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I gave it a shot and it works as described. I was just wondering if the worldball props and lights are just left overs from the 3De version. I also noticed that the Sun light isn't set as photometric even though it is visible. Also, the worldball when rendered is very blurry. Is this a side effect of the low resolution standard worldball files or is something up with my system, because I've never been able to get HDRIs to show up as clearly as they should. I've tried ones that are litterally hundreds of mbs and the result is always the same. I'm wondering if something is wrong. Anyway, good work and keep up the good work!
Yeah, I've found on large renders... you're often better off just adding it in post if you can. You need VERY high resolution to appear right.
Though keep in mind I strongly suspect texture compression will apply to worldballs.
Cool.
Now, I have a bunch of textures in, I THOUGHT, but only see 5 or so in the options. Am I missing something?
Here's a quick test: http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Camp-near-the-summit-574813860
I'm happy with the results. I ended up pretty much jettisoning everything except the distant light and the environment map... but that's USEFUL, because much of the problem with doing that is making sure the light and map are lined up correctly.
And if I want softer shadows I can rig a spotlight and 'anchor' and use the angle of the distant light as a guide (which saves me time), push it out and bam. (In this case, the very sharp light source fit the environment)
And another, thought a lot of the details ended up not very obvious: http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Martian-outpost-574844217
Thanks for the feedback dakkuan - you raised several good points:
"...I was just wondering if the worldball props and lights are just left overs from the 3De version..." - Yes. The only part of the original 3Delight WorldBall that's actually used in the current Iray setup is the WorldBall Sun. So if you're only going to use Iray it would definitely make sense for the script NOT to load the WorldBall, WorldBall IBL or WorldBall Ground. The current script actually sets up both the 3Delight WorldBall and the corresponding NVIDIA Iray render settings regardless of which renderer you select.The only difference is that for 3Delight it sets all four worldball items visible, but for Iray it only makes the WorldBall Sun visible. (I think it also selects the Iray renderer even if you chose 3Delight - that's a bug!)
"...I also noticed that the Sun light isn't set as photometric even though it is visible..." - I haven't looked into photometrics, but I assume from your your comment that the sun should probably be set as a photometric light ? I'll need to look into this.
"... Also, the worldball when rendered is very blurry. Is this a side effect of the low resolution standard worldball files..." - almost certainly it's the low resolution (4096x1024 for most backgrounds, which is about 114 pixels per degree) plus the JPG compression. The two latest backgrounds (i.e. the futuristic city ones) are double this resolution because I found a new way to generate them. N.B. You are NOT limited to using my backgrounds - if you have your own backgrounds you can easily add them to the SmartPlusData.txt file yourself (I think there's insructions how to do that in the original documentation?)
Nice test renders - I particularly like the first one (camp near the summit) as you've got the foreground and backdrop to blend beautifully.
The background images I provided are probably the main limitation - they're low resolution and they lack sufficient 'interest' or detail for anything except a very wide (35mm) field of view. But as I noted in response to dakkuan's comment you can easily add your own environment sets, but I probably need to provide more explanation about how to do that.
I also saw a recent mjCasual thread about Rendering daz studio scenes as skyballs ( equirectangular / spherical images ) which looks very interesting...
It's all in the WorldBallData.txt file, which should be here... {AnyDSContentFolder}\Scripts\3DCheapskate\WorldBall\WorldBallData.txt
(although if you also have the Poser version installed it may also be here... {YourPoserRuntime}\Runtime\Python\poserScripts\3DCheapskate\WorldBall\WorldBallData.txt } the script uses the first one it finds, which will be the Poser one if you have both versions installed.
The default WorldBallData.txt file contains five environment sets Test, Snow, Sand, Scrub and Mars, which will be the ones you're seeing
When you grab any of the additional environment sets and unzip them you'll have the background, reflection, and angular map images in the right place, but you haven't told the WorldBall Setup script about them.
To do that you have to copy the datablock from the Readme to the WorldBallData.txt file - instructions are in the readme for every additional environment set (basically just copy the datablock from the readme, and paste into the WorldBallData.txt at the bottom,)
"... I ended up pretty much jettisoning everything except the distant light and the environment map..." - both yourself and dakkuan making more-or-less the same comment, so I think the default setup with NVIDIA Iray selected should be to JUST load the WorldBall Sun. Maybe have checkboxes (unchecked by default) to also load the IBL, Ground and WorldBall for folks like me who do one NVIDIA Iray render, one 3Delight render, another Iray, etc...
