Lights are way too dark

noodlyrice

Hi! I'm a bit of a beginner to Daz and have this problem since yesterday. I've already asked some friends for help but we haven't been able to solve it yet.

For some reason, whenever I add a light or light presets to my scene, it appears really dim, making the character look almost completely black. Lighting also appears really dark in the render if I turn off dome lighting and use the lights I have in my scene. This happens in all scenes I've tried, and I've factory reset my settings.

The lights shown in the image are all default excluding the color, with 100% intensity and varying distance from the character. They show up in the Iray render, but only if I keep the dome active (I suppose it might not work in the same way as the light objects. Either way, the dome's lighting completely overwhelms the added lights). The render settings are all also default, with 13.00 exposure value and default f/stop (can't remember the exact value right now). There are no cameras in the scene that might be casting a headlamp, and Preview Lights was on. This happened on all shader modes except Iray and the ones that I think are emissive wireframes and similar. There are no other characters or assets in the scene, just one figure with no emissive textures or anything that could interfere with the lighting.

Thank you very much for your help! I'm more than happy to provide more info, or the scene file if needed.

Richard Haseltine

The default tone mapping is for bright daylight, you need to adjust it for internal/artificial lighting (and make sure that the Environment Mode incldues Scene)

PerttiA

Setting the "cm2 factor" in tone mapping to 8-10 with ISO 400 fixes a lot of problems with lighting interior scenes

noodlyrice

No, it's the viewport which is too dark. If I disable the Preview Lights setting, the headlamp makes it okay, but with it enabled it's far too dark, and nothing like the final render.

I'm attaching a screenshot. There's nothing but the model and two point lights, and the render is done with Iray, default settings, and Environment Mode set at Scene Only.

Shouldn't the viewport lighting be much brighter here, matching the render somewhat?

noodlyrice

I don't think I've correctly attached the image, it seemed stuck on loading indefinitely. Anyway, the image is this https://i.imgur.com/DaJF4qI.png showing how the viewport preview doesn't match the render lighting. Lights are set to visible in both viewport and render.

Richard Haseltine

No, Texture Shaded does not do a good job of previewing lighting - especially for Iray.