Lighting issues when rendering.
Pardon the noob questions, but we gotta start somewhere.
I've put together a practice scene where a character is standing in front of a screen (Phantasmagorical Scenes' Sci-Fi Screen--all hail!) I thought there should be some illumination from the screen onto the character, so I placed five lights at different areas behind the screen--relative to the character--and adjusted their colors and intensities so it would seem that the screen was giving off a uniform light blue glow and the yellow patch directly in front of the character would light her up with a dash of yellow.
I included screenshots so you could see what I was trying to do. This result is very close to what I wanted; I just have to work on sharpening the image and increasing the resolution.
I also included my renders of both front and back views, and here is what's killing me. In each and every render I've done in the last week or so, my lighting in each scene is washed out by the light coming from the camera. I can't figure out why that is or how to stop it. I've watched the videos twice and still can't figure out what I'm missing.
I'm using Iray rendering because it says "Nvidia" on it and I'm using an Nvidia card, but perhaps I'm using the wrong settings for that renderer. Or do I need to specify a camera in-scene and try to render the view from that camera?
This is like Mortal Kombat..."Head versus Desk, round fifty. Fight!"
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Comments
The light that shines from the Camera is known as the 'Headlamp' and it can be switched off by selecting the Camera in the Parameters pane, then under Headlamp, change the value to 'Off' (default is 'Auto')
Another easy way tio switch off the Headlamp, is to go to Render Settings > General > Auto Headlamp and switch it to 'Never', that means Iray will not use the Headlamp from any Camera.
Okay, here's what I did after I saw your post. The first thing I did was go to the camera editor and set "auto headlamp" to "never," like you suggested. Just for fun, I opened the settings gear next to it and set the default to "never," as well to help noob-proof my future work.
I checked myself by going to the top of the screen, clicking "render," then opening the settings tab again to make sure the settings had been saved.
I got the same effect as before. It's as if the headlamp was never turned off. Would a headlamp blocker be in order? Or if I've set the auto headlamp to never, is there a setting elsewhere that could be overriding it?
Thanks for the quick reply, too.
If you have set the option to 'Never' in the render settings, then there is no need to do anything else, you are definitely not seeing the headlamp.
Are you using Shader Baker as well?
You would need to post a clear screenshot of your Scene pane and the Render Settings pane so that we can see what you have set there. It is seldom necessary to use so many lights with an unbiased renderer (Iray), I would suggest that you try this with 3Delight first to see what effects that you get. Iray is a completely different render engine to 3Delight which is a biased engine.
You could look through these posts here whcih may help: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/56788/iray-start-here#latest
Switch from Perspective View to a Camera view, the headlamp can't be turned off for Perspective. You might want to try applying the Iray emissive shader to the screen so it really gives off light instead of faking it with other lights.
How new and how powerful is your card? Iray only works with fairly recent NVidia cards that have lots of memory (anything under 4GB isn't really worth the bother), fast memory (I think DDR5 is the best type), and lots of rendering cores, the more the better. If your card isn't good enough for this, then Iray will fall back to using your computer's main processor, which will give exactly the same render, but it's a lot slower. (The downside to this is that, of course, cards like this are expen$$$ive...)
This is probably the source of many of your problems — you aren't using an actual camera, you're using the Perspective View. And this is exactly what it says on the tin, it isn't a Camera, it's a View. It doesn't give you all the control options of a real camera, and it isn't saved in your scene like a real camera. Every time you re-load that scene, the Perspective View will toss out your previous setup and go back to its defaults.
Yes. The boxes were checked for "bake illumination" and "bake shaders." I've attached four more renders, two each with Iray and 3delight. The first two are from perspective view and the other two are through a camera, still with the headlamp option off. 3delight gives me what I was looking for, but even with headlamps off, Iray still does its own thing. Which settings would you like to see?
Hmmm....a new toy! I'll check it out and see what I can do with it. I didn't even know it existed. Thank you!
It is resoundingly "meh" as far as new and powerful. It's an Nvidia GeForce GTX 750 Ti. Only two gigs of memory, but 640 cores. It takes a bit of time on Iray renders, but rendering the same scene through 3delight is much faster. My wife always chides me for making excuses to buy new computer stuff. Now I can tell her it's not an excuse. It's a reason!
The Perspective view ALWAYS has a helper light attached to it...there is no way to shut it off. What it looks like is happening is that when Iray is default it loads with an HDRI which provides light from the dome. Go into your render settings then down to environement make sure that the drop down menu at the top is set to Scene only otherwise the render engine is using the Iray skydome for light. As a side note your screen that you created if you want a nice glow from it change the emmision color to white so it produces light than throw your diffuse image in the emmision channel and set the light how bright you want it to be. Also the poster above you is right you have to create a camera in the scene. Perspective view should only be used when you got your camera shot set up and you want to tweak things in your scene without moving the camera. One other advice is that with the Headlamp turned off on the camera your scene objects will be black in the view port when your not using the Iray viewport. You can hit CTRL L and it will turn on a helper light that doesnt render.
Daniel
The Perspective view headlamp can be switched off, in the current version of DS, in Render Settings using Auto Headlamp in the General group.
Thanks one and all for the tip about the headlamp. I should have specified on an earlier post that I'd been turning it off. I'd had it set first to auto and then, when that didn't work, to "never." I still got light from somewhere that kept overriding my settings.
It turns out that I was overlooking the Render Settings editor. The Honorable D. Robinson pointed me in the right direction. In each scene I'd been accidentally leaving it as though it were rendering an outside environment: it was set to render dome and scene rather than just the scene along with the default position for the sun. (How arrogant for Daz Studio to assume the presence of a sun! What if we were on Tatooine and needed two? Or in hyperspace and needed none?)
Attached is an Iray render set for dome and scene with no additional light sources added. Looks doubleplus good compared to the other efforts, now that I know what I'm doing. I'd have included one set for scene only with no lights, but I suspect we all know what a black panel looks like by now.
For "teh noobz" who come after me, here's one of the things you should check if your Iray renders are looking wonky: Render Settings>Editor>Environment. The Environment menu will expand to include tabs for Dome and Ground. Expand "Dome" and you should see two drop-down menus for "Environment Mode" and "Dome Mode." If you're doing an interior scene, select "Scene Only " from the "Environment Mode" menu. There are other advanced options to adjust for latitude, longitude, and time of day, but that's for later. Just remember that Daz Studio assumes you're illuminating an outdoor scene, which includes ground and sky and the objects you're manipulating. You have to tell it otherwise. Remember, this is what I did to resolve my problem; your mileage may vary.
Learning from your mistakes is fine, but now you get to learn from one of mine. A lesson in humility from your friend, The Brig.