Daz How to light like a pro?

[coffeeaddicted]

Ok, so i am desperate.

Whenever i light a scene it kind of looks shit.
The clothing doesn't come out as it should be and the overall vibe of the scene is kind of lost.

Currently i light with 100/16/100 in the tonemapping.
Additionally i like to crush light to 0.1 and give it some gamma of 1.8.

Example.
My goal was to preserve the "believable" setting but at the same time have the character shine. So that didn't work out really.

I am using a free ghost light from here that i only use for the ceiling and then a spotlight softened for the characters and some mesh lights that are build in the scene.

Be my judge but tell me what i should be doing instead.

I don't want to overthink too much. It doesn't need to be Picasso but just more .... vibe.
My issue is usually placement and strength. So i have no feeling how much is enough or too much. I think i haven't found the sweetspot.
This image i didn't even finish rendering as i am not really happy with it.

 

[MissFortune]

First of all, I'd avoid fucking around with tonemapping for lighting. It's good for overall scenes that'll stick around throughout it, but it's generally better to light a scene via lights and leaving the tonemapping for more general adjustments. With enough knowledge you can do everything with lighting. I typically only really use White Point and Crush Black, with a minor usage of Saturation.

Where I think the image is lack is within it's composition. There's too wide of a scope here. You're seeing absolutely everything and confusing the eye of the viewer. They don't know where they should be looking. The bed? The walls? The shelves? Fridge? Food? The people? Trying bringing the camera closer to the figures, and angling the camera toward their shadow side (the side where it's darkest, often the wider side, but varies between lighting styles.). This will allow the main light source rim/wrap them depending on the angle, and create a bit more interesting composition/angle to view the characters at. Leaving room to add something like a bank/dutch angle, and thus a bit of movement. Maybe even a bit of DoF if your system can handle it.

The difference between a good and great render is partially lighting, the other is compositions and angle.

 

[coffeeaddicted]

First of all, I'd avoid fucking around with tonemapping for lighting. It's good for overall scenes that'll stick around throughout it, but it's generally better to light a scene via lights and leaving the tonemapping for more general adjustments. With enough knowledge you can do everything with lighting. I typically only really use White Point and Crush Black, with a minor usage of Saturation.

Where I think the image is lack is within it's composition. There's too wide of a scope here. You're seeing absolutely everything and confusing the eye of the viewer. They don't know where they should be looking. The bed? The walls? The shelves? Fridge? Food? The people? Trying bringing the camera closer to the figures, and angling the camera toward their shadow side (the side where it's darkest, often the wider side, but varies between lighting styles.). This will allow the main light source rim/wrap them depending on the angle, and create a bit more interesting composition/angle to view the characters at. Leaving room to add something like a bank/dutch angle, and thus a bit of movement. Maybe even a bit of DoF if your system can handle it.

The difference between a good and great render is partially lighting, the other is compositions and angle.

View attachment 3553479

I have to agree. My problem is, i like to show the whole figure but keep forgetting that close ups or at least closer is important.
So i have to work on that.

So i have to make two shots for this section.

I changed the values a little so that it looks a little more life like.
Every light is 3500 to give it that old warm light.
One ghost light is in front of the character, between them.
There is also a spotlight but its minimal, default. So it doesn't do much.

Here are the same shot each with a different angle.





Personally, i like it. It looks more vibey. More authentic.
Since it is below the house and no neon light is present, i feel this hits the spot. Not sure about the angle of the shot, though the last one looks probably better.
It has also DoF.
I have to admit, every image is its own composition and it takes really time. I can't imagine make 1000s.

 

[Turning Tricks]

Don't forget that you can do tricks that real photographer's can't.

For example... you could do your render above first in a full frame to catch all the environment lighting and to set the shadows. Then you could hide the environment, leaving only the actor showing. Switch environment lighting to Scene Only and then set spots on your main character and play with temperature and lumens. 3 to 4 spots, with one of them from behind the actor, makes a really nice effect, without messing up your environment lighting. A rear spot would put some light highlights on the MILF's shoulders, simulating the light that could be coming from light above the stairs.

Then in post production, just layer the actor's render on top of your background.

also, just a nit-pick, but why use mesh lighting on that table lamp? It looks unnatural that the lamp shade seems opaque. Probably be easier to just put on emissive on the bulb itself. Or, emissive on bulb first to get the lamp shade glowing, then use mesh to make the effect on the wall, like you did.

 

[xell_]

Ok, so i am desperate.

Whenever i light a scene it kind of looks shit.
The clothing doesn't come out as it should be and the overall vibe of the scene is kind of lost.

Currently i light with 100/16/100 in the tonemapping.
Additionally i like to crush light to 0.1 and give it some gamma of 1.8.

Example.
My goal was to preserve the "believable" setting but at the same time have the character shine. So that didn't work out really.

I am using a free ghost light from here that i only use for the ceiling and then a spotlight softened for the characters and some mesh lights that are build in the scene.

Be my judge but tell me what i should be doing instead.

I don't want to overthink too much. It doesn't need to be Picasso but just more .... vibe.
My issue is usually placement and strength. So i have no feeling how much is enough or too much. I think i haven't found the sweetspot.
This image i didn't even finish rendering as i am not really happy with it.

