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Understanding that I am way late for this party, I'm offering waves of thanks for this thread, and for these instructions specifically. Whew! What a relief to know how to get this to work!
It's time to revive this party anyway, @mavante. I know I have been remiss in not posting images that used the older sets.
One of the older sets I use a lot is Rubble in the Bronx: Alleyway. It's big set, and there are a lot of details modeled in. When I use this set, I use the Geometry Editor Tool to select and hide/remove as much of the set as I can that won't impact the render to decrease the memory needs in Iray.
Here are some images I created with this set in the background:
Back Alley Negotiations
I used Ultrascatter to add the small rocks to the alley surface, which doesn't hold up too well close up. It's been a while, so I'm only guessing that I used metal shaders on the fire escape/balcony and the downspout supports.
Attitude
The "wall" she is leaning on is a cube primitive with a shader applied.
Another image with the above character is Detention, with this set visible through the blinds on the window.
In this image, other than hiding as many polys as I could with the Geometry Editor, the set is out-of-the-box with Iray Uber Base applied.
Yay! I love this thread. And since we've resuscitated it, I have a question specifically about bitwelder's Top of the World I hope somebody can help me with.
I followed to the letter the instructions that were posted on, I think, the first page of this thread. It worked, after a fashion, but I never could get the sun to act like a sun. Sooooooo, I assayed to try a trick somebody else posted in this forum (somewhere) by locating the image used for the skydome, making that the image for the basic DAZ Environment dome in Render settings (with infinite sphere), and then turning off the visibility of the skydome that comes with the product.
(I thought I would be really clever then—Ha!—and use IBL Master to create a new "sun" alliigned with the sun in the environment image. I hope you can follow my convoluted story.)
Anyway, I never got that far because the results without the skydome on were inferior in ways I couldn't find any way to fix.
I'm attaching two images: The first is with the skydome visibility off, the second is with it on. I've aligned the DAZ environment dome rotation to at least approximate the rotation of the product's skydome. So when the product's skydome is turned off, the DAZ environment looks washed out and desaturated comparred to skydome. I tried fiddling with various settings for the DAZ Render Environment dome, but I couldn't figure out any way to get it to look like the skydome image.
Any ideas?
I love the color and lighting in your renders.
Did you try using the Sun Dial Set located in the Content Library > My DAZ 3D Library > Render Presets > Iray? It's a prop that makes it pretty easy to put the sun where you need it.
I don't have Top of the World, so I can't test it.
Nope, never tried that. There is an installed "sun" in the Top of the World product, which is a distant light named "sun." I get the feeling that the Sun Dial Set must work with the default Daz sun, and if that is the case, then using it will not resolve the primary problem I'm having with the image looking washed out when I use it for the Daz dome, as opposed to it being used on the product-included skydome. And that skydome doesn't let the DAZ "sun" into the picture. (Sigh) I'll figure something out. I think. Or I'll get fed up and just use some different scene product.
Okay, I think I understand now. It sounds like you are putting the included skydome image in the Render Settings > Editor > Environment > Environment Map channel. Is that correct?
If so, I suspect the problem you're having is because the skydome map is not an HDRI.
There is a way to use a skydome in Iray. See if the comments in this thread help.
(I've used this technique several times. It's a great way to use older skydomes, though the quality of the image is important.)
Précisément.
I have little to no doubt that you are correct again.
At the risk of repeating myself until we go around and around and turn ourselves into butter, I said in my original post above that I got the product's own skydome working—as a skydome—fine in iRay using the steps laid out by Llynara for this specific product that are on page 1 of this very thread.
The problem I'm trying to resolve is to get some form of sunlight into the scene—while using the product's own skydome—that will approximate the position and colors of the "sun" that exists in the image projected onto the skydome. And unless I am very mistaken—and Lord knows I often am—there is no way to get the light from the built-in iRay Sun-Sky (latitude, longitude, time-of-day, etc.) to penetrate into said skydome and illuminate the objects (props, people, etc.) that are positioned inside the skydome.
