Converting Sci-Fi Circular SkyWalk from 3dlight to iray, any advice from experience? :D

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I am in the process of converting the Sci-Fi Circular SkyWalk from 3dlight to Iray to use in a scene, any advice from experience? :D

I've run RSSY 3Delight to Iray Converter on it, and other than a couple of minor mistakes its made, most of it has turned out well so far.  On part of the short little anteroom where the doorwars are, for instance, came out chrome-reflective, while the rest of it didn't, but it was a simple matter to select one of the other metal surfaces in there, copy the surface, and paste that surface onto the part that went all chrome, so that it was back to consistent-looking again.  The surface that went shiney chrome was called Metal, so I guess the script decided "Oh, that's supposed to be shiney!" and made it shiney.  3DLight renders (of the non-converted version of the set) don't show that area as shiney-chrome, so changing out that one surface to match the other same-textures surfaces was the right move for it.

The only other shader issue I've run into is those curving, tubular light fixture thingies along the floor in the main corridor.  The iray converter makes the glass part of those go opaque.  Pretty simple matter to go through and simply replace all the glass surfaces on those with some other glass shader, but I'm wondering if someone else has done this already and can tell me which glass shader they were most satisfied with, or if there's a simple way to tweak the existing glass shader settings on these so they go back to being see-through again.

The remaining issue is, the light sconses in the doorways are now dark as sin, and the spotlights in there that are clearly meant to create a little splash of light from them onto the walls and floor don't seem to be doing anything in iray render.  And I'm guessing the light hotspots in those tubular lighting thingies probably aren't going to be rendering much light effects for me either, once I've tweaked the glass in them.  I was expecting the converter script to adjust the luminances and such on those spotlights and pointlights but... nope, either I accidently turned that converter option off in the script, or it didn't up the lumens enough.

Naturally I'm going to have to lose (hide) the fake sky surround thingy, since those don't work right in iray anyway, but I've already selected an appropriate HDRI to use in the later renders.

There may be other minor things I might have missed here or there.

So, anyone else here converted this set over?  What was your experience with doing that?

 

NorthOf45

So many I want to convert, so little time. Oh, wait, lots of time nowadays...

The RSSY converter uses keywords in the filename to select an appropriate shader preset, and defaults to the basic shader if t doesn't find a suitable match. In the dialog, you can override the shader used if you know a particular surface isn't going to convert properly. For the red light fixtures, they outside glass is called "lens", so the converter desn't know what to do. You can replace it with the clear glass default before accepting the conversion. The inner red filaments could be replaced with the "red light" option, since they are most likely meant to be emissive. The wall sconces can also be converted to an emissive surface and drop the pointlights and spotlights. In fact, drop all the discrete lights, they do become redundant.

You can play around with the glass opacity/translucence or try different presets from any of a number of products. There is no "right" way, use whatever looks good. They can be perfectly clear, a little fuzzy, tinted, whatever.

I do find the interior a little dark using just HDRI lighting through the windows. Maybe make the interior walls and ceiling a little more metallic/glossy to bounce the light around.

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Well, I've set the Lense surface on those tube things to one of the iray uber glass shaders, and then did this test render.  Came out a bit darker than your render, but then I haven't placed any lights in there other than the provided ones, and an HDRI.  Not really sure yet what to do about the doorway lamps, though.

 

NorthOf45

For the tubes, apply the DAZ Uber Emissive shader to the "filament" surfaces. Ctrl-double-click and chose Apply: Images->Ignore (not that there are any in this case). Set the Emission color to whatever the diffuse color is (some dark red) and adjust the temperature (~4000 K) and luminance (i.e., 200 Kcd/m^2). The original used ambient, which does not translate in Iray, to get the red glow, and the point lights for highlights.

Do the same for the doorway lamps, on the "glass" surface, using the same emission color as the base color (a medium-dark teal). Blue lights are usually hotter, so temperature to 6500 K, luminosity to maybe 100-200 Kcd/m^2. Again, the original had ambient and a pointlight for the glow, and spotlights to illuminate. With emissive surfaces, you don't really need anything else..

I did drop the Exposure Value to 12 to brighten things up a bit, even with the sun shining in the windows. There is no other lighting other than the wall lamps and the red floor lights in there, so it will be pretty dark. Adding metallicity to the walls and ceiling, and some glossy roughness to prevent a mirror-like finish (not a good look) bounce and scatter the light a bit.

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Okay, did most of that now.  Haven't added made any changes to the walls or ceiling, though, but did do everything else you suggested.  For some reason, in mine, the glow from the filament is much more dominating the fixture.  This may have something to do with what shader I applied to the Lense surface, in this case I THINK I used Glass - Solid - Clear (from the DAZ Uber shader set), maybe I should have used Glass- Thin - Clear instead?

NorthOf45

Try it on one of them. If you don't like it you can always undo. Thin-walled would make it look more like a tube, solid more like a rod, where refraction will play a bigger role, which is what you are seeing. Luminance can be adjusted as you like. Maybe decrease the intensity on the red floor filaments, increase the intensity on the wall lights. I guess for them to give any meaningful light, they should be up around 5000 - 10000 Kcd/m^2. You could also copy one of the wall lights and add more of them along the inside wall to brighten the corridor. Or, add some light fixtures to the ceiling from one of the various lighting products. Or, make it slightly emissive. Or, ... experiment. There's more than one way to get there, and you are off to a good start.

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Yeah, already knew it was a simple matter to replace them again, I was simply too lazy to do it last night before heading to bed.  Anyway, here's the new render with the shader changed on the Lense surfaces to that other one.  Oddly, if I don't have the particular sky HDRI loaded, leaving the defauilt outdoor-lighting one in place, the scene lights up more, but I get a black plane visible out the windows.  I'm guessing that MIGHT be an indication I'd need to go turn off Draw Ground in the default settings for that, but I'm wondering what I should look for in the new HDRI to adjust the lighting level up closer to what's in the original.

I also think I should probably lower the emmissive a bit on the filiment, since it seems to be showing a little TOO bright in the scene.  I have it set to 200, I'll probably set it to 100 later, but I have other fish to fry tonight.

NorthOf45

Some HDRIs only do the sky above the horizon, and anything below ground is faked or blanked out, nothing to do with Draw Ground unless there is actually something casting a shadow. The one I used had a full spherical image, and a well-defined sun, so it is quite bright. 

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Well, I'm talking about the one that arrives when you start a scene fresh, and that has the sky itself hidden so all you get is the light.  But, yeah, I've encountered sky HDRIs that had what looked like a darker, solid floor of cloud forming the bottom section of the image.  Anyway, the render on the left was done with the default lighting environment, the one on the right was done with an HDRI where the bottom (below the ground) part of the HDRI is basically a flipped-upside-down mirror image of the sky, made a little more out of focus.  The latter HDRI, I'm satisfied with.