How do you tell if lights are going to work in Iray? Also Skydomes

Blastedlabs

In Daz3D 4.8, I see several lights I can add. 

Create>Distant Light, Spotlight, Point Light, Linear Light 

Which ones will work?  

Also, is there a way to tell if preset lights from a scene will work? (Like, can I click on them and see what kind they are?)

My last question is about Skydomes. When a scene comes with a Skydome, the infinite light from Iray gets blocked by the skydome, making it weird to render any scenes that come with skydomes. Is there a way to make it so the Skydome is "transparent" to the lights, but still visible in the render?

Fishtales

All the lights will work but need setting once added and the Tone Mapping needs tweaked for the amount of light.

For the Skydome see here.

 

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/63014/yet-another-iray-skydome-technique

SpottedKitty

Note that the Linear Point light was made as a 3Delight "bending of the rules of nature" to give us something easier to work with than a plain Point light. I think they both work the same way in Iray — with a realistic falloff that can't really be changed.

Novica

Hi BlastedLabs!

One thing I can tell you from a few months of experimenting- that Distant Light will really light your scene, in 3DL is much gentler lol. Whenever you add a light, always select the light in Scene, then go to Parameters>Light and turn off the headlamp (then use CRTL+L to turn it on to view your viewport) That way your scene won't be overlit.  I like the spotlights better than the Distant, but that's only my personal preference, because the Distant lights everything the same, whereas you can pull a spotlight back and forth and be more selective. And, as I said, the distant lights REALLY light up things. 

For the spotlights, don't be shy about doing lumens that are "way up there." 1500 is pretty low, I up mine to 6000 then leap on up to 20,000 then double it to 40,000, etc and keep testing. DO also increase the intensity, you will see  some mis-information in earlier threads that intensity doesn't work with spotlights, it does indeed. But intensity is limited if your lumens aren't powerful enough. 

Spotted Kitty is right, the linear pointlight fall off is realistic.

Do you know about the Iray viewing in the viewport? To the left of where you choose your view (default says Perspective) you can click and get a dropdown of wire shaded view, cartoon, etc- the bottom one is the Iray one. Whenever you make changes in lighting, it will show you there. Give it a chance to load, everything goes unshaded/gray, just wait on it. Once it does it the first time, it changes more quickly it seems.

Fishtales

Distant lights can be changed the same as any of the lights. I change their position, colour and intensity for a few of my renders and I use the Tone Mapping settings for the camera to get the lighting right rather than keeping increasing the light output, which is different from intensity. The shadows can be a problem with the Distant Light as there is no fall off which means that shadows are always sharp black.