I'm sorry I haven't made myself clear earlier, and fear that maybe I still haven't. As for this thread you referenced, I have read it a number of times, and I just don't quite get it. I don't understand how it addresses or resolves the situation I just described in the paragraph immediately above, or why it is better than Llynara's technique of applying the Uber Base to the skydome.
I'll load it all back up tomorrow and try the technique you suggested and hope it will start to make some sense. Thank you very much for your interest and taking the time to try to lift me up.
EDIT TO ADD: This problem I'm having is pulling this thread off-topic, which I didn't intend to do, so I'm taking these technical problems about the skydome and lighting to more appropriate subs and threads. Thanks very much, L'Adair, for your patience with me and your help!
Level 19 by Stonemason, added the iray uber shader and tweaked a few things to make it not so shiny in iray.
Oh, don't worry about that.
I didn't mean to take so long to answer, but it occurred to me a mini-tutorial would better serve both you and the community, so I created one! Here's the link to Using a 3DL Skydome in Iray. Please feel free to ask questions there, as well.
Now, you mustn't say that; I'm the one who was AWOL (having to do some client hand-holding) and in idle moments it hit me that I shouldn't be clogging this aesthetic thread up with my technical fogs, which is why I came by quickly and did the edit.
I am utterly gobsmacked. What a wonderful, lucid, logical, comprehensive, and comprehensible tutorial. Thank you so much for contributing that to the community. You have a rare combination of gifts: artistry, technical savy, logical sequential thought, a heaping of helpfulness, and pithy eloquence in prose. I hope somebody is paying you what you're worth. (Hello, Daz?)
I'm going to follow your tutorial stap-by-step tonight (in the wee hours) before I allow my head to hit the pillow, and I will let you know the result. Thank you again, sincerely.
Now comes mavante with a tale of woe. I followed your excellent tutorial step-by-step, to the letter, and the results I am getting are all the miserable sameness as what I was getting the moment I merely smeared the Uber Base all over everything.
As the attached image shows (with lots of little white spottiness because I didn't let the iRay preview cook for long), I cannot get a single ray of anything resembling sunlight to fall on that dull and dingy platform, or get any shadows to appear from any object on that platform.
I've even tried throwing a spotlight on it, with a spotlight target dead center of the columned structure, and cranked the luminance up to 100,000, and— And nothing. Zip. Nada. It's as though that platform and those columns and props are cursed to the point of achieving perfect evil, thereby absorbing all light aimed at it. (Welllll, okay, I may be getting a little histrionic there.) But, seriously, I have never seen anything at all like this.
I have spent, now, hours on this project, it's 2 in the morning, and if I continue a moment longer it will be at serious risk to my computer's life span.
I do sincerely thank you for the work you put into explaining a process that I hope will work for others.
@mavante, I'm seeing shadows on the floor in the image you attached. They are faint, but there.
Have you tried using a Camera, or only the Perspective View to render? Have you tried rendering from several different angles?
IRL, It can be difficult to get a good photo when pointing the camera directly at the sun. It's usually too dark in the foreground, or completely blown out in the sky. The "fix" is to light the scene, so using a flash fill can make a big difference.
DS Cameras are, by default I believe, set up to use a light (headlamp) automatically if there are no lights in the scene, (the sort of lights you add by using the Create > New [light] from the main menu.) You can change that in the Parameters for each camera. You can also control it in the Render Settings > General > Auto Headlamp parameter. I use the headlamp setting in General and set it to Never. The Perspective View is a special camera, which doesn't allow us to change the parameters. So you have to change the parameter in the Render Settings to turn the light off for Perspective View renders.
If your camera is lighting the scene, it may be negating the shadows of the "sun" to a large degree.
Get some sleep, and then take a look at the scene with fresh eyes.
