Any good tutorials for CLS Lights freebies? {now more of an iray click-n-render thread}
WillowRaven
Posts: 3,787
I have a brain defect that makes my eyes cross when I try to follow PDF tutorials, lol. It actually happens anytime I try to read something in a textbook or instructional format. Don't even get me started on legal-eeze.
Also ... anyone familiar with me in the forums knows, I tend to be lazy and run screaming from learning certain techniques until I absolutely need to learn them for my work. I have to be choosy with my way-too-limited time. Knowing all of this, I went to YouTube to get some help learning the CLS lights freebies at rendo but a slew of videos about cars popped up. So I came here hoping some of you use these sets and would be willing to explain them to me in dummy/lazy-friendly terms or lead me to a good video tutorial for the set.
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It might help if you linked to the lights.
I have no idea what you mean since I am an iray-resistant artist and am using it under duress, lol. When I say I know NOTHING about iray lighting, I mean NOTHING.
I mean a link to the light set you are talking about so people don't have to waste their time searching for it.
https://www.renderosity.com/users/callad/freestuff?sort=newest§ions=530
I had installed the entire thing a while ago but didn't manage to achieve anything intertesting, so I uninstalled everything again. Would not mind some help as well.
Thankyou, I see that they are mesh lights. What is it you don't get about that set I use mesh lighting a lot. I'll download them and see how they work.
It's been a while, but the way I remember it, I didn't understand what made this set special.
Sure, I could load a mesh light or three and point them at my character... I can do that with any point-light, spot-light, or emissive primitive. What value does this entire set add? What makes this set better, or more convenient, or special?
I think I remember many colour options and shapes and they all kind of gave similar results.
To be clear, I'm not critisising this product in any way. It has been very generously provided for free and I'm sure it's fantastic. I'm saying that I didn't understand it.
It took me three years to sorta learn 3DL lighting, lol ... And I basically bought one-click light sets or environments that came with good light sets. And nothing about iray is even slightly familiar to me. My norm would be just to buy more one-click sets for iray, but I'm still not convinced I need to make the investment yet. I just need to figure out this one render that's forcing me to use iray.
As I recall, those lights originally came out fairly early in the DS Iray development cycle, as a paid product, so probably what made them special was that there just wasn't a lot out there at the time. I think they're an adaptation of some lights that Callad originally made for Reality/Lux.
What exactly are you trying to achieve with these lights? What type of scene? Indoor or outdoor? Lots of characters or none? High fantasy or modern or something between? It might be easier to help you get where you need to go if we knew where that was.
High fantasy outdoor battle scene ... And I do a lot of post in photoshop ... So just need the basics ... or lead to an easier, cheap, lol, pay-for set.
If the scene takes place in daylight, then assuming that you don't need special sky effects, all you would need would be either the sun-sky option in the Environment settings on the Render tab, which will put a sun in the sky and give you a cloudless blue sky, or possibly an HDRI set like Iray Skies 4 or the original Iray Skies (don't ask me what happened to 2 and 3) or the Skies of Economy series, which is very cheap if you're a Platinum Club member. (In general, I prefer HDRI because sun-sky deactivates other lights, which I find annoying -- but then, I seldom do outdoor scenes.)
Video tutorial for Sun/Sky by Jay Versluis, who did the tutorials in the Season Pass:
I don't even like iray, lol ... to me it's ugly. But that's an aesthetic issue. Having to learn something I don't see me using but MAYBE once or twice a year, if that, ruffles me. Even so, I don't even know how to do what you just described. That's how different the two render engines treat lights.
Thanks ... Now THAT'S actually helpful. :)
A question: what set/environment are you using that's forcing you to use Iray? Maybe there's some trick to working with that in particular that people might know. (I assume it's the set; otherwise, what are you using that's forcing Iray on you?)
This playlist includes the above-linked video, and can give you more information about lighting in Iray in general. It'll probably take about an hour and a half total to get through, I think, but it contains six different videos, so you can probably just do each one as you need it.
It's actually a set of armor that's been the bane of my existence ... No matter what I did or what shader or shader presets I used, it crashed daz when I render in any engine but iray. There have been complaints in the forums about the armor, but not sure if anyone made the connection I did that it's VERY iray specific.
https://www.daz3d.com/orleans-armor-for-genesis-8-males
You can remove all the iray aspects from it. The RSSY scripts can help you. I got one of the first one's out and it came with both a conversion for textures and for lights. Reduces the load on your machine and reduces render times.
https://www.daz3d.com/rssy-iray-to-3delight-converter-and-merchant-resource
I actually have that armor -- no idea why, since I rarely do that sort of render, but there you go -- so I tried to convert it to 3Delight, just to see what would happen, and see if there was maybe some way forward there.
As you experienced, the RSSY Iray to 3DL converter did not like it at ALL. Oddly enough, it didn't even convert the shader, the script just crashed silently in the background somewhere. When I checked the surfaces, they all still said "Iray Uber" instead of "Daz Studio Default".
I then tried just selecting every surface and force-converting it to Studio Default, which theoretically worked -- all the surfaces said "Daz Studio Default" in the surfaces tab -- except that when I tried to render, Studio just errored out in an odd way, so oddly that I wouldn't have known what happened without checking the logfile. No idea why it errored out; the logfile seems to indicate that 3Delight crashed during the render attempt, I think.
I've never run across anything that was so shader/renderer dependent, unless it had a custom shader, which the armor doesn't seem to have.
I was hoping to figure out how to do the conversion so that it would work for you, but that armor is just odd.
Set environment mode to Dome and Scene, and remove the HDRI map from the environment. Then you get Sun/Sky and whatever lights you add to your scene.
