My first Reality Render

wardmatt1

I finally think i have managed to Render something passable as art in lux render with reality 2.5.
My first render

Let me know what you think.

Chohole

You can attach an image to a forum post. There is an attachment field below the Type pane

Jake_35533

wardmatt1 said:

I finally think i have managed to Render something passable as art in lux render with reality 2.5.
My first render

Let me know what you think.

FInally, someone who appreciates the Reality plugin for DS. I use it exclusively because I haven't totally figured out how to get a good rendering from DS. Reality is far easier to set up good lighting.

The rendering is good, all you need to do is use a soft box and place it right behind the camera.

The skin is good but add a little more gloss to it to give it that moist but not greasy look.

The hair also needs gloss and more bump to it.

If you can put a backdrop behind her, that would give it a shadow behind her that gives it a little more realism, as if she is standing against a wall for a portrait.

Finally, use the lens effects and add a little bloom to the rendering. It gives the image a slight glow. Here is an image I did with a photo I edited behind the rendering (alpha channel output), 1 soft box in front and one to the side and bloom.

wardmatt1

chohole said:

You can attach an image to a forum post. There is an attachment field below the Type pane

Sorry wasn't sure if it was too big for Daz's forums.

FInally, someone who appreciates the Reality plugin for DS. I use it exclusively because I haven't totally figured out how to get a good rendering from DS. Reality is far easier to set up good lighting.

The rendering is good, all you need to do is use a soft box and place it right behind the camera.

The skin is good but add a little more gloss to it to give it that moist but not greasy look.

The hair also needs gloss and more bump to it.

If you can put a backdrop behind her, that would give it a shadow behind her that gives it a little more realism, as if she is standing against a wall for a portrait.

Finally, use the lens effects and add a little bloom to the rendering. It gives the image a slight glow. Here is an image I did with a photo I edited behind the rendering (alpha channel output), 1 soft box in front and one to the side and bloom.

Thank you for the tips.
I did not even know there were people who did not appreciate Reality. I started using because i suck a lighting in DS. I understand real lighting better,
I know how to do all of your suggestions but the lens effects and bloom can you point me in the right direction.

Jake_35533

wardmatt1 said:

chohole said:

You can attach an image to a forum post. There is an attachment field below the Type pane

Sorry wasn't sure if it was too big for Daz's forums.

FInally, someone who appreciates the Reality plugin for DS. I use it exclusively because I haven't totally figured out how to get a good rendering from DS. Reality is far easier to set up good lighting.

The rendering is good, all you need to do is use a soft box and place it right behind the camera.

The skin is good but add a little more gloss to it to give it that moist but not greasy look.

The hair also needs gloss and more bump to it.

If you can put a backdrop behind her, that would give it a shadow behind her that gives it a little more realism, as if she is standing against a wall for a portrait.

Finally, use the lens effects and add a little bloom to the rendering. It gives the image a slight glow. Here is an image I did with a photo I edited behind the rendering (alpha channel output), 1 soft box in front and one to the side and bloom.

Thank you for the tips.
I did not even know there were people who did not appreciate Reality. I started using because i suck a lighting in DS. I understand real lighting better,
I know how to do all of your suggestions but the lens effects and bloom can you point me in the right direction.

I have to use Reality because I can't seem to get how to use DS lighting. I use it exclusively. There are many who don't know how to use Reality properly or don't have a powerful enough computer.

Bloom adds that effect that makes the rendering a little more realistic. Its at the bottom of the list of adjustments called "lens effects". Vignetting is also good depending on what mood you want. Didn't get much use from C. Aberration unless you are trying to make your image look like a badly taken photo. Glare is useful only on metal surfaces and even then, it gives more of a strange effect than a realistic one.

XoechZ

I also use Reality now (built a new computer for it :-) ) and I love it. Much better results with much less effort, especially on lightning. Materials can be a bit tricky to make them look as you want, but that is something to learn with time.
And the possibility to change the intensities and colors of your lights during rendering (so no need to re-render!) makes it very powerful. Simply amazing.

Jake_35533

XoechZ said:

I also use Reality now (built a new computer for it :-) ) and I love it. Much better results with much less effort, especially on lightning. Materials can be a bit tricky to make them look as you want, but that is something to learn with time.
And the possibility to change the intensities and colors of your lights during rendering (so no need to re-render!) makes it very powerful. Simply amazing.