This old Poser set "Temple Ruins" has long been vaulted, but it rendered alright with iRay straight out of the box import. Probably don't want to look too closely at the textures,
I only have sets that were in the Daz Studio pakage or free, So they are probably all old, but as far as I know they all render in Iray. This is just a little experiment I did with changing an outfit to make it more interesting. It was set in Castillo del Diablo.
Thank you! That was actually one of my very first renders :).
I think you might need to add maybe a distant light inside the skydome, positioning it as if it were the sun. However, I haven't yet experimented with converting and using skydomes in Iray, so I'm not sure if the lights (even inside the skydome) would work.
Otherwise, you could always add a rim light and position it where the sun is pointing towards your objects. Update: although since the spot light didn't work, not sure if the rim light would work as well :/.
I don't think you can move a distant light closer, or at least not close enough to be inside the dome. It shouldn't matter, though. As Refraction Weight is set to 1.00, the dome works like a window. But none of the DS Lights will work if the Environment Mode is set to Sun-Sky Only.
As an aside, when the Environment Mode selection says "Only", it really means only! That's tripped me up more times than I can count!
Also note:
I'm hoping @mavante will come back in and let us know if the headlamp was active. This issue is really bugging me, so much so, if the set were on sale I'd buy it, just so I can get this figured out for him/her.
A fair fairy tinkled a bell in my ear and told me I had been summoned.
I'm sorry I've been away so long, but I got asked to do an urgent project that is great for paying bills but unfortunate for my fun here.
It has to wrap up in the next few days, and as soon as possible thereafter I will be back with a full report on the "Top of the World" animation project.
Let me say this now, though, about the headlanp issue: I know with certainty that for much (most?) of my wranglings with that thing, the headlamp was definitely set to always off. I think that was the case with the last render I uploaded here. I've done a quck set of screen grabs to show how the file was last saved:
FIRST IMAGE: Skydome on, headlamp NEVER
SECOND IMAGE: Skydome off, headlamp NEVER
THIRD IMAGE: Skydome settings (as much as I could get to show), with most of the relevant things. (I may or may not have fiddled with them the last time I had the file opened, after taking screen shot upthread, but before saving and closing the file. but I'm relatively certain that even if I did, I did not save on exit, and left it just as I had saved it after setting the dome settings as in your tut.)
Sorry, but I've got to dash now. Hope this helps.
Uh-huh. Okay, L'Adair, I see how you are: You never write, you never call. I 'll just sit here and do my nails and drink vodka from the bottle. (Jooooooooooking!)
So several things have transpired since we met here last. One is that I have been having a discussion about this over here in this thread: Iray Sun-Sky with a Skydome: Possible or Impossible?
I'm attaching an image here that shows where the "fix" I described there currently stands. Don't be fooled, though: Even though this precise angle shows an approximation of the sort of dramatic lighting and shadows I had in mind, when I rotate the view around the platform--something I need to do for this animation—they diminish signifcantly. But there it is, and I'll either figure out why or I won't. Budgetary considerations are shoving me persistently toward "I won't."
With everything going on, online and off, I only got one real image completed this month. I'm sharing it in here because the set I used is Junk Alley. First the image:
Hospitality
Second, the comments. Junk Alley is a three sided environment with fences on either side and a concrete block wall at the back. It really lives up to the name, with old and useless junk strewn about. For this image, I simply applied the Iray Uber Base.
One drawback of the set is the lack of separate objects. The alley uses bones to make the junk moveable, but it's not conducive to kitbashing. Of the set, what you see here is the barrel with the fire, the ground, the back wall, some debris, and the electrical box and wire conduits in the back. If you look closely, you might be able to make out the tread of a tire between the dog and shopping cart. I hid anything that was out of frame, or that detracted from the image, and used props from Hobo Scene Props to give the set more of a lived in look. The ground has the same problem most old sets have when used with Iray, but you don't see that here because of the frost on the ground.
Overall, though, it's not a bad set.
@Fishtales shows off some renders using The Study in a post from Novica's current review thread here.