Lighting Tutorial Suggestions

starboysf

I'm looking for some suggestions for good tutorials on lighting in Daz. There are so many hits when searching on Google or YouTube, and I really want to maximize my learning rate as much as possible.  I do a great deal of real-world photography so understand the basics of lighting and shadows on an object/person but translating that to Daz is a bit of a challenge so far. 

Chezjuan

SickleYield has a good tutorial for 3-point lighting. I use it in lots of my renders: https://www.deviantart.com/sickleyield/journal/Tutorial-Three-Point-Lighting-In-Iray-598282717 

You might want to check out the Tone Mapping settings. They are designed to mimic camera settings for lighting, with adjustable shutter, aperture, and iso settings. I have played with them and found that they are close, though not exact. The reason many scenes are so dark and require unrealistic lumen settings for lights is that tonemapping is set at a shutter speed of 128, f/8, and iso 100. I have been able to successfully light a scene with "real world" light settings by adjusting the tonemapping to what I would use in similar lighting with my camera. A couple of caveats to tonemapping is that I've found that using realistic lumens and "camera" settings increases render time (by a lot in some cases), and that if you're using a HDRI you need to adjust the environment intensity down otherwise it is very over exposed as the default is set for the default tonemapping settings.