Exactly! I am hooked! I can't use DS rendering anymore. I use Reality exclusively for everything I do. I have a quad core i7 macbook pro with 16GB of ram. The ram is very important because when I first started using Reality with 4 GB or ram, I couldn't use my computer while it was rendering because Reality would hog all the memory. You have to have a powerful computer for this. I am trying to get a 12 core Mac Pro with 32GB or ram just for Reality.

Now the only problems I have sometimes is that when I render some scenes, they take a long time (like 10+ hours) to get the grain out (sometimes the grain still won't go away after 24 hours), while other scenes take only 2 or 3 hours to clear up (with both scenes having similar complexity and no glass or any transport stuff in it). Do you have these problems even when you set up lighting right?

The image below took 24 hours and the grain is still there.

XoechZ

Well, render times in Lux (the render engine used with Reality) are not an issue, they are a feature :-)

You have a pretty big scene here, I see 6 characters, 3 of them in the foreground with much detail. Therefore is it normal that rendering takes a long time. Lux here has to calculate a large ammount of textures. A good way to check how far a render is progressed is the S/p meter (Samples per pixel). On simpler scenes it is climbing fast and you get good results soon. At complex scenes (like yours here) it is climbing slow. The good thing with Lux is that you can go on rendering until you are satisfied with the result. You can even stop the render and continue later.

To save some RAM and also CPU power - and therefore getting good looking renders faster - you can try the usual "tricks":

- hide or remove parts of your scene that are not seen or outside the camera frame. This also includes objects that are hidden behind other objects. In your image you can hide all of your characters legs because there are pants covering them - just as an example
- use only as many lights as you really need
- use low-res textures for objects in the background

So, even if you have a fast CPU and tons of RAM you can always speed up rendering by using a bit simplicity :-)

Jake_35533

XoechZ said:

Well, render times in Lux (the render engine used with Reality) are not an issue, they are a feature :-)

You have a pretty big scene here, I see 6 characters, 3 of them in the foreground with much detail. Therefore is it normal that rendering takes a long time. Lux here has to calculate a large ammount of textures. A good way to check how far a render is progressed is the S/p meter (Samples per pixel). On simpler scenes it is climbing fast and you get good results soon. At complex scenes (like yours here) it is climbing slow. The good thing with Lux is that you can go on rendering until you are satisfied with the result. You can even stop the render and continue later.

To save some RAM and also CPU power - and therefore getting good looking renders faster - you can try the usual "tricks":

- hide or remove parts of your scene that are not seen or outside the camera frame. This also includes objects that are hidden behind other objects. In your image you can hide all of your characters legs because there are pants covering them - just as an example
- use only as many lights as you really need
- use low-res textures for objects in the background

So, even if you have a fast CPU and tons of RAM you can always speed up rendering by using a bit simplicity :-)

Actually I did most of this.

But with the lights, I had to use more lights to even get it to this level, because I used just HDRI and 2 lights and it didn't even clear up at all. I had to add 5 more lights and crank them up to the highest efficiency and power (watts) and turn the gama down low. So far, this is the only way to get large scenes to render with minimal grain. I have to reduce the remaining noise in photoshop.

But some times it does this on a small scene too. But it renders pretty good with a portrait scene with one person and a couple of props. That's the only problem I have with Reality/LuxRender, big scenes. For example, the forest scene by Andrey Pestryakov cannot render in LuxRender at all, but it can render in Daz just fine.

wardmatt1, Have you done any more renderings?

swordkensia

Have you tried adjusting your camera settings.?? i.e. f-stop, exposure, etc.

These are the things you need to adjust in order to improve the amount of light in a scene, also check that your HDRI is actually bright enough to correctly light a scene, as If it is not raising the HDRI's gain, will cause it to generate alot of firefly's. This is more a possible problem with the HDRI map than with LuxRender.

Cheers,

S.K.

Jake_35533

swordkensia said:

Have you tried adjusting your camera settings.?? i.e. f-stop, exposure, etc.