"...making sure the light and map are lined up correctly..." - I've just realized that in Iray if you adjust the "Dome Rotation" after running the script the sun won't move in accordance with it. Using the DS WorldBall with 3Delight the lighting nodes are parented to the worldball, so if you rotate the WorldBall then the lighting moves with it. I can't see a way to get the lighting and backgroup to stay in step in Iray if you manually adjust the "Dome Rotation" on the render settings. Any thoughts/ideas?
Well, at this point I'm likely to just rotate the main scene (group it all and move it). Another option is to group the lighting, and go 'ok, whatever you rotate the Y at, add that to dome rotation'.
So, for example, distant light is grouped, rotate it 30 degrees, well, just add 30 to dome rotation (or vice versa).
Oh, and thanks... getting color and lighting to blend took some work. Originally, the snow in the foreground was WAY too yellow and dim. Changed the light to be more blue and bright.
I just realized that the old 'Ambient' channel seems to have no effect in Iray. So I applied the Iray Uber Base shader to the Worldball sphere and set up the Emission stuff instead. The temperature 10,000 and luminance 30,000 settings I used are probably totally wrong, but it's just a test. I now have light inside the worldball, generated by the worldball sphere prop only. It seems very slow to render, and I guess the emission stuff isn't intended to be used like this - that's what the Environment Mode render settings are for. But set up like this the stuff inside the worldball is illuminated. However, with no directional light (sun) I've got no shadows. I think I'd actually set Environment Mode = "Sun/Sky Only" for this render expecting that to give me a shadow, but I assume that this lighting is being totally blocked by the worldball's geometry?
Heh, oh, I've been down this road...
Ok, the problem is that almost every image map lacks enough dynamic range to provide good lighting/shadows. (Even most HDRIs)
You can go look at a bunch of options... another problem is that lighting is slower the more complex the source. So lighting primitives (point, followed by sphere and disk, I think) are fastest, while that cool curly Halogen bulb is going to make your computer scream.
The 'best' solution I've found is a worldball (basically) with a spotlight set to disk geometry set to be just about at the edge of the worldball, lined up with where the sun is. Roughly.
(There are a bunch of other things I've tried that have sucked in various ways)
In other words, you're probably better off avoiding trying to get lighting from the Sun/Sky. All the solutions that present themselves are slow and often don't look very good.
The cleverest solution I've come up with is putting the image into _glossy color_, which turns the sphere into a gel, basically, and then set it to be transparent. Slow, and prone to glitches, and often looks fuzzy. Meh.
Re dynamic range and shadows Horo made some interesting comments about how shadows are generated from environment maps when I was first playing with this a couple of years ago, and shadowless diffuse lighting from all around (with or without a specular component) plus a directional light source for direct sunlight and shadows seemed a good compromise.
When you say "...The 'best' solution I've found is a worldball (basically) with a spotlight set to disk geometry set to be just about at the edge of the worldball, lined up with where the sun is. Roughly..." are you using the worldball/sphere purely as a backdrop, or are are you also using it to generate environmental light, whether by making the sphere itself a light emitter, or plugging a modified-as-necessary version of the same environment image into a separate light source?
I either make the sphere itself a light emitter (enough so that it's not actually DARK, and providing some basic ambient light) or I rely on light filtering through the gel (if I'm using Sky/Sun to glow 'through' the sphere).
I don't bother making a sphere AND environment map -- I haven't found any particular reason to.
Now one idea I need to try at some point is attempt to create a cloud mask so that I can handle 'how much light is getting through' vs 'how bright this is' differently. This would improve the gel approach so that clouds could cast good shadows. As it is, I find it very hard to tease that out of a regular rendered image, since 'this part is blue because there are no clouds' and 'this part is sort of blue because I'm looking at the darker patch of cloud' can be indistinguishable to any normal process.
