Iray Reflections Not Working

JTL2

In my sadistic quest to slowly tourture my 7 year old computer to death, I have recently switched from Poser to Daz. And while I've found Daz to be much more intinutive, I'm having an issue getting reflections to show up. I used Real Paints Iray from the Daz Store, the stock shader setting. This render only got to 51% convergience before my 9 hour render time expired. But even still. there's no reflections at all. 

The truck has some shiny on it from the lights, but no reflections. Is there some setting I need to turn on?

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Spec List:

• Windows 7 64bit SP1 (holdout)
• Asus Z77 Motherboard
• Nvidia G-Force 1060
• 32gb RAM
• Convergence: 51.2%
• Render time: 335 iterations/~9 hours

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felis

Are you sure the materials on the car is Iray?

Besides, if you are using DS 4.12 you should have rather new drivers for supporting the graphic card.

SpottedKitty

What lighting are you using? If it's a real HDRI, it seems to be overexposed. If it isn't an HDRI, that's probably why there are no reflections on the car. What are your settings in the Render Settings>Environment pane?

JTL2

SpottedKitty said:

What lighting are you using? If it's a real HDRI, it seems to be overexposed. If it isn't an HDRI, that's probably why there are no reflections on the car. What are your settings in the Render Settings>Environment pane?

I've been tweeking my render setting all day, so I don't remember what they all were, I was using a high def HDRI set to 500 intesity, plus I had pre-loaded daytime light setup.

But thinking you were onto something with overexposure (the sky should be blue, not white), I turned off the pre-loaded light setup and lowered the HDRI to 100, and ran a 15min render and got much better results in reflections. I think the character is a little to much in a shadow, but I'm going to point a spot light on the character and try another longform render when I go to bed tonight.

Thanks.

JTL2

That seems to have done the trick. Still only got to 7% convergance after 9 hours, but looks pretty good. Thanks for the help!!

SpottedKitty

JTL2 said:

I've been tweeking my render setting all day, so I don't remember what they all were, I was using a high def HDRI set to 500 intesity, plus I had pre-loaded daytime light setup.

Argleblargle. An intensity of 500? Are you sure this is the Environment Intensity dial in the Render Settings>Environment pane? That's hilariously, hideously, immensely mega-overexposed. Unless you also have the Render Settings>Tonemapping dials set for the light values at noon... on the planet Mercury. I usually never touch that dial; for test renders using the default HDRI environment map, it stays at the default value of 1.

Which "daytime light setup" do you mean?

One thing to remember about environment HDRIs is that there is usually (unless it's heavily overcast or night) a sun in the sky — this will determine the direction and sharpness of shadows. If you know where the sun is, you can rotate the HDRI using the Dome Rotation dial a bit further down the Render Settings pane to make the shadows fall exactly the way you want.

That said, your final render does look a lot better. There is what seems to be compression artifacts in the clouds, though. How "high def" is that HDRI? The ones I buy in the DAZ store or download from HDRIHaven are usually 8k or 16k, anything less might be OK for a light map, but doesn't have enough detail to work as a background on the environment dome.