These are the things you need to adjust in order to improve the amount of light in a scene, also check that your HDRI is actually bright enough to correctly light a scene, as If it is not raising the HDRI's gain, will cause it to generate alot of firefly's. This is more a possible problem with the HDRI map than with LuxRender.

Cheers,

S.K.

Wow, Thanks, I will try this. I didn't know that the firefly's are caused by that. I will also try the f-stop, exposure settings too to see if that improves the renderings.

XoechZ

I have just checked the Reality User Guide about IBL. There it says that HDRI spheres usually generate a very weak light. So it is a common practise to raise the IBL gain to 3 or 4. I have never worked with IBL so far, so I cannot verify that. But maybe you can try it to avoid some additional lightning.

Edit: Have you tried to use a sun instead of HDRI?

Jake_35533

XoechZ said:

I have just checked the Reality User Guide about IBL. There it says that HDRI spheres usually generate a very weak light. So it is a common practise to raise the IBL gain to 3 or 4. I have never worked with IBL so far, so I cannot verify that. But maybe you can try it to avoid some additional lightning.

Edit: Have you tried to use a sun instead of HDRI?

The reason why I use HDRI is because it gives even lighting to an outdoor scene. When I use sun (or distant light as DS calls it) it gives a harsh shadow, especially on mate surfaces. HDRI gives soft shadows (sometimes too soft) and makes reflective surfaces super realistic. Here is an example of HDRI light being the only light for the armor. This image for a book cover published on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/The-Last-Spartan-Different-ebook/dp/B007MNYL44) would not look like this with sun or even a mesh or soft box light.

Jake_35533

Actually I found out that Luxrender has this feature called refine brush. It tells Lux to focus on spots that need more work. Its the new Luxrender 1.2. I haven't tried it yet, just wonder if anyone else has tested it to see if it works or not.

Hiro Protagonist

The refine brush works very well and there is an overall improvement in respect to noise in the 1.2-dev builds, but note that a bug was fixed in respect to the handling of displacement maps in the build of 23 November (I think it was) and onwards, and because Reality made its own fix for this bug, to cut a long story short, displacement is inverted if you use the current version Reality (there will be and update to Reality to address this). I've stuck with an earlier build of 1.2-dev for this reason. I've been using this for 2 or 3 months now and I find it a great improvement.

Now, although I use Luxrender exclusively, I have very little patience with long renders (3 to 4 hours is my limit, and it is often less) so I keep my lighting efficient. This pretty much means using only mesh lights, and using no more than three, in a traditional photographer's 3-point lighting set up. I also enclose interior scenes in a cube, which cuts out a lot of unnecessary sampling of those things in your scene that don't have any influence on your picture. I've occasionally used IBL but it certainly takes a lot longer to clear up; however, you can cover this up to a certain extent by using mesh lights and/or sun/sky as well as IBL and you will still get that realistic daylight effect that IBL provides (not to mention a nice sky). Here's and example, which I think rendered for about 4 hours or so. I have an i7 2600K (8 cores) and currently only use CPU rendering. This render uses those three kinds of light together. I mostly do interior renders, though, and for that mesh lights are ideal and the most efficient.

By the way, you can cut down the harsh shadows of the Sun light by increasing its size (and reducing its gain to compensate). For example. size at 20 and gain at 0.0025 should give you the equivalent intensity to size 1 and gain 1, but with nice soft shadows. A larger light source gives softer shadows in nature and in Luxrender.

There's a fair bit to learn about using Luxrender, but that's also true with DAZ's 3Dlight, if you want top quality renders, but on balance, I find Luxrender the easier, and more intuitive, to use of the two. It's also great to be able to adjust the lights, non-destructively, while your scene is rendering so that you can see the effect immediately.

Jaderail

Anyone Else notice that the OP Has faded? Could it be Over load? They asked for Like, Don't Like, and then tips ect.. Not for a lighting war.

Jake_35533

Jaderail said:

Anyone Else notice that the OP Has faded? Could it be Over load? They asked for Like, Don't Like, and then tips ect.. Not for a lighting war.

Well, I'm sure wardmatt1is learning from what we are discussing. He is welcome to join in or show so more images he has rendered.