Slighty OF TOPIC reply but this Free Iray to 3delight converter rarely give me headaches as long those standard (UBER ) IRAY material not like 4 Layer IRAY shader or OOT hair shaders ( procedural)
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/139326/irayto3delight-conversion-script/p1
Give it try if you prefer work in 3Delight than IRAY .
Ok, that makes sense.
@WillowRaven: Others have pointed this out already but for outdoor renders you want to look into sun/sky or HDRIs (there are tons of free ones out there). I think the CLS light system is for portrait ligthing.
helpful HDRI basics:
Free HDRIs: https://polyhaven.com/hdris
Some of my favourite sky-only HDRIs by AgentUnawares: https://www.deviantart.com/agentunawares/gallery/64098035/freebies
Also, Sickleyield´s Sky system is currently $1.99: https://www.daz3d.com/sy-sky-system-iray
It provides a few sun/sky presets and a cyclorama-esque cloud prop. I´ve played around with it a bit. It´s nice and certainly worth $1.99... but I´d say you don´t really need it. Those Agent Unawares HDRIs give roughly the same results and they´re free.
I tried that ... didn't work. I've tried everything I could think of. I have gone out of my way to avoid iray for years, lol. But the one set of armor the client wants, for whatever reason, crashes Daz any time I try to render or even spot render in any other way but iray. Very frustrating.
Right? I feel something of what I accidentally figured out should be noted in the threads about the armor because I found other threads with complaints, but I was hesitant to say too much knowing I'm somewhat of a novice at these things. I'm just not technically minded. So I figured it was really my ineptitude causing the problems more than anything else. Whatever it is, the client wants what he paid for and I need to find the fastest and easiest way to do it, even if I gotta buy iray one-click light sets.
The lights still have to be iray lights, though, right? What if I buy the Skies of Economy Redux set that's on sale right now? Or is this how to make the free CLS lights work?
Not off-topic at all. I'm all for alternate solutions to get the job done. But yeah, I tried that, too. I couldn't make it work. Maybe someone else with the armor and that free converter can and then explain it to me, lol.
So.... sun/ski or HDRIs are their own "lights"? I just load the sky and that's it? Or am I over-simplifying it in hope of going back to my click-and-go ways? lol. I'll definitely grab those freebies and SY's Sky System, too, though. Can't hurt to have more options.
Yes, sun/sky and HDRIs are their own lights. You just load the sky and that's it!
(A scene will use either sun/sky or an HDRI. They can't be used at the same time.)
You can add additional lights (spot lights, point lights, mesh lights) to your sun/sky or HDRI but you don't have to.
I was specifically addressing vwrangler to correct his statement that one can't use the sun/sky system in conjunction with scene lights. It's possible, but it's not obvious how to do it. I also can't comment on the CLS lights at all. However, that method would not work with Skies of Economy, for example, because those are HDRIs and, as Hylas pointed out, sun/sky and HDRI can't be used at the same time. I love the Skies of Economy products and use them all the time.
That makes me so happy to hear, lol.
I've got all four SoE sets in my cart right now. So sun/sky systems and HDRI are two separate ways to light Iray scenes, but both ways are pretty much click-and-render ... right? I also have SY's Sky System Iray in my cart, most;y for the night scenes, Do they work about the same way?
For most HDRIs, the only adjustment you should need to do is adjust dome orientation to get the light coming from the right angle for your scene. Sun/Sky is a bit more fiddly, and I don't use it often because I haven't familiarized myself with the controls as much, but it's not too complicated to use ultimately.
Correct.
Well... HDRIs are pretty much click-and-render.
As for sun/sky...
SY Sky System is a convenient & expanded way to use sun/sky.
I've found sun/sky kind of hard to grasp until now, but now that I have SY Sky System I think I'll be using it more frequently.
It has presets and is easy to use.
WillowRaven,
I highly agree with everyone else about using HDRIs. I do this all the time for my product promos and personal work. In fact, even if you are rendering an interior shot with windows, it is wise to use an HDRI still so that you can have real world reflections in any reflective surface.
The best site on the internet to get FREE and free for commercial use HDRIs is PolyHaven - https://polyhaven.com/hdris - that is the new home for what was once HDRIHaven. Just download them to a location on your hard drive that is easy to remember because you will need to change them manually in Daz Studio.
As for mesh lights, my personal preference has been this set - https://www.daz3d.com/iradiance-hdr-mesh-lights-volume-2-for-iray - I use them all the time and they are very easy to use. They load parented to a camera for easy positioning.
Sounds like my kind of light system ... dummy-proof ... thanks :)
Great ... my plan shall be grabbing mostly HDRIs until I can later learn the sun/sky stuff I grabbed while on sale ... that's if I find myself needing to do more iray scenes after this job is finished.
Thank you !!! You're an angel. I always prefer to grab freebies that are commercial savvy. And thank you more-so for the visual aids. Definitely grabbing those for the folder.
Thanks for all the clarifications and help and links, guys :) ... rather than getting frustrated and judgy with me about even trying iray so late in the daz/iray game ... ya'll we're kind and helpful. Hopefully, this thread will help others in the future, too.
Ummm ... possibly an odd question ... but where do y'all store or rather, where will I find HDRI skies or sun/sky sets? under lights, environments, varied presets or scenes? I mean ... some of them have domes, right? So not just a 'light' per se...
Since I tend to shuffle files and rename stuff all the time to make my life a bit easier to find what I have when I want it, does it make sense to put all of my iray lighting stuffs together in the daz content library, or will that screw up their ability to work correctly?
Usually HDRIs, for Iray, will be Render Settings since that is where they are set.