UE2 Light direction
marble
Posts: 7,500
Hi,
I'm trying to get the lighting acceptable in a scene using UE2, Uber Spot and a distant light set to Specular only. I have the UE2 globe scaled down so that I can see the light direction and have select Soft Box from the presets (it is an interior scene).
What troubles me is that I expected the light/shade on the figure in the scene to be similar to the light/shade on the globe. In other words, if the light appears to be originating from top right the I'd expect the light cast by the UE2 to appear to come from top right.
However, much as I rotate the globe, I can't get it to light the figure as I wish. Am I expecting too much?
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It's actually a somewhat well-known problem. But there isn't a quick/easy fix.
One way, unless you are planning on using the included Environment Sphere for reflections/backdrop, is to ignore it and use a plain sphere to judge where the actual UE2 light is putting the light/shadow and go from there.
Oh - ok - you mean create a sphere primitive rather than the actual UE2 globe? I'll try that.
I was wondering whether it only worked with an IBL picture on the surface and not without. Or whether it doesn't work in AO mode and needs to be set to directional shadows.
The UE sphere is somewhat 'messed up'...it's 'turned inside out', which effectively flips textures. This is done so the normals will be pointing in...but coupled with the 'odd' DS world co-ordinates makes for some very difficult to line up rotations. And directional shadows only make some of the alignment problems worse.
The actual light, it's pretty close to 'right'...there's a slight off axis tilt to it, but it's livable.
It's just the sphere/light alignment that is totally maddening. (There's several threads, probably deeply buried in the Commons/Nuts and Bolts forums, about all this...)
Would you recommend the A0A advanced lights instead? I'm tempted because some say they are very quick but I'm having lots of problems with A0A shaders (white figures, displacement errors, etc.).
Depends...
What exactly are you trying to achieve?
If it's full global illumination with bounce and everything...then no, I don't think the AoA lights would be enough.
If it's just adding AO, more/varied control over the lights, yeah, they'll work.
What kind of displacement errors are you getting on the AoA surface shaders?
I'm just needing a kind of fill light or the room - I suppose ambient describes it pretty well. Preferable to light the figure from a different angle than the spot light.
3Delight message #43 (Severity 0): R2093: object 'shapematerial_leaves1_1953_7a0' (displacement 'dzdisplace', surface 'dzplastic') used only 0% of its displacement bound (actually it was similar but it was to do with eyelashes, not leaves). I have lots of similar errors in the log file.
One one scene that message was in the render progress window and it got stuck at 5%. I could not narrow it down to what was causing it so I recreated the scene with the same figure but different skin (one that does not use A0A shaders). That rendered fine and quickly.
Actually, I'm not too concerned with that error because it is not happening in other scenes so far. The white figures in renders often happens so I exit DS and restart to get around it.
The displacement message isn't an error, it's an alert. Displacement bounds determine how far out the renderer looks when checking for displaced geometry - too low and the displaced surface is clipped, too high and you are wasting calculations. So the alert is telling you you could use lower bounds for that surface, which would be a worthwhile tweak on an animation when you could save a lot of time over a scene but isn't worth fretting over on a still image, especially when you can't edit the shader (though you could remove displacement entirely if it's used 0%, or you could edit the map to use more of the black-white range and lower the positive/negative values if you really wanted to).
To expand a bit...any Severity 0 or 1 messages that pop up when rendering in 3Delight are more like performance tips/warnings than errors. They won't impact the final render, much or at all, and if they do, it is to make it a little slower...like maybe a couple of seconds slower over a several minute to hour long render.
Severity 2 may impact the render, but it usually will complete. It may contain errors or not be exactly as expected.
Severity 3 and up...then there's real problems that will dramatically impact the render. More often than not, cause it to fail completely.
This was already discussed in a thread
There is a workaround https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF8&prev=_t&sl=ja&tl=en&u=http://oso.tea-nifty.com/blog/2011/07/daz-studio-34-i.html
The link goes to a Japanese blog and I'm afraid that Google translate doesn't do a good job. I tried to read it twice but it made no sense to me. Sorry but from what I can see it seems to be talking about converting applying HDR images which was not my original question.
No it's about the UE sphere and the UE light being off. And this fix the problem. For it to work you must be sure to convert the HDR maps appropriately
Found the thread in DS Forum http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/18998/
OK - thanks. Now I'm starting to get the idea. Still not clear about a couple of things. Do I need to load an HDR image (or can I use the presets (kitchen, soft box, etc.)? Also someone mentioned the need to create another camera. I normally use the default camera but I there is no problem to create another if necessary. I will just need to remember that I need to do that.
I didn't test UE default presets so I don't know if you also have to prepare Omnifreakers's preset files
For other maps, see my post in an other thread http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/422119/
The author of the thread made some interesting mistake you should read
You don't need to create a special camera from what I remember
I have downloaded that "fix" and it has me totally confused. I've read the Readme.txt that comes with it and I still have no clue about how to use it. All I want to do is to use UE2 as ambient light. Most of my scenes are indoors so I don't want lights for fields and sky. That's why I opted for the soft-box preset.