Jake_35533

Hiro Protagonist said:

You must have a powerful computer because the most simple rendering takes 3 hours before its finished. The bigger renders take no less than 6 hours on my quad core i7 2.4GHz Macbook pro with 16GB of ram.

This pretty much means using only mesh lights, and using no more than three, in a traditional photographer's 3-point lighting set up. I also enclose interior scenes in a cube, which cuts out a lot of unnecessary sampling of those things in your scene that don't have any influence on your picture. I've occasionally used IBL but it certainly takes a lot longer to clear up; however, you can cover this up to a certain extent by using mesh lights and/or sun/sky as well as IBL and you will still get that realistic daylight effect that IBL provides (not to mention a nice sky). Here's and example, which I think rendered for about 4 hours or so. I have an i7 2600K (8 cores) and currently only use CPU rendering. This render uses those three kinds of light together. I mostly do interior renders, though, and for that mesh lights are ideal and the most efficient.

I may try the cube thing for my scenes. I disagree with IBL being longer to clean up. WHen I use mesh lights and IBL, the IBL is usually finished before the mesh lights are. Like the picture above, the armor rendered clean in about 30 minutes. Reflections are very clean in Luxrender using IBL.

By the way, you can cut down the harsh shadows of the Sun light by increasing its size (and reducing its gain to compensate). For example. size at 20 and gain at 0.0025 should give you the equivalent intensity to size 1 and gain 1, but with nice soft shadows. A larger light source gives softer shadows in nature and in Luxrender.

I will try this too. But this setting doesn't appear for spot lights.

There's a fair bit to learn about using Luxrender, but that's also true with DAZ's 3Dlight, if you want top quality renders, but on balance, I find Luxrender the easier, and more intuitive, to use of the two. It's also great to be able to adjust the lights, non-destructively, while your scene is rendering so that you can see the effect immediately.

I use Luxrender/Reality exclusively for its ability to render at much higher quality and for the ability to have control over multiple lights, changing their color, exporting images with transparency, and my biggest like (and one most people miss) is the ability to turn any object or any part of an object into a light. Like the picture below, I selected the eyes and parts of the armor and changed the material into a light. It works for car headlights, TV sets, and lamps too. You can't do that realistically in DAZ at all. And nothing can compare with metal renderings.

Herald of Fire

I use both Luxrender and 3Delight. For toon renders, I wouldn't touch Reality with a barge pole. Lux lends itself very well to more realistic renders, but I've not once got a decent toon out of the mix, no matter how I play around with the materials. There are also times I just want a tidy render in less time, which I'll exclusively use 3Delight for. Again, Reality is great for getting amazing results over time, but no one could argue it's particularly fast at doing so if you don't want fireflies and noise across your renders.

I'd love to make use of my graphics card for rendering, but the hardware support for Lux also seems rather hit and miss. Some scenes will render perfectly fine with it, and then the same scene loaded in later will crash. Judging by the Luxrender forums, it's a fairly well known issue, but as yet no solutions have been offered up.

So far this might seem overwhelmingly negative, but aside from some issues I've gotten some amazing results from the Reality plugin with the right sort of scenes. The ability to affect the lighting during the render is also very nice, as are the bloom and glare effects. I still have a long way to go before I could drop 3Delight though, as my Reality renders tend to be flooded with noise and fireflies even after twelve or more hours and despite my best lighting attempts.

Jake_35533

HeraldOfFire said:

I use both Luxrender and 3Delight. For toon renders, I wouldn't touch Reality with a barge pole. Lux lends itself very well to more realistic renders, but I've not once got a decent toon out of the mix, no matter how I play around with the materials. There are also times I just want a tidy render in less time, which I'll exclusively use 3Delight for. Again, Reality is great for getting amazing results over time, but no one could argue it's particularly fast at doing so if you don't want fireflies and noise across your renders.

I agree that 3Delight is more consistent in its renderings. I would like to see some of your toon renderings becuase I am thinking about doing my next project like that. The fireflys are not that common with me. Only when I use DS lighting like the spotlight or distant lights. I almost exclusively use mesh light, soft box and HDRI.

I'd love to make use of my graphics card for rendering, but the hardware support for Lux also seems rather hit and miss. Some scenes will render perfectly fine with it, and then the same scene loaded in later will crash. Judging by the Luxrender forums, it's a fairly well known issue, but as yet no solutions have been offered up.

