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The problem is, those settings are not even remotely good for a realistic camera. 1/20 would be extremely blurry if you were shooting it handheld, and an aperture of 1.7 is almost as narrow as you can go, DOF-wise. You can get away with that in Iray, because it doesn't do motion blur and it handles camera aperture separately from tonemapping aperture. But it's not physically accurate at all.
I think Intensity is a holdover from 3Delight.
I covered this in my tutorial that I linked to, but you need to change your tonemapper's cm^2 Factor to 10.0 instead (and, if you're using an HDRI, turn the Environment value from it's default of 2.0 to 1.0) to compensate for Iray's baffling low lighting.
I read somewhere that one reason for that is that the renderer is tracing light beams that bounce endlessly around that enclosed space, getting weaker and weaker - beyond the point where they'd have a noticable effect, but still requiring calculations to be made on them. If you have somewhere - a hole in the wall out of shot, say - for rays to escape to, it'll speed up your renders. Another approach is to have a black plane with 0% glossiness somewhere out of shot to soak up stray light beams.
I can't say I've noticed much difference myself, but it's someting you might like to try.
And, conversely, Stanley Kubrichk shot a scene in BARRY LYNDON entirely by candlelight, without pushing the film stock. Likewise, most sit-coms are shot live with a pre-rigged set of lights that are simply varied slightly from scene to scene.
Ultimately, there are two key fundamental differences between Iray lighting and working with real lights: 1.) the power of Iray lights is essentially infinite whereas real world lights are restricted by pesky little things like power consumption, heat out put and potentially starting fires if they're too near something else, and 2.) photographic film stocks have a much narrower range of light sensitivity than the nearly unlimited range the virtual cameras of 3D rendering, where literally every parameter can be dialed to your heart's content without any corresponding increase in grain, etc. (though now that digital cameras are becoming the standard, and digital color grading is the default, this second half of the limitation has become far less crippling than it was in the days of chemically only based film.) That means 90% of film lighting is a compromise between what the director and cinematagrapher envision and what will actually produce a visible image... and, frankly, most of what's done in the U.S. film industry is more a case of having the money to throw around. I've seen Hollywood set ups for a single shot that cost more than the entire budgets of feature films produced overseas, let alone Indie work, where you'll quite often see much more limited lighting in exchange for lower costs and more set ups being shot in a day.
All that said, one of the BIG tricks to learn with Iray is that when you're working with emmissive lights, to NOT use the default cd/m>2 settings that most install with and instead kick it the setting up to kilocandles, Kcd/m>2 . Otherwise you're going to spend forever twisting dials to get an apparent change to the lighting in your image. Once you've got something that looks good roughed out you can always convert back to footcanles if you want to get tweeky... or, if you're not shooting with the depth of field settings on, you can also just crank up your camera's virtual ISO setting, but I find that a bad habit to get into as if you do decide to throw something out of focus you'll often have to start all over again.
I´m sure endlessly bouncing rays add to the render time. But I wonder if that´s the whole truth or if there´s more to it. I always limit my ray bounces to 10 and a closed space still takes up significantly more time than an open one. Even a partly closed space - a kind of alcove - still renders quite a bit longer than a completely open space.
BTW if you want a surface to "suck up" your light, give it an emissive value below zero. But if you just want to limit the endlessly bouncing rays there´s a much more direct way to do it, you can set the maximum amount of bounces somewhere in your render settings. Default is zero, which is infinite.
I have learned some things. First, lights are created by default with far too little luminous flux. Crank it up to a million and it works better. Second, sometimes the scene is dark for viewing because iray lights confuse the previewer. Just pop a light into the scene and leave the intensity (the old lighting system) up high and you can see fine in preview but the default luminous flux is so low it is invisible. Third is, the lights are not real. Don't treat them like they are real. For example, you can get nicely blurred shadows outdoors if you make your emissive light panel really big. It's not real, you can do that.
You'll have to take that up with my phone as those were the literal physical settings it used... you know, in the real world
also 1/20 is totally doable handheld without blurring, modern OIS is great. I my phone def can get blurry in my low light cave of a room, but with my real camera I can get something absolutely pristine (the photo, not my room).