Looking back at the forum posts, this problem with the attached sphere not indicating an accurate direction goes back at least 2 years. Other people are clearly using it to their satisfaction but I don't see how. I tried it with a sphere primitive and the results are total frustration. You would think the primitive should be lit like the UE2 globe indicates but that's far from the case and rotation is far from intuitive.
I can only think that most people create outdoor scenes with HDRI images of sky and sun. Perhaps it works ok with those settings but indoor scenes are a PITA.
Well, you could always drop the image based part of the light altogether and just use it as an ambient light. More often than not, this is all I use it for....either ambient or GI bounce. After witnessing what hdri illumination can do in other render engines, UE looks pretty lackluster in that department.
To do this just the load the UE light and don't app!y a preset. Set a color for your overall light and possibly an occlusion color. Don't bother with directional shadows as those are irrelevant without an image driving it. I'd give more specifics but I am. Not at my render computer right now. If you'd like more info just post again and I'll gladly share.
Well, I did tinker around for another few hours. Then I found a thread on here comparing UE2 with Advanced Ambient lights from AoA. I had some store credit so I bought those (the bundle). I must say that out of the box I got better results than I had managed after 2 days of trying with UE2.
I'm not saying one is better than the other but for my level of skill (or lack of it), I'm probably better off sticking with my new purchase until I understand things better.
One odd thing though - with UE2 plus spot plus specular light, I set gamma correction on (2.2) and it looked better. With the AoA lights, the skin (Belle 6) looks washed out so I set gamma correction off again. I wonder whether some skins look better with GC on and others need it off?
I experimented with UE2 heavily a few weeks ago and posted about it extensively, including still images, in the 3delighting thread.
My basic conclusion was UE2 is a bit dodgey, but it does work.
Since then I've been getting pretty good results at fairly fast render times using UE2 for IBL. The three stills I've attached are 3delight UE2 renders with no additional lights.
I'm not sure if it will help, but here's a link to the thread:
I've tried to wade through that thread before but most is way over my head. For at least two years I only used Reality/Luxrender (with V4 and M4 and no SSS) so lighting was less of a pain: a couple of well placed mesh lights and good to go. However, I upgraded to Reality 4 when that was released a few months ago and was most disappointed. Suddenly I started getting red hot spots on certain (G2F/V6) skins. I tried with Luxus and had similar (but not so severe problems with hot spots). I was informed on the RuntimeDNA forum that Luxrender and SSS don't play well together and that the hotspots generally fade after many hours of rendering. So I decided to give 3Delight another try.
What I gain in speed of render, I seem to be losing in realism. I can put up with that typical 3D render look (plastic skin and razor sharp edges) because I only do this as a hobby. But I'd rather get the images to look natural if I possibly can. These AoA lights look promising so I'll stick with 3Delight a while longer.
I did try IRay but it kills my iMac. GPU is not up to the task and CPU is just as slow as Luxrender. Plus that is another big learning curve so I'll wait until the official release before I give it another try.
I've tried to wade through that thread before but most is way over my head. For at least two years I only used Reality/Luxrender (with V4 and M4 and no SSS) so lighting was less of a pain: a couple of well placed mesh lights and good to go. However, I upgraded to Reality 4 when that was released a few months ago and was most disappointed. Suddenly I started getting red hot spots on certain (G2F/V6) skins. I tried with Luxus and had similar (but not so severe problems with hot spots). I was informed on the RuntimeDNA forum that Luxrender and SSS don't play well together and that the hotspots generally fade after many hours of rendering. So I decided to give 3Delight another try.
What I gain in speed of render, I seem to be losing in realism. I can put up with that typical 3D render look (plastic skin and razor sharp edges) because I only do this as a hobby. But I'd rather get the images to look natural if I possibly can. These AoA lights look promising so I'll stick with 3Delight a while longer.
I did try IRay but it kills my iMac. GPU is not up to the task and CPU is just as slow as Luxrender. Plus that is another big learning curve so I'll wait until the official release before I give it another try.
I know what you mean about iray. My computer can handle it for still images ok, but I mostly use Daz for animating and 30 minute per frame render times aren't realistic, lol.
It's really forced me to squeeze what I can out of 3delight & UE2.
Just in case it helps Here's the short form of my current workflow, it's pretty simple really:
1) Load UE2
2) Paramaters Tab > Color Channel - Load a .HDRI or .TIFF image into the Color channel
3) Select the UE2 Sphere in the scene tab
4) under the Surfaces Tab > load a .jpg that matches your .HDRI or .TIFF into the DIFFUSE COLOR and AMBIENT COLOR channels.
5) Under Parameters, select UE2 > set "X Scale" to -100%.