Are you use Mac or windows? Also, when you name your file when you choose your temp folder just before rendering, if you add a dash, dot or capital letters, it causes luxrender to crash.

So far this might seem overwhelmingly negative, but aside from some issues I've gotten some amazing results from the Reality plugin with the right sort of scenes. The ability to affect the lighting during the render is also very nice, as are the bloom and glare effects. I still have a long way to go before I could drop 3Delight though, as my Reality renders tend to be flooded with noise and fireflies even after twelve or more hours and despite my best lighting attempts.

It all depends on how powerful your computer is and if you use spotlight from DS or reality lights and how much ram you have. I could never get the lighting to look higher than a plastic doll in DS. Reality is my only rendering solution.

3dLux

Jake__Russel said:

FInally, someone who appreciates the Reality plugin for DS. I use it exclusively because I haven't totally figured out how to get a good rendering from DS. Reality is far easier to set up good lighting.

Yay! Fellow Reality users :cheese:

I had a few renders in 3Delight before switching over to Reality. I had put together a workstation for the specific purpose of doing decent renders (I couldn't even open files with my old setup if they had complex textures :blank: )

After Paolo's help I was able to get Reality working and I haven't looked back since :lol: I keep telling myself I should learn more about 3Delight rendering but I find Reality more intuitive because of my background in cinematography.

Regarding fireflies/unresolved pixels, the attached file took ages to render because of the shadow area in the raft. I had scaled down the glossiness and with the benefit of hindsight should have scaled it down more. It was initially rendered with 8 cores, then used the hyper-threading feature of my i7 which halved the rendering time in other works, then set my Sabretooth Z77 mobo to turbo, which further halved the render time.

That said, this still took ages because the unresolved pixles only disappeared at a whopping 37K s/p

Yup, that's 37,000 samples per pixel :P

Aside from the undeformed raft (which I'm now working on) the quality of the render is pretty good %-P

Jake_35533

banditcameraman said:

That said, this still took ages because the unresolved pixles only disappeared at a whopping 37K s/p

Yup, that's 37,000 samples per pixel :P

Aside from the undeformed raft (which I'm now working on) the quality of the render is pretty good %-P

I remember seeing this in the DAZ gallery. The reason why it rendered so long is probably because of the depth of field blur. I never render it in reality, I use atmosphere camera effects in DS and render out an alpha depth map (which take about 5 minutes). Then apply the DOF in photoshop using lens blur. In photoshop, you can adjust the blur to any amount, you can even reverse the blur to be in the foreground.

Herald of Fire

Jake__Russel said:

I agree that 3Delight is more consistent in its renderings. I would like to see some of your toon renderings becuase I am thinking about doing my next project like that. The fireflys are not that common with me. Only when I use DS lighting like the spotlight or distant lights. I almost exclusively use mesh light, soft box and HDRI.I'll confess I do use Daz lighting in some instances, mostly spotlights. as there doesn't seem to be a way to have a controlled form of lighting with the Reality defaults. Things like mesh lighting are too broad, and affect more parts of the scene than I would otherwise like, whereas spotlights are directional and can be easily aimed at a target, as well as giving you control over the spread angle. The only way I know how to add similar controls to Reality lighting is to create my own tubes and put mesh lights within it, which feels like a messy solution.

Jake__Russel said:

Are you use Mac or windows? Also, when you name your file when you choose your temp folder just before rendering, if you add a dash, dot or capital letters, it causes luxrender to crash.

Windows, but like I said it's a common issue and the problem can arise even when resuming a render in progress. There are certain things I know cause it to crash though, so whenever I use those items I'll intentionally avoid rendering with hardware acceleration on. That being said, even when it IS active, I haven't noticed any drastic changes in render times. SmallLuxGPU works blindingly fast but also cripplingly restrictive. It relies purely on hardware texture memory, so everything ends up losing a lot of detail.