Unfortunately, lighting is probably one of the lesser intuitive aspects when making a scene for iray rendering in Daz. Sure, we can throw a spotlight or two in it and crank up the lumens, but as with anyting else, you just have to experiment and play around with the settings.
So far, I'm finding that the best way to achieve an overall even-lighting for a scene is to just use an HDRI and add spotlights as needed(highlights, color effects, fills, etc.). Learning the Tone Mapping settings is also a MUST, which is what I'm currently in the process of doing.
I've been experimenting with emissives lately, and I find it works pretty well to just use lumens. If you research the kind of light you're working with, you can usually find the wattage, and then look up a chart to determine the lumens per watt.
Here's a viewport render of Urban Sprawl 3:
I turned off all the emissives but the street lamps and set them to "lm". Halogen street lamps are 180 watts, and generate 20 lumens per watt, so 3600.
For the tonemapper, first I set cm^2 Factor to 10--because you need to do that to make Iray physically accurate--then picked an ultra wide aperture of 1.4 for both my tonemapper and my camera. I used a shutter speed of 48 (what movie cameras use) and an ISO of 3200. Unfortunately, Iray doesn't make grain, so my high ISO doesn't produce that seedy "adult movie theaters in Times Square" aesthetic I'm shooting for. Still, I think it looks pretty moody and realistic.
True, but since the tonemapper is designed to emulate chemical photography, I think factoring OIS in is cheating a little bit. And an aperture of 1.7 would still be loaded with DOF in a small room like that.
Not if the sensor is tiny which it is on a phone camera, I wish i could get loaded DOF on it :(
but we're kind of getting into nitty gritty details that aren't going to effect most folk and definitely not OP.
My main point was: If you take a photo in the real world and plug those settings into tonemapping and use them for a similarly lit scene in the 3d realm, in my experience, they end up lining up pretty well. While it is not the only way to do things if you use real world light values + real world tonemapping settings that match that setup you will get something that makes logical sense
@ Hylas. Im about the same 30% A and 70% B.
@ J Cade, I started the same way using the built in light meter as well as exposure and aperture setting charts for the various types of film I worked with, As I mentioned in my post above, I would enter those settings in the Iray tone mapping pane, however depending on the scene it seems really hit or miss.
For outdoor scenes with the Iray Sun/Sky I usually use an ASA of 64 and the exposure settings for Kodachrome 64 which is about the only time the lighting and appearance are pretty much spot on. Dimly lit and indoor scenes that I would normally use higher ASA Ektacrhome with wider aperture and slower shutter speed settings tends to be more miss than hit even using the recommended exposure settings.
However to get a "naked eye" apperance is far trickier and invloles a lot fo trial and error. Thankfully I have a GPU powerful enough to support working in Iray view, though even then it can be tedious and time consuming.
Unfortunately my camera kit uses a 35 mm film so taking a shot for reference isn't viable as K-64 and EK- 200/400 have been discontinued (though Kodak re-released Ektacrhome E 100 in 2018).
It isn't that lights have too little luminosity, it's that the lights are right for more exposure than the default tone mapping. This hjas already been covered in various ways up-thread.
texture Sahded is never going to give an accurate preview for Iray, and even the iray preview may have limits depending on the settings.
@nemesis10
I agree 110%... there are HDRIs for lighting, an then there are HDRIs for backdrops. In Blender, you can just set the Film to "transparent" and rays that escape the scene render to 0% Alpha, and I understand there's a way to do that in DS as well.
But more importantly :) ... what outfit is that? It's very cool and I don't think I've seen it.
The garment is https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-realm-keeper-for-genesis-8-males.
@nemesis10 Thank you!
Edit: Ha ha, I already have it :)
The issue is that none of this stuff is apparent to many Daz users. Even seasoned users, people with years of Daz experience, are in here in this thread disagreeing with each other. Now while it can be sometimes hard to get a group of people to agree on a topic, I think what we are seeing in this thread demonstrates the difficulty for lighting. And Daz does a poor job of giving users any information on the settings involved, and more importantly, what the settings do. Many people ignore certain settings because they simply don't know what they do.