That would ALSO make for the possibility of using a transparency rather than a gel, though I think my experiments suggested using cutout wasn't as great an approach. One problem with cutout and also transparency is that at large sizes the shape and fidelity of the sphere and the ability of the rendering engine to handle the light passing starts breaking down a little, and you can get weird effects. I found it important not to make the sphere TOO large.
The recent Iray World thingie ( http://www.daz3d.com/iray-worlds-skydome ) takes the clever approach of mirroring a large image map on the worldball. While this requires some care to set it up right, practically speaking it means you can use a very large image and have it look finely detailed without 'wasting' a lot of space on parts of an image you aren't going to see.
If you are using GPU rendering, it's important to try to fit your render information in the GPU's RAM, and so this is... pretty darn clever. (Although, again, you have to be careful that the seams aren't in shot or reflected).
I've always found terminology to be a great cause of confusion. To me a gel is the same as a transparency, i.e. an image with an alpha channel. The only difference (I thought) was that with a transparency the 'image' was just solid white (or black). Am I mistaken?
Sooo... I've just put the bits of your comments in bold together ...
now I understand why you've talked about using a spotlight for the sun in the past (yep, sometimes it takes my rusty old brain a while to click 
!)
Making the sphere with the environment map image on it semi-transparent (your gel approach) was something that hadn't even crossed my mind, even though I've used semi-transparent planes to do faked sunlight-through-stained-glass, faked underwater caustics, and foliage shadow type effects.
Fishtales commented a short while ago on the Iray Environment Map and Environment Intensity sliders. What's the difference? thread about using the worldbase dome and the Iray dome together - not sure how this works yet.
Maybe I'm not using the right words for it... transparency I figure is just 50% cutout or something.
Gel, on the other hand -- when objects are fully transparent, glossy color becomes, interestingly, an additional caustic/gel factor -- if glossy color is black, for example, no light gets through. With sun/sky, you have an ambient color/glow which can drive light coming through the sphere, in ADDITION to the sun.
I noticed that in the Iray Uber Base shader there's no transparency/opacity, but there's translucence and refraction - and it's these that appear to be allowing Iray 'Sun/Sky Only' lighting to shine through a sphere geometry and illuminate what's inside in the stuff Fishtales is talking about (link in previous post).
But I think I'll be sticking with the Iray 'Dome And Scene' environment mode with 'Infinite Sphere' dome mode and a DS Distant Light for the sun for the time being, as that's a more-or-less one-to-one match for what I was trying to do with the WorldBall.
Maybe now just look at whether I should be using the Photometric stuff for the sun ? {Edit: Useful starter link on that - http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/784881/#Comment_784881 ; from the old stalwart Wikipedia the sun provides roughly 98,000 lumens per square meter (lux) on a perpendicular surface at sea level, and the temperature of the photosphere is about 5,800K.
Setting the WorldBall Sun as photometric, plugging these values into it, and doing an Iray render it' comes out far too bright. And contrary to what I think I've read elsewhere, the 'Intensity' value on the light seems to be multiplicative - i.e. set 'Intensity' to zero and the the photometric light does nothing, set it to 0.1% or higher and it's a whiteout, but set it to around 0.01% and it's sort of reasonable ish (in the right ballpark ;o) ) - time for a new question thread !
Just making a note of another useful reference - Shibashake's Daz Studio Iray Tutorial for Beginners which confirms a couple of things I thought and gives me some more stuff to think about...
If you are using photometric lights, ignore Intensity. You want to pay attention to Luminance.
Also, if you want an actual sphere rather than environmental map (and it's an open question if you want to), my 'gel' approach is: refraction IOR 1/weight 1, set glossy color to the image.
Cutout = direct opacity.
A Couple Of Simple Manual Fixes For Refraction/Reflection In The Poser Worldball
I've been playing with glass in Poser and discovered a couple of settings that need to be changed.
One is something I mentioned way back - if you have any reflective or refractive surfaces the worldball sphere needs to be set 'visible in raytracing' to see it in reflections/refractions. Simply manually tick the appropriate box.
The second had me chasing around for ages, and is the cause of blurry washed out refraction. The default material setting for the worldball sphere will make any refraction - the whole story's on this thread on the SM forum. The fix is simple - the 'Filtering' for the image on the worldball sphere needs to be 'None', not 'Quality'. Simply change this setting manually.