It all depends on how powerful your computer is and if you use spotlight from DS or reality lights and how much ram you have. I could never get the lighting to look higher than a plastic doll in DS. Reality is my only rendering solution. Currently using an i7-2600K Sandybridge CPU with 16Gb RAM and a GeForce GTX 560Ti card. Not exactly a powerhouse rendering machine, but it stands up pretty well to the newest challenges I can throw at it, as well as any modeling tasks I might need it for. Like I said before, I do use spotlights but I've also heard they translate fairly well in Reality so shouldn't a major issue to use anyway.

frank0314

I love the results you get with reality but don't have the patience to adjust everything in it to get it looking perfect. I wish I did

Jake_35533

Frank0314 said:

I love the results you get with reality but don't have the patience to adjust everything in it to get it looking perfect. I wish I did

That is what I say about DS render engine. I don't have the patience to tweak all the little things and still not get a photo real image. With reality/luxrender, you can use one HDRI image and light the entire scene with realistic shadows and lighting. There are many free HDRI images online too.

Herald of Fire

Jake__Russel said:

Frank0314 said:

I love the results you get with reality but don't have the patience to adjust everything in it to get it looking perfect. I wish I did

That is what I say about DS render engine. I don't have the patience to tweak all the little things and still not get a photo real image. With reality/luxrender, you can use one HDRI image and light the entire scene with realistic shadows and lighting. There are many free HDRI images online too.Only with properly tweaked materials. Really, that's the key thing with using Reality. Every single surface needs to be scrutinized before using it in a scene because it can give odd effects. For the figures I use especially, characters come out almost plastic without greatly reducing the glossiness, and some surfaces, even stones, can come out with an almost mirror sheen to them. There are some ACSEL shaders available for some of the things I use, but not all of them are particularly good presets either, though I confess the ones added by the plugin author tend to be far better than most.

The biggest issue for me is that many shaders have no equivalent in Reality. Especially things like the pwEffects shaders which allow everything from ghosts to plasma. There's no way at all to mimic their effects in Reality as the materials simply don't exist. That means that any work I create which uses those shaders has to be rendered in 3Delight.

I suppose that's why I can't give up either one really. I love Reality for it's superb lighting, and I love 3Delight for its versatility. Reality really lives up to its name in that it's mostly designed for doing true-to-life work. As I do an equal amount of cartoon or fantasy works, a straight 50-50 split is inevitable.

Jake_35533

I usually just make all the shaders matte and then add gloss to what I need. Skin tends to be about right and doesn't need that much tweaking. I actually reuse scenes by merging them in, then Reality keeps the settings of that object along with the current new scene.

3Delight can do fur, hair (the new Garibaldi plugin), true ambient textures, and pweffects and camera effects. But I have learned to do some of the effects in photoshop.

Has anyone compared the renderings of Carrara with Luxrender? Do you think they are about the same or one has an advantage?

Jake_35533

This is a raw rendering from Luxrender using only one HDRI. No mesh, no soft box, no spotlight. It rendered fully in 5 minutes. Most of my normal non-reflective scenes take hours.

wardmatt1

Jaderail said:

Anyone Else notice that the OP Has faded? Could it be Over load? They asked for Like, Don't Like, and then tips ect.. Not for a lighting war.

Lol.

I wasn't gone just applying some of the tips you guys gave me. and here is the newest version of the image.
Luxrender Portrait 1.1

Chohole

Hi and welcome back. We were worried that maybe you thought that your thread had been somewhat hijacked.as it appears to have turned into a debate on reality in general, rather than a thread where you can show us your own renders and we can comment and give you advice.

We do suggest to people that they use the Art Studio as a means to having their own image portfolio on the DAZ 3D site, and if this what what you had intended, then the thread had certainly wandered away from that.

This was the reason I suggested that you did actually attach your images to the thread for all to see easily, as yours are the only images that are not immediately visible,

You can attach images up to 2000 x 2000 pixels as long as the kb size is less than 1mb

Jake_35533

wardmatt1 said:

Jaderail said:

Anyone Else notice that the OP Has faded? Could it be Over load? They asked for Like, Don't Like, and then tips ect.. Not for a lighting war.

Lol.

I wasn't gone just applying some of the tips you guys gave me. and here is the newest version of the image.
Luxrender Portrait 1.1

Your image is better. Do you have any forest or interesting sets? She would it in a sunny setting with some trees. You know you can output the image with the alpha and edit a background photo in.

Why don't you include some of your best images here so others can see them?