Those incredible renders - How do they do it?

Jay Jay_1264499

Hi and sorry if this has been answered many times but couldn't find it on forums.

Since using Daz I've always been impressed with quality of the renders that are used to sell new figures etc. I was wondering though 'how do they do it?'. Is it all in the lighting or is shading or a mix of the both or something else? Ambient light seems to be a really big feature on these renders but how do you mimic that in Daz?

I've looked into lighting and found Dreamlight's freebie video on the subject very helpful, but wasn't sure if his LightMaster series would help as I read a few negative posts about the spam emails and needing to purchase other items to get the full benefit etc

If anyone can recommend any tips, pointers or YouTube videos I'd be eternally grateful

Thank you to anyone who can help and apologies if this has been answered loads of times

Tjeb

Like with most things, it's a combination.
Most important indeed is your light set-up.
Minimum is a three point light set up, That is so basic for every photographer, it's even on a Wiki page.
You've probably bought some stuff here in the store; frequently they come with their own lightset,
so after a couple of years, you have a number of light sets to play with, rather than build your own from scratch.
At least, that is how I do it.
Making good use of shaders is also important.
Now, have a look at the lower right of my pic, you see all the lines: white/yellow/red ?
Those are the Golden Rules of art composition. (see Wiki)
Try to keep those in mind when you choose your camera view. Jaderail made a tool to help in that.
And don't forget to create a new camera and to switch on the DOF.
But in the end, there's also something like experience and inspiration....

Jay Jay_1264499

Thank you very much for the reply and tips, there's some great info for me to go on

Thank you again

Noved1

this might help you out some. i am no good at advice, so please (Polar) bear with me.

the first is a render i just did with no lights at all. it took me three seconds to render.

the next is that exact same render, except i bathed it in wonderful environment lights, deep shadow maps, and a good camera FOV angle. it took 10 minutes to render.

The last render, is that same second one, except i have put well made clothes on her, blew her hair up, then put her in an epic pose, and placed her in a huge beautiful cavern room, and added camera blur. and i also bumped the resolution up to Jesus levels. it took 40 minutes to render. click on this one to see its full resolution.

do you get the Gist of the point, my friend? i could have added rain, fog, dust, monsters, and if i really wanted, i could have fully animated it and hired voice actors and such. and thus become famous. but that would have taken quite a awhile.

Jay Jay_1264499

Hey Noved thanks for the reply

Those last two renders are pretty sweet. Wheat sort of environment lighting did you use? Three point or more? I'm a big Vue user so normally import my figures into Vue but am keen to try everything in Daz to see what workflow I prefer. How would you go about adding stuff like haze, rays and fog in Daz

Again, thanks for the reply

Noved1

hmm...i have no experience with vue my friend. with daz there are many ways to add effects like that. the most common i use is the daz uberPoint lights, or volumetric cameras, that can add fog and dust with no problem. just search the shop for effects and such and you will find huge amounts of tools. the second way i use to get effects is with good old fashion photoshop. and as for the lights, i use a combination of rim lights, backlights, enviroment shadow maps and shading rate tricks. also, for people who are short on time you can use the Uber environment light 2.0. that is good for quick quality. look here for examples-- http://www.daz3d.com/portrait-lighting-tutorial-for-ds4 http://www.daz3d.com/core-lighting-3

also, here is an example of a render using only the uber enviroment light and one single spotlight behind her. it took me little effort to figure out a good shadow position, so i could put a shadow mapped light behind her. so basically this is uberEnviroment, and one spotlight. then i added the light ball and smoke using photoshop. does that help out?

Jay Jay_1264499

Perfect, thanks again for the reply. Yeah I think that's given me loads to go on with so I really appreciate the advice. Nice render also :-)

Thank you for your help

mark128

Outdoors in the real world you not only have direct light from the sun, you also have refracted and reflected light coming from all directions. This is the so called "ambient light". In a biased rendering engine like 3Delight, you have to fake the ambient light somehow.

Ambient light comes from all directions and does not cast a shadows, because it is coming from all directions. A very simple way to fake ambient light is to use distant lights coming from all directions with shadows turned off. For all directions I usually use 4 or 5 distant lights arranged as shown in the image. You can add more if you like.

The image labeled "ambient only" shows a render with just this ambient light. This is what I call comic book lighting. It does not look realistic at all. Too much ambient light destroys the realism in a render.

