Enclosed Spaces
morrisonmp
Posts: 152
Not sure if the best forum or not but here goes...
As I work more with Daz and try to expand my skills, I'm discovering an area where I really struggle. I have the worst time getting camera framing and even remotely good looking renders in tight spaces. When I say tight spaces I mean, for example, the cab of a vehicle or the corner of a room. I've been using the Ranger SUV and trying to set up shots inside that thing is a nightmare. I'm also really struggling with lighting in those same enclosed spaces.
I know this is vague, so I'm not really expecting "answers" but if you all know any tips or tricks for shooting in enclosed spaces - or any good tutorials for this topic - I'd appreciate the help.
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Comments
A Section Plane (Create>New Iray Section Plane) will help with camera plaement as you can place the camera outside the room or vehicle and the Section Palne will hide everything on its near side (as created, irt can be rotated). By default the Section Palne will also let lights in, that may help with your other issue but I think it almost always looks odd and enable the Clip Lights option in the Parameters pane for the Section Plane - with that on the invisible sections will still block lights, and so cast shadows, and will appear in reflections.
For lighting an interior the first step is probably to use Point and Spot lights, or emissive surfaces where appropriate, and to make sure that the option for Environment Mode (Create>Environment Options) is set to a mode that includes Scene.
Create and Place two low level spotlights on either side of the camera, set them to Rectangle and then parent them to the camera.
Are you aware of the "Iray Section Plane Node"?
It is a really cool feature that you can use in Daz when you want to do renders but some of the scene's geometry blocks out the shot.
There are a couple of YouTube videos on it. This one by "The WP Guru" is easy to follow.
How to use the Iray Section Node in DAZ Studio - YouTube
There are also tutorials written by various people. Like this one by "slimmckenzie" on Deviantart:
[Tutorial] - Iray Section Plane Node (beginner) - DeviantArt
Basically you create a plane (under Create > New Iray Section Plane Node). The plane will optically 'slice' through the model; however, this effect is only apparent when you do a render.
I was too slow in typing up my suggestions -- Richard and FirstBastion beat me to it.
You can use a wider angle lense. Some knowledge of photography helps here.
Ghost Lights are a good way to light interiors.
Have you tried using Camera Cutaway from Riversoft Art? https://www.daz3d.com/camera-cutaway
It`s also in the Camera Doctor bundle https://www.daz3d.com/camera-doctor
I use it quite a bit when space is tight.
Other than that, I usually just remove a wall, light the room and render in scene only
In some cases you can set Render settings > environment > environment map to 0 and set the wall with which you're having trouble to invisible.
Obviously this doesn't work if your scene requires you to use the environment map setting.
Thanks. I'll check out the tutorials and see if that helps. Daz is full of stuff like this that I feel like I will never discover all of it.
If I find the camera controlls too coarse in a tight spot, I like to group everything in my scene so I can scale everything together at once. Then I can make the whole thing double sized or usually much larger, position my camera in the now much larger space, and then shrink the whole thing back to 100%.
Adjusting the cr^2 in Tonemapping is useful for seeing more light, or less light if that's what you need.
If you want to try the wider angle lense idea, after you create a camera and select it in the scene pane, find the sliders for focal width, or focal distance. Increasing focal width or decreasing focal distance will have about the same effect. Sorry if you already know this or it's obvious.
This was a great tip! I am going to get a lot of use out of this tool. Thanks.
This is an interesting idea. I've gotten some use out of shrinking things to make "big" scenes but never tried scaling up. Thanks for the help.
This is an excellent answer. Camera settings and tone mapping settings are things that I think a lot of people overlook...mainly because they're fairly complicated and you can do things just by cutting away stuff, etc.
But, I come from a real-world photography background...where I can't just cut away a car's geometery to make the camera fit, or just crank up the lumens to 1000X the brightness of the sun. So, with that, I try to keep things as 'natural' and 'default' with the lighting and scene geometery as much as I can and tinker around with the camera focal length, frame width, and exposure settings to get the look I'm trying to achieve.
Interior scene coming up too dark? Increase the shutterspeed and decrease the f-stop, or crank up the ISO. Camera backed against the wall and still too close? Adjust the frame width for a more wide-angle lens. Nice thing about Daz is you don't have to buy a thousand different lenses that cost thousands of dollars...you just buy thousands of dollars with of assets. :D
But remember that in film most sets have no front wall, and the camera is usually outside the apparent bounds of the room, while for cars the camera may well be on a strut looking in through the window.
I hide lights all over the scene, if I need light on specific objects. One of my go-to techniques is to use a plane primitive (just 2 divisions!) and set it to emissive. Then, I size it to hide it behind something, as needed, to light the thing I need to show. Just play with the emission settings in the Surfaces -> Emission section for brightness, color, etc.
Good luck!