More realistic lighting - Is Reality 4 the answer?

tl155180

Hi all,

I've been looking for a way to make the lighting in my renders look more 'realistic', in particular improving the ambient light to more accurately suggest light bouncing off surfaces etc and lighting the room that way (UE2 just isn't doing it for me).

I see that Reality 4 is on offer right now in March Madness - is this the answer I'm looking for? I can't tell from the product description, but the promo video seems to suggest so.

What experiences have people had with Reality 4? Is it fairly easy to use? Will it help produce more realistic looking lighting?

Thanks!

Scott Livingston

tl155180 said:

Hi all,

I've been looking for a way to make the lighting in my renders look more 'realistic', in particular improving the ambient light to more accurately suggest light bouncing off surfaces etc and lighting the room that way (UE2 just isn't doing it for me).
Seems like what you're looking for is an unbiased render engine. Options include LuxRender (which the Reality and Luxus plugins use), OctaneRender, and Cycles (Blender). I've seen great, highly realistic results from people using each of these.

I see that Reality 4 is on offer right now in March Madness - is this the answer I'm looking for? I can't tell from the product description, but the promo video seems to suggest so.

What experiences have people had with Reality 4? Is it fairly easy to use? Will it help produce more realistic looking lighting?

Thanks!

Is it the answer you're looking for? Quite possibly, though partly it's a question of personal preference...

Is it easy to use? I found it relatively easy to get started with it, at least once you get past installing it (different process compared with installing other products). There is a certain learning curve to the lighting and materials setup...very different from what you're used to with DAZ Studio/3Delight renders. But Reality's features and user guide do help make this learning process easier.

Will it help produce more realistic looking lighting? From my limited experience with Reality, I think I can safely answer "yes." Though a more complete answer would be, "Yes it can, but your results will depend on how you use it."

tl155180

Thanks Scott. Sounds like you're saying I might not even need Reality then... LuxRender is free isn't it? Could I just get better ambient lighting using that instead of 3Delight - even without Reality?

I must admit that after reading the promo material about Reality I'm no wiser as to what it actually does. Thats my n00bism talking. It looks like it comes with new lights (mesh lights?) and allows you to make adjustments to textures to make them appear more photo-realistic?

Does it actually do anything to improve ambient lighting itself, or is that all LuxRender's doing?

Edit: Also, I've been reading a few forum posts where people have been saying that Reality is full of bugs - is that true, in your experience?

Steven-V

Luxrender is the "engine" that does the rendering. Reality and Luxus are the "plugins" that give DAZ "access" to Luxrender. I don't think there is any easy way to use Luxrender without Reality or Luxus.

I have not used any of the above so I can't speak to bugs.

tl155180

steven.viscido said:

Luxrender is the "engine" that does the rendering. Reality and Luxus are the "plugins" that give DAZ "access" to Luxrender. I don't think there is any easy way to use Luxrender without Reality or Luxus.

I have not used any of the above so I can't speak to bugs.

Ah, I suspected that might be the case. Thanks Steven. So I probably do need Reality then (the product - not actual reality... who needs that?).

Probably worth the $25 investment then.

404nicg

I was considering nabbing it too since it's on sale. The only thing that turns me off about it is the drastically longer render times. In 3Delight I found you can get some pretty good results in 3-5 minutes with some tweaking of UberEnvironment2 and some well placed spot/distant lights. From what I've gathered, rendering for 3-5 minutes in Reality will get you garbage if you're going for a complete scene and not like a portrait shot.

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but to really get the most out of Reality you have to let your scenes render for hours, and that's not really practical for me because I like to do series of shots/tell stories with renders.

Scott Livingston

404nicg said:

I was considering nabbing it too since it's on sale. The only thing that turns me off about it is the drastically longer render times. In 3Delight I found you can get some pretty good results in 3-5 minutes with some tweaking of UberEnvironment2 and some well placed spot/distant lights. From what I've gathered, rendering for 3-5 minutes in Reality will get you garbage if you're going for a complete scene and not like a portrait shot.

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but to really get the most out of Reality you have to let your scenes render for hours, and that's not really practical for me because I like to do series of shots/tell stories with renders.

It depends on the scene, and on your computer, etc., but yes, that's basically true. Within 3-5 minutes you can often get a good sense of what the final image will look like, but it will be rather noisy and it will likely take hours to look like a polished, final render.

tl155180

Scott-Livingston said:

It depends on the scene, and on your computer, etc., but yes, that's basically true. Within 3-5 minutes you can often get a good sense of what the final image will look like, but it will be rather noisy and it will likely take hours to look like a polished, final render.

Yikes! Really? Hmm maybe Reality isn't such a good idea after all. I don't think I could handle render times longer than 1 hour.

404nicg

tl155180 said:

Scott-Livingston said:

It depends on the scene, and on your computer, etc., but yes, that's basically true. Within 3-5 minutes you can often get a good sense of what the final image will look like, but it will be rather noisy and it will likely take hours to look like a polished, final render.

Yikes! Really? Hmm maybe Reality isn't such a good idea after all. I don't think I could handle render times longer than 1 hour.

