Can't figure out indoor lighting

Rubyfocus

Hello, I've read and tried to understand the lighting tutorial, but i'm obviously missing something. If I try to add lighting to an indoor scene (A small room), upon rendering in iRay I get nothing but black.  I can see the windows and whatever's outside, but nothing else.  I've increased all possible parameters with the lights (intensities, lumen values, etc.), monkeyed around with the tone mapping and just about everything else, but nothing changes.  The preview looks fine, but I can't get a shread of light to light the room whatsoever. I don't know if there's one or two things that I can change in order to effect correction in the right direction (some light instead of no light), but at this point it's impossible to tell if the changes I make in the render settings are even moving in the desired direction.  No matter what I change, when I check the render it's just as black as it was before I made the settings changes.  No noticable improvement.  Anybody?

Also, is there some way that I can reset all render settings back to default, in case I need to start over?

margrave

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/7048791/#Comment_7048791

Use the big gray "Default" button at the top of the Render Settings tab to reset (most) everything.

chris-2599934

In the  Render Settings > Environment tab, what is Environment Mode set to? It needs to be "dome and scene" or "scene only" for the lights you have in your scene to take effect. I usually go with "dome and scene."

JVRenderer

Rubyfocus said:

Hello, I've read and tried to understand the lighting tutorial, but i'm obviously missing something. If I try to add lighting to an indoor scene (A small room), upon rendering in iRay I get nothing but black.  I can see the windows and whatever's outside, but nothing else.  I've increased all possible parameters with the lights (intensities, lumen values, etc.), monkeyed around with the tone mapping and just about everything else, but nothing changes.  The preview looks fine, but I can't get a shread of light to light the room whatsoever. I don't know if there's one or two things that I can change in order to effect correction in the right direction (some light instead of no light), but at this point it's impossible to tell if the changes I make in the render settings are even moving in the desired direction.  No matter what I change, when I check the render it's just as black as it was before I made the settings changes.  No noticable improvement.  Anybody?

Also, is there some way that I can reset all render settings back to default, in case I need to start over?

isit possible that your camera is intersecting one of the walls(s) Try moving the camera.

takezo_3001

What are your GPU specs, if you have an ancient card with 3-6Gb of VRAM, that may be your issue as one of the symptoms of the black screen render is due to not having enough VRAM... try rendering with your CPU to see if the GPU is the issue!

margrave

takezo_3001 said:

What are your GPU specs, if you have an ancient card with 3-6Gb of VRAM, that may be your issue as one of the symptoms of the black screen render is due to not having enough VRAM... try rendering with your CPU to see if the GPU is the issue!

They said they can see outside the windows, so it's not a memory issue, just a tonemapping/light level issue.

charles

Lighting in Iray requires your lumes to be much much greater. The standard spotlight and point light come in way too dim and the lumes need really cranked up. Switch to Iray mode in your viewport so you can see what's going on and start adjusting the spotlight or point (if that's the kind of light you are using) by adding a 0 at the end until it starts to be visible.

I would also recommend some YouTube videos on lighting.

charles

I wouldn't mess with the tonemapping at all, reset those to default. Pretty much anything you do in tonemapping can be achieved in post work so there is no real reason to do it during the render except for some occasional situations.

 

coralyn

One thing I have noticed - if I'm not deluded - is most of the one-off lights pre-installed in DS insert as a size near zero. So putting aside the issues of if lights should show up has massive black objects ina scene, you will have to increase the size (the area) of the object, as I'm guessing it is emmitting based on number of some square something-or-others. 

I've also had luck with Elumin's portrait lights. Add them, and they are objects of good size for lighting, so then delete the ones I don't need and move the others around mercilessly! :-)