased render engine is many times simpler than in a biased renderer like Bryce or Carrara. So my workflow is now much faster. I also render Octane on two Titan Blacks so I can produce renders in minutes compared to hours on even the fastest cpu renderer I can find. For my personal experience, unbiased rendering in Octane simply is much faster and better quality. Better, Faster, Cheaper....that is the American Way!
It's true however. no amount of clever hacks from clever users can bridge the gap between biased and unbiased rendering, unbiased will win the realism challenge every single time, but for the average viewer, a plausible image is as satisfying as an accurate one. It's only us nerd types that care this much at all.
All this to say, I think this thread is fantastic, it reminds us that the artists sometimes has to do some actual work. With applications like Octane, all the difficult stuff is done for the artist, and it might give an artist the impression that they are more knowledgeable than they really are. I figure, if you're really a master then you should be able to pull it off reasonably with applications like 3Delight.
It's all good. Homework continues.
you could till 4.6
4.7 killed it
Only an American would consider Octane on two Titan Blacks "Cheaper". ;)
When I was growing up, I was interested in fine art. I studied paintings of the Old Masters and my absolute favourite was Vermeer. His art was so life-like and realistic. In later years, my preference changed and became - as it is now - a preference for impressionist art. I love how I can look at heavily daubed blobs of paint and see an image that feels lifelike.
Another example: I can't imagine a movie like Spirited Away played by real actors in live action. Part of the enjoyment of that movie is the sheer artistic brilliance of the animators.
Perhaps this is a diversion from the topic but I think it gets to the point about what tool to use and what we want to get from it. As I said earlier, I'm not an artist. I don't keep many of my pictures: once I produce something better than the previous effort, I delete the older work. It is a hobby and it is often more than I can afford, but there is always some satisfaction in creating something.
In the light settings? Ok - I'll try that, thanks.
In the scene you posted, you don't need to put any lights outside the room to make things look 3D. The attached render, using the same room prop, was done in Carrara (ray tracing and GI enabled), but the same "3D-ness" could be achieved in DS with the proper lighting and shaders. The HDRI that you can see in the window provides only a slight bit of fill light. The rest of the lighting in the scene comes from 2 low intensity spot lights, the overhead light prop in the room turned into a mesh light, and two of the floor lamp props turned into mesh lights.
Now I do like that :) Nice skin tone, nice atmospheric light. Please remind me what GI is.
Did this one take long to render with all those lights?
you could till 4.6
4.7 killed it
I'm not sure what you mean - here the cone has Diffuse 99%, the sphere has Ambient 1%. There are two AoA Advanced spotlights - the blue light is set to not illuminate items with diffuse = 99 and is indeed lighting only the sphere and the plane, the red is set to illuminate only surfaces with ambient = 1% and is indeed illuminating only the sphere.
There are other considerations as well.
Since you're using Octane, I'm limiting this post to GPU renderers. GPU renderers are fast, until you hit the limit of available memory of your graphics card. You can somewhat alleviate this limit by using geometry instancing or using lower resolution textures where its less noticeable, but even then there's still a hardware limit. Try to run a crowd simulation (MiArmy) with the models using different clothes and individual textures and you will bump into those limits.
Out of all the GPU renderers available on the market, the only one that provides a real,workable solution is Redshift, with its out of core rendering. It also happens to be a biased GPU renderer, so it's much, much faster than Octane. It doesn't suffer performance problems with the GeForce 680 like Octane when the series came out. Otoy promises out-of-core rendering as a future feature, so it's not yet implemented in stable builds,
Another limit to consider is power usage. For the same amount of power used to run two Titan Blacks, A single Titan Black (just the graphics card) based on power usage measurements, consumes up to 260 watts. Two Titan Blacks may very well consume up to 500 watts alone. Add something like 50 watts to that number for the rest of the system.
For comparison, the Xeon E5-2650 consumes up to 65 watts. Each node shouldn't consume more than 150 watts. I could use a few two-socket Xeon E5-2650L nodes and still come under two Titan Blacks power consumption number. I think four will give me comparable numbers
Yet another limit is heat produced. Graphics cards by design are self contained units meaning they come with their own cooling and the cooling system is generally made to exhaust air out of the case. All well and good until you need to use them in a room where ambient temperature is above 30 degrees Celsius. You can use liquid cooling, but that means additional issues and complexities.
With a 65 watt processor, there's less heat produced and you can getaway with a 1U heat sink. If you have the space, you can use larger heat sinks with larger, more silent fans with noise levels south of 30 dB. Much more thermal headroom too if you use them in a hot environment. Measurements show one Titan Black with reference cooling is about 37 dB.
Looking at the price, the Xeon E5-2650L is actually cheaper. Of course, you will need to set aside additional funds for other components and software. The software is the thing that irks me most, but that generally depends on your choice of operating system and/or renderer.
Comparing the performance between the two is hard. NVIDIA's OpenCL performance with Luxrender is so poor with card before the 900 series, it's spotty at best to use Luxrender to judge performance. Thankfully, there's Thea Presto, and they have some official results here: http://theapresto.com/benchmark.html
Green is GPU scores, blue is CPU scores. The closest thing to the E5-2650L is probably the E5-2630 v2. Seems like it's no slouch either. Put two of them together, the pair will definitely beat a single Titan Black.
I'm not sure what you mean - here the cone has Diffuse 99%, the sphere has Ambient 1%. There are two AoA Advanced spotlights - the blue light is set to not illuminate items with diffuse = 99 and is indeed lighting only the sphere and the plane, the red is set to illuminate only surfaces with ambient = 1% and is indeed illuminating only the sphere.
Perhaps I'm reading this wrong but I thought the original point was that de-selecting objects per light was possible in DS without the need for the special A0A Advanced lights but since 4.7 it is now only possible using the AoA Advanced lights?
I believe selecting which surfaces gets lit based on the surface properties (diffuse and ambient strength values in Richard's example) is only available with AoA's Advanced Lights.
You can't omit surfaces or whole objects from being lit with other lights. What you can do is have them not cast shadows. Either turn off 'Cast Shadows' in the object's properties or the surface shader properties (with UberSurface and UberSurface2).
I believe selecting which surfaces gets lit based on the surface properties (diffuse and ambient strength values in Richard's example) is only available with AoA's Advanced Lights.
You can't omit surfaces or whole objects from being lit with other lights. What you can do is have them not cast shadows. Either turn off 'Cast Shadows' in the object's properties or the surface shader properties (with UberSurface and UberSurface2).
I guess Carrara spoiled me. I can't imagine setting up a scene without the ability to include or exclude objects from certain lights. It's a great way to provide some subtle effects, such as separating subjects from the background, add ing mood, etc.
This one uses a spotlight restricted to the V4 model, the clothing models and the hair to provide a highlight that the sunlight wasn't providing. It also separated the figure from the busy background and draws the eye to figure, which helps to define the scale of the scene.
Now I do like that :) Nice skin tone, nice atmospheric light. Please remind me what GI is.
Did this one take long to render with all those lights?
Thanks, GI is Global Illumination, the same as indirect lighting in DS (bounced light). That render took about 4 hours as I recall. The big windows were speed killers with glass shaders (both transparency and reflection). Without the windows, it would have been about a 30 minute render.
An optimized indirect light render with DS 4.7 and 3delight. Render time: 3 minutes 22.12 seconds