Lol my same reaction.

tl155180

404nicg said:

tl155180 said:

Scott-Livingston said:

It depends on the scene, and on your computer, etc., but yes, that's basically true. Within 3-5 minutes you can often get a good sense of what the final image will look like, but it will be rather noisy and it will likely take hours to look like a polished, final render.

Yikes! Really? Hmm maybe Reality isn't such a good idea after all. I don't think I could handle render times longer than 1 hour.

Lol my same reaction.

Thanks for warning me! I do the same thing you do - a series of images telling a story etc. If each image took hours to render I'd never get anything done :)

Jonstark

If you've got a computer that can run it, and the extra scratch to afford it, sounds like Octane might be more of what you're looking for, as it renders using your computers GPU (the graphics card) and can do very fast unbiased rendering.

The fastest unbiased renderer I've run so far is TheaRender, which combines both your computers GPU and it's CPU together to render, but there isn't a plugin for it unless you're using Blender.

Luxcore is much much faster than regular Luxrender, and there's a plugin for that in development for Carrara right now, the beta trial is free if you've got Carrara and want to see. It's not as fast as Octane at rendering, but it's still very fast.

Steven-V

tl155180 said:

Thanks for warning me! I do the same thing you do - a series of images telling a story etc. If each image took hours to render I'd never get anything done :)

Yeah.

I am doing a comic book. Trying to get 1 page a week done, which means 1 panel a day. Since most days I can only spend a few hours on it, if the render time took all those hours, I would never get done (I still have to pose figures, dress them, dress the set, set the lighting, try and re-try camera angles, etc).

Steven-V

Jonstark said:

If you've got a computer that can run it, and the extra scratch to afford it, sounds like Octane might be more of what you're looking for, as it renders using your computers GPU (the graphics card) and can do very fast unbiased rendering.

I thought about Octane but the price is off-putting... $400-ish. Ouch.

Also, because I am doing a comic-book I am not sure hyper-realistic renders is what I want. So far what I am getting out of 3DeLight is acceptable, at least with sufficient PS post-processing.

tl155180

steven.viscido said:

Jonstark said:

If you've got a computer that can run it, and the extra scratch to afford it, sounds like Octane might be more of what you're looking for, as it renders using your computers GPU (the graphics card) and can do very fast unbiased rendering.

I thought about Octane but the price is off-putting... $400-ish. Ouch.

Also, because I am doing a comic-book I am not sure hyper-realistic renders is what I want. So far what I am getting out of 3DeLight is acceptable, at least with sufficient PS post-processing.

I've been finding that a heavy emphasis on Uber Area Lights (with Szark's plentiful and essential help), combined with a little UE2 and sometimes distant lighting tends to produce quite a nice level of comic-style semi-realism with 3DeLight.

I was hoping to step that up to ultra-realism with Reality, but not if it means devoting hours to each render. The trade-off just isn't worth it in my eyes.

Thanks Jonstark for the Octane tip. If I ever get richer I'll consider that as the way to go.

Btw, has anyone tried Advanced Ambient Light (https://www.daz3d.com/advanced-ambient-light)? Someone recommended it to me once as a good replacement for UE2 - just wondering what the results are like with it?

Steven-V

I have been using the three main advanced lights for most of my comic (other than the first 3 or 4 pages I shot, because I didn't own them yet), which includes Advanced Ambient and I absolutely love them. In particular, if you use their suggested settings with 1x Advanced Ambient with a slightly blue tone and 1x Advanced Distant with a slightly orange tone for an outdoor sunny day, it looks fantastic, at least to me - very realistic. I am used to having to struggle with 8 or 10 different lights of varying types to get the sort of result I can get with 2 lights. (See below)

I also found using Advanced Ambient indoors on a late afternoon with distant coming through the window to be very nice as well. And even on the scene that used UberEnvironment2 with IBL and more traditional DAZ lights, I ended up going back with an advanced spotlight that was set with flags to light ONLY the one character's face because her face seemed too dark in the scene. I also like Advanced Ambient for night-time. I am working on Urban Sprawl 2 at night right now, trying to get the windows to light up right, and a small amount (I think around 30%) of infinite-size Advanced Ambient is just what the doctor ordered for the night time shot. (See below.)

Advanced lights won't do everything, to be sure. But I have found them to be very useful and I like the effects I'm getting from it.

mjc1016

A couple of things about Luxrender, in general.

It is very easy to set up network rendering...which basically means that if you've got a laptop, desktop or even a fairly old multi-core dust collector, you can 'gang' them all up and cut the render times, dramatically. Or even off load the render entirely. This frees your main machine up for other tasks. There's also 'faster' modes (sppm, one of the other ones) and soon GPU (you'll need to read over the Luxrender forums/wiki to get all the details on what is doable with GPU rendering now...and what's to come)

Two, since is 'physically based' it's best suited for trying to mimic 'reality'.

That said, 'vanilla' DS uses but a small fraction of the power of the included 3Delight renderer.

There's a lot in this thread...but much of it is very technical. It goes into getting much more out of 3Delight/DS.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/21611/

Also, this thread has a lot of great info on getting the best out of the included Uber Area lights (which offer many advantages over the 'basic' lights)
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/14536/