You need lights that cast shadows to make a image look realistic. If you turn off the ambient lights, and add a single distant light set to ray traced shadows you get the result in the image labeled "sun only". This image looks much more three dimensional and realistic, but the shadows are very harsh and don't look realistic.

You need to combine the ambient light with the single shadow casting distant light you use for the sun. I usually use the sun distant light at 100% and the 4 ambient lights around 20%. This gives the results in the image labeled " sun + ambient".

You could bring the ambient up more and the sun down, so the shadows are not as deep, but the more ambient light you put in the scene the more the lighting will tend towards the comic book look. You need ambient, but you need to keep it as low as possible.

I have used this lighting in outdoor scenes. It is simple to setup and it renders quickly.

mark128

The distant lights produce hard shadows that are realistic for a clear day outdoors, but are not that great for portraits.

For portraits you are better off using large light sources that give soft shadows, like the UberAreaLight planes. The setup shot shows the basic 3 point lighting setup using UberAreaLight planes. I have parented cameras to the light planes for easier pointing. There is a tutorial thread on how to use UberAreaLight lights.

The Main light is left of the camera and above. The fill light is right of the camera. The fill light is at 50% the intensity of the main light.

The resulting image has shadows, but they are shallow, soft shadows. Those soft shadows are what gives the image its 3D look.

mark128

The setup image shows what I call glamour lighting. You have two UberAreaLight planes above and below the models head, angled to point at the models head. The camera is shooting between the two light panes. Because the area light panes are big compared to the model's head and very close, they produce very soft shadows. The two lights are at the same intensity, so the shadows are very subtle. The resulting image still has a strong 3D look because of those soft, subtle shadows.

Fashion photographers use lighting similar to this for makeup ads and other glamour closeups, and that is where I got this idea.

Herald of Fire

A quick way to emulate ambient light is to use the UberEnvironment light which comes with Daz Studio. Essentially, it's a giant version of the area light which transmits light evenly across the whole area. You can also apply textures to it to create an image based light. A directional light and a single UberEnvironment light can give wonderful results on its own without the need for complex light setups.

Something to bear in mind though is that using non-raytraced lighting to fill in dark spots can give unwanted results as the 'light beam' will also penetrate through walls and figures. Sometimes this is a good thing, but it can equally be troublesome if you're using any surfaces which rely on subsurface scatter (SSS) since it can make figures 'glow' unexpectedly.

If you post some of your images to the forums, it would give us an idea of where your skill level is at, and how best to approach learning new techniques. Check out my DA in the sig if you want to see examples of some of my own work, and feel free to ask how I achieved the effects therein.

Jay Jay_1264499

Good morning all

Thank you all very much for your replies and the fantastic advice. I'm pretty new to Daz in respects to doing all the work in Daz as I normally export figures and use in my Vue scenes. But have been pretty much fascinated with the brilliant quality of the renders here which can look ferry different to how they look in Vue

Here's a link to my Vue gallery so you can see my level. I've got a long way to go so I appreciate all your advice so far

http://www.cornucopia3d.com/portfolio/jaywalker

3dLux

o_O

Your landscapes and day and night exteriors are downright stunning :worship:

Just off the top of my head (and from my experience as a cinematographer) an area for improvement are the figures in the foreground. Your modeling and lighting of the background provides a solid foundation, lighting the foreground characters using the methods described here will help them "pop" and give it an emotional anchor (the emotion your characters convey will be made even stronger by that ;) ).

Of course the challenge is to make sure the characters don't look like they're obviously lit and the light isn't "sourcey" but "motivated".

Welcome to Daz :D

Jay Jay_1264499

Hi Banditcameraman, Thank you for your advice and for looking at my gallery, I always have nagging self doubt with my 'art' so having someone say it's not bad really means a lot. Thank you

Looking forward to experimenting with the whole compositing side of Daz based on all the great advice I've been given in this thread.

Thank you for the welcome

Jay Jay_1264499

Evening all

One week on from when I posted this thread and just wanted again to express my thanks to everyone who replied with advice on how I could improve my renders. its been very much appreciated. I've been going through the above recommendations and trying my hand at Uberlighting which is a great tool. I also purchased the really cool Luxus training videos which have also explained a lot as well

Here's a test using the Supersuit, GIS and a backdrop of one of my Vue images. I used one Uberlight and a directional light to mimic the sun and composited it all in Hitfilm. Still got a long way to go but all your advice has really helped this week. Thank you!