Iray Moon
vex3d_22560
Posts: 130
How do I get the sun-sky only mode to show a moon?
trying to do full moon 7/1/15 12AM SS Lat 45.63 SS Long 122.6
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I don't think you can...I'm pretty sure it only handles the sun, fairly accurately.
Modo has the same limitation in its equivalent - it's a shame there isn't a built-in way to do night scenes, but it seems common with this sort of feature.
Fullmoon in a clear nigth has just 0.01 lux. This is not enough ligth to make a movie or a photo with normal aperture values....every sharp photo with moving objects at nigth is cheated (post graded) or has enough ambient ligth (fire, streetligths and so on)... The best nigthshoots are done using rest ligth in the sky... the last 30 minutes before darkness.
But nothing stops us from creating nigth scenes in DAZ with iray...
one way is to use a environment map and set "environment intensity"very low. (try o.1) fine adjust with iso and fstops.
This was one of my desires when I was using iRay to create a nice night time sort of sky with a moon but yea, it's not easy to do, esp if your a total newb to this sort of rendering engine!
Hi Ramwolff...
It is possible! :-) but it has not much to do with iray (the sky with moon is a real photo (skydome/texture) anyway)..
It is really important that you understand how a photographer shoot at nigth.,,,
First there are different "full moon" shoots. And you must answer the question what do you want to see in your final result? the brigth moon ? then without additional ligths you see just silhouettes. This is a well know "impressive" technic. And what iray does at nigth - everything is BLACK.
Here is a example: http://petapixel.com/2013/04/27/silhouettes-in-a-giant-moonrise-captured-using-a-1200mm-lens/
All other nigthshoot techniques use ether very long exposure time or artifical ligths (skyline at nigth). Iray does not simulate moonligth because of that - you can simply use the sun and ether postgrade it down to simulate a long exposure nigth shoot (or set environment intensity very low) - or then use artifical ligths - or a combination of both....
I am wiling to do a documented example if you show me a real nigth photo which you like to copy in iray.
Don't really have much in mind but a stary night with a moon that casts enough light to light the scene so the object or person isn't shadowed. I know, it's more of fantasy idea and iRay doesn't do fantasy, it's one of it's drawbacks for me.... I like what I see so far but getting it to render how *I* want probably isn't going to be realized very well so I'll probably revert to 3Delight for stuff like that. Thanks!
Hm.
What about setting the skydome as a background (so you have your moon and stars), and putting a distant light where the moon should be in your sky, keeping it dim enough so it doesn't interact with your scene as a light source. Then, set the 'sun' to that node in Sun/Sky, and turn the environmental intensity down low as AndyGrimm said. That way, you've got the light coming from the right 'direction,' and the appearance of the background, and then you can adjust intensity until you're getting the right light and shadow balance for your intent?
(I'm mid-render right now, or I'd try that out myself -- if I've forgotten some aspect of the renderer, apologies. ;) )
Tried that but the card I was using turned out to be a dud so I had to send it back t EVGA and I'm STILL waiting for the replacement. Card kept freezing my system and eventually started rebooting it the second I would even open up DAZ Studio. Kinda scary so right now I'm using the card that came original in my rig (that's only like 6 months old but the card doesn't have enough RAM to run iRay properly) so I wait... and wait... and wait.... and wait.....
OK here some quick scenes simulating different nigth shoots... i am in testing mood
Only moonlight... = shilouettes.(backligth).
The moon is on a plane... i use the emissive iray shader - the sky with moon is in the "emission color" channel.
the moon is warm so i set the Emission Temperature to 3000k.
Lumincance = 3200
I use only scene ligths - (the backgroundplane with the moon)...
Camera 200iso, FStop 4 Shutter 60...
(i am on a slow labtop, so i stopped rendering after 50 - 100 iterations).. but the results are to see.... this scene is worth a final render i think.
Cheating like in movies...
)
We want the moon AND enough environment ligth.
I use the doom (the standard blue image).. and set the "environment intensity to 0.005..
I can now tweak the background against the foreground - using the moons emissive luminance and the camera settings....
In the posted image all values are the same as in the first one (just used dom and scene - environment mode).
The ligth can NOT come from the moon - because then we would have again a backligth situation. This is also often to see in movies (watch close
Cheating because we can
i want everything darker and lesser shadows but still see everything under a dark sky full with stars.
Same as the first one - changed the moon with stars on the background plane.. switched off dom.. and instead, used a large 50 x 50meter plane as a mesh roof ligth(added the emissive shader)... the ligth is cold (stars) so i set emission temperatur to 7k (cold blue ligth). on both planes (background with stars and mesh roof ligth.
Roof mesh ligth = luminance 1500
Background plane (stars) = luminance 3000
The second example is more what I'm after. I can't really do anything right now as my card was a dud so waiting and waiting and waiting for EVGA to get the S together and get the replacement mailed out to me.. they are really dragging their feet with this and I'm getting po'ed about it... Thanks for the examples.
How do I make a good emmisive moon light like how you have the second image? I tried my best in my pathetic examples before the card when kaplooie and it looked nothing like that....
attached is a start point file...
The moon dosent look real because it was just a quick hard copy into a evening sky photo for doing this test render...
