ShawnBooth's IRAY Thoughts and Suggestions

ShawnBooth

I'm in the process of combing through pages of IRAY info... Holy crap. My head is throbbing due to a lot of the posts. I'm starting this thread to condense and provide the best info I can gather. I know this has been attempted with the IRAY: START HERE thread but I feel it has become cluttered and lost. I would appreciate abstaining from posting anything here until I've posted "my suggestions".

***WARNING - I do not approach rendering with any regard to rendering times as I don't care how long it takes to render an image I'm happy with. I also understand this is the world of 3D and today's render times are amazing to me when compared to 5-10 years ago.

I'm currently reading about how to approach IRAY lighting as it is as close to real world lighting as we can get. DS with IRAY makes me so happy. I spent so much time learning how to light in the 3D world, adjusting settings and render settings.... Ugh. Now I'm at home with real world lighting principles! Woo Who! I'm still wrapping my head around certain settings, shaders, etc. but the lighting aspect of this is where I "earn my living".

Why me? I feel that as a cinematographer with 15 years of professional experience, I may be able to help with the lighting/tone mapping aspect. First point I'd like to make, try approaching lighting from a cinematography POV. QUICK TIP (tone mapping): Indoors/Night/dark scenes and low light = start at ISO 400/800 and increase to no more than 1600 (any more and you get actual noise, not the artifacts left by not completing the render). If you aren't happy, rethink your lighting. Exterior Daylight = ISO 320 is a great starting point, however, 100-200 are great too. Keep in mind, we don't have ND filters to use on our "cameras". There is no reason to use ISO 800 in an EXT. DAYLIGHT scene. If you are, you haven't lit the scene properly (artistic reasoning for your poor lighting is no excuse). If outdoors, one HDR image plugged into environment, plus one distant light (sun) is really all that is needed. However, sometimes you want more lighting for style. Cool. You'll need bigger lights like a 18K (18000 W) in addition to your properly set up/lit HDR/Sun scene. You can also use negative fill when outdoors (for 3D, use a primitive plane set to black and place off camera next to your subject(s).

I see a lot of settings being posted that are incorrect. There is no reason to use ISO lower than 400 when your scene is an interior.

Also, if you adjust the shutter, you HAVE to adjust the f-stop.

Another tip for starting to learn real world lighting: try setting ISO to 400, f-stop to 4/5.6 for interiors and adjust your lights until you're happy. For daylight exteriors, ISO 320, f-stop @ 11-16. These aren't necessary per se, especially when you can open the iris and not worry a whole lot about light levels.

I'm gonna finish my reading/researching and will return with more thoughts and examples. Again, let me just post my thoughts before responding to this thread. If you have questions before then, PM me.

Moderators, if I'm out-of-line starting this thread, please let me know.

ShawnBooth

Reserved.