While people can make tutorials and stuff, I think the best learning tool would be for Studio to have optional tool tips that give users more explanation. The tool tips can even include hot links. So if a person has these tool tips enabled, hovering their mouse over tone mapping settings gives a description of what that specific setting does, along with a hot link that can take them to additional info. This is different than searching the net for tutorials, or watching a lighting tutorial just to find what one setting does. I think this would be a good Studio 5 feature.
In terms and language that doesn't require degree in arts and/or the user to be native english speaker = What does it do instead of what it is.
I hope they move over to Watts when version 5 comes out and the equivalent of 1,500,000 lumens is default that's what I do for lights then I just adjust intensity where I have to
Mostly for lighting you have to feel for it like if a warmer light looks better reduce the temperature
A hard part can come from walls and ceilings. Since lights that come with environments can flatten too much I use Iray Light Manager Pro to disable them then use spotlights. I have emissive sets but they are harder to work with than spotlights
The problem with using wattage is, the amount of lumens per watt depends on the type of light. Incandescent bulbs have a lumens-per-watt conversion ratio of about 15, so a 100W incandescent bulb with generate 1,500 lumens, which is the Iray default.
That seems very dim when you actually plug it into Iray but, as I mentioned up-thread, you need to raise your cm^2 Factor to 10.0 to get realistic values.
Rather than make the default light a floodlight I'd like to see an easy way (which could be handled via some prominent presets, or a button on the Tone Mapper Settings node) to switch to a sensible set of tone mapping values for indoor scenes as well as the current default outdoor daylight.
+1
Every shot in Barry Lyndon was pushed 1 stop - the interior and exterior scenes. What scene wasn't pushed? The interior night scenes shot entirely by candles had ceilings covered in reflective metal, there were thousands of candles used on those interiors, and the multiple table-top candles were pushed right up in front of the actors faces. And for continuity purposes, every candle had to be replaced every couple of takes. I've been a union set decorator on features too - and replacing and lighting and extinguishing thousands of candles sounds worse than moving hundreds of electric lights - 6 days a week for 12 or 16 hours a day, for months. That's why on certain movies they have to pay low level crew members, sometimes, hundreds of dollars an hour - because nobody wants to work that hard. Barry Lydon was extraordinarily beatiful, but also extraordinarily boring.
...yes.
As I mentioned earlier, outdoor scenes are not much of an issue (particularly daylight using teh Iray Sun/Sky).but getting lights to look right in indoor ones seems an exercise in extreme fruatration.
That would be the most logical thing to do, to have a simple toggle to flip to indoor mode. The user can still adjust things further to their liking, but having a default option for it would help tremendously. It also would need to be placed in a very easy to find location, perhaps even multiple locations (kind of like how environment and tone settings now show in the scene tab).
Also, as a demonstration, I am curious, how many people in this thread know you can adjust tone mapping while a render is active? I think this feature also needs to be pushed a bit by Daz, little dials and toggles like these need to be made more visible to users. Some users might go for years without even knowing this is possible, simply because the tab to pop the tone mapping window out is so well hidden.
At any rate, using this feature makes it a lot easier to dial in the tone mapping settings, especially if you have a half decent GPU that can show the results quickly. This way you do not need to stop and start new renders, a process which by itself can take quite a bit of time. Some of these settings will restart the render, but within the same window and it is much faster than starting a new render from scratch because the scene is already in GPU memory. That is the process you skip when doing this.
...I often make use of that.
The default, I believe, is "-1" which I have read is actually 32 bounces, not infinite.
Also, one thing to note about Ghost Lights is that they don't create any specular highlights. Therefore, they can make a scene look very flat and unrealistic.
I would like to be able for each node to right click and a lighting rig menu shows up for different lighting rig styles and I use LMB to select the style light rig & presto, a lighting rig at the coordinates the node is at & that lighting rig is rotated to the camera. Then, if I want I can select another node in the scene tab to add another lighting rig too. If I select another camera then I have a menu choice that says "re-orient all lighting rigs to face current selected camera".
There are no specular highlights on TV sitcoms either. If you want specular highlights with ghost lights, use some highly reflective shaders in the scene.