The sky is my own photo the moon free to reuse.. so feel free to do what you want with this image.
use a large background plane..
add the emissive shader
put the moon image in the emissive channel
scale the plane to the image ratio
Grade it with the color options in the emissive channel aka.. more yellowish - or darker (grey)... or even better - load it first in photoshop and make it as dark, warm or cold as you like... and add a lunar corona if you aim for realism.
then use the values i posted above in the first example for the moon - and dom environment from the second example - and you should end with something similar.
Thanks so much. My quest was to use a moon obj that I made.. simple really.... just a sphere from DS and then used the free seamless moon textures that one can find on line that wraps perfectly around it. I wanted to make that into the main emissive bit. Just wish there was a way to tell iRay to not cast shadows like you can with 3Delight... I understand this is based more on reality but still, be nice if someone were to come up with a script to tell the engine to not cast shadows on what ever we didn't want casting or receiving shadows...
if you have a nice mapping moon texture for a sphere - that should work well... just try the camera and luminance values i provided.. should work..
yes there is NO ligth without shadow.... but we can cheat...
that's what i tried to show in 3th example.... if you use a softt ligth which comes from everywhere - you wont get much shadows...
you can try to use a large empty half sphere instead a plane as roof mesh ligth (my 3th example) this should eleminate nearly all shadows,,,,
A full moon, on a clear night, with little/no 'light pollution' casts amazingly strong shadows...
Thanks Andy... some stuff to play around with when my new replacement card finally gets to me....
Hi Andy,
Had a little fun with your free background..... added in a corona around the moon and some stars... Thanks again!
@RAMWolff
Nice phantasie sky - in reality we can not see stars close to the moon.... i think only venus is bright enough... but who cares - i see what you aim for... dont forget to post your first render here
Great tips Andy. Thank you. I really hope some clever PA comes up with fantasy background/lighting presets for iray. Not just night scenes, but also dramatic skies and scenery preloads that will work out of the box for fantasy renders. Sometimes a HDRI is too realistic when what you really want is the 'cheat' dramatic lighting to make your realistic looking characters pop.
Just got notice this AM that my replacement video card from EVGA was shipped via UPS, should be installed and working by next Wed, hopefully.. then back to work learning all this
@Redz welcome - Yes... i start to use DAZ iray because i can do all the tricks which i know from photgraphy AND cheat :-).... Most think photorealism means just that it looks real.... well correct - but it means also that we can use all the tricks photographers used a long time to produce better then reality images. And that is what fascinates me on iray.
@RAMWolff the above examples did render relatively fast even with my slow labtop and entry Nividia card. You will be surprised how quick such nigthscenes are done with your new card
New replacement card showed up. Got it installed but I'm nervous. After the installation and NVidia reestablished the video drivers (since they were already installed from the previous same card) I was getting the desktop set up and the monitors went blank. Upon rebooting I was taken to the BIOS which I didn't ask to go there and clicked through and came into Windows eventually. Did this test render from an iRay file I had set up and all went well but if anyone has any notions about what happened above let me know so I can check it out. EVGA did mention at one point that perhaps I didn't have a powerful enough power supply. From my order for the computer late last year:
POWERSUPPLY: 650 Watts - Corsair CSM Series CS650M 80 Plus Gold Certified Modular Ultra Quiet Power Supply
So hoping that's not the issue but if it is I have one picked out at Amazon, it's a 750 which should be adequate.
Here's the render. Nothing special but wanted to see if I could get the windows lit... the moon still needs work!
Minimum System Power Requirement (W) for the 750 is 300watt. Your old corsair powersupply should be ok for one card in a normal desktop setup.
Yea, so far, so good. Just busy with projects now, have had no time to play with iRay .. perhaps this weekend... Thanks for the info Andy!
The moon is fiendishly small. Northern Hemisphere dwellers can do an experiment during winter: look at the Pleaides, savour how compact the cluster looks and then think that the Moon is too small to occult them all at the same time
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I read about two Hollywood night tecniques.
The first was used in the black-and-white era to shoot those western movie scenes "lit by full Moon". They put a red filter in front of the objective; the sky turned black while the rest remained passably normal.
The second gives the usual bluish appearance: tungsten color balance and close the diaphragm by 1 or 2 stops. The scene appears bluish and darkish. Before you say that this is a realistic appearance, remember that at low light levels human vision become monochromatic. At night cats are gray, not blue
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Good observations about day-for-night shooting techniques. In fact the more red sensitive the film, the better the day-for-night effect looked. The technique of using a red lens over a camera filled with black and white stock to simulate a night shot really caught on post war, as more and more camera negative films were panchromatic (in the 20s and into the 30s, movie film was primarily orthochromatic, and not sensitive to red light). For black and white films, they tinted in the blue for every release print, and also pushed-processed the negative to give it more contrast.
These days, of course, we do all this in Photoshop, but the techniques are all still here. You are absolutely right that a night scene with rich colors may not look real -- unless it's Vegas at night, but then it's the bright lights making all those colors. Everything between is dim, dark, and mostly lacking color.
I just wanted to add for light fantasy scenes, especially works for children, the brighter colors at night are perfect.
Oops, posted in the wrong thread!
It is (was) way more difficult to shoot at nigth with a movie film camera because of limited shutter speed values (the shutter must close for every frame aka 24 or 30 times a second - the longest open shutter is 1/48 or 1/60))... while with a photo camera and long shutter time we can see the colors also at night in a fullmoon night or with enough restlight (sunset)... or the colors of stars (space) which we cant see by eyes - but we are used to see such night photos with colors
Impressive night shoots show colors and are actually better then "reality" - example hdr (high dynamic range) photography.