View attachment 3553184

for in-game renders
use 1 spotlight(rectangle)
height=150
width=150
lumen= 190000-210000
spread angle=60
and definitely use DOF on all pictures.
for artworks
i suggest you to use 2 or 3 light
1spotlight(rectangle)(same settings)
1spotlight(disc) above/behind head(spread angle lower)
1 spotlight(point) right on body from a different angle for reflections(use lower lumen)
however im not expert on lighting but i spend alot of time on it, but i have to warn you my tonemapping settings will make your lights darker than usual but you can fix that on gimp or photoshop pretty quickly. hope this helps to improve your renders a bit more.
edit;
render settings
min sample=600
max sample= 35000(or 15k if you have a weak system)
max time=unlimited
render quality=1,32(i usually use above than 1 but you can keep it 1 if you dont have good graphic card)
Bonus: enviroment light also helps but avoid using extreme lighting to keep your scene more real.

 

[coffeeaddicted]

for in-game renders
use 1 spotlight(rectangle)
height=150
width=150
lumen= 190000-210000
spread angle=60
and definitely use DOF on all pictures.
for artworks
i suggest you to use 2 or 3 light
1spotlight(rectangle)(same settings)
1spotlight(disc) above/behind head(spread angle lower)
1 spotlight(point) right on body from a different angle for reflections(use lower lumen)
however im not expert on lighting but i spend alot of time on it, but i have to warn you my tonemapping settings will make your lights darker than usual but you can fix that on gimp or photoshop pretty quickly. hope this helps to improve your renders a bit more.
edit;
render settings
min sample=600
max sample= 35000(or 15k if you have a weak system)
max time=unlimited
render quality=1,32(i usually use above than 1 but you can keep it 1 if you dont have good graphic card)
Bonus: enviroment light also helps but avoid using extreme lighting to keep your scene more real.

Thanks for sharing.
Lightning is one of the hardest thing to do so its nice to hear from someone else. You only can learn.

I watched SY doing lightning and it looked very nice.
Though since i am inpatient, i usually always use IRAY cam to cut the time render. Nothing is more annoying than to have to wait a long time before you can have a finished render.

See my take on a kitchen. I love the European apartment but dam is render slow with that asset. So i just use the furniture's on the boys dorm room. Who will know the difference?
Much fast render and if i am honest, the character is in the center of the image not the asset. What i mean by that is that as long as you know this is a kitchen, it should be fine.

I will, out of curiosity, try your settings and see how that will come out.

For this i am using two ghost lights and one spotlight. The spotlight is only support on the character.

 

[Turning Tricks]

for in-game renders
use 1 spotlight(rectangle)
height=150
width=150
lumen= 190000-210000
spread angle=60
and definitely use DOF on all pictures.
for artworks
i suggest you to use 2 or 3 light
1spotlight(rectangle)(same settings)
1spotlight(disc) above/behind head(spread angle lower)
1 spotlight(point) right on body from a different angle for reflections(use lower lumen)
however im not expert on lighting but i spend alot of time on it, but i have to warn you my tonemapping settings will make your lights darker than usual but you can fix that on gimp or photoshop pretty quickly. hope this helps to improve your renders a bit more.
edit;
render settings
min sample=600
max sample= 35000(or 15k if you have a weak system)
max time=unlimited
render quality=1,32(i usually use above than 1 but you can keep it 1 if you dont have good graphic card)
Bonus: enviroment light also helps but avoid using extreme lighting to keep your scene more real.

I have to be honest... these settings to me look .. bad. 35K iterations is just a waste of time, IMO. So is messing with Tonemapper settings, outside of using it to correct issues with an already made scene. If your scene is lighted properly, then you should never need to mess with those settings. Any minor adjustments can be done in Post Processing is a few seconds instead. Changing any default settings (other then the most commonly used and variable ones) is a recipe to fuck up some future scene because the changes carried over.

The thing with upping the Quality settings for DAZ is that DAZ sometimes has issues with calculating Quality above a certain point. It could be for many reasons, but it's usually light related. Daz Studio itself has explained that, and why they chose to use 0.95 as the base.

Most devs I know ignore the Quality setting completely, specifically because of this issue. Instead we turn it off and just run some test renders to determine a good iteration count that gets the best quality in a reasonable time. Then run that through a denoiser.

I mean, I've watched devs spend hours making a single render... doing iterations 10-15-20K.. wasting all that time to just try and get rid of a few grains of noise from the shadow under an armpit, for example. When the render was ok at 2K iterations - needing only to be denoised to get rid of those grains.

Would you rather spend 3 hours on a single render, just to try and get it 132% in one pass? Or would you rather make 10-20 renders in that same time frame, needing only to do a few minutes of post processing in Photoshop or another editor afterwards.

I won't even talk about using DoF all the time.... how you would have to render a scene multiple times to bring people or objects in and out of focus, while running a scene through in layers (Background, characters separate) and then applying blurs to different layers, is so much quicker and allows much more options for creativity. That's a whole other topic.

 

[xell_]

Thanks for sharing.
Lightning is one of the hardest thing to do so its nice to hear from someone else. You only can learn.

I watched SY doing lightning and it looked very nice.
Though since i am inpatient, i usually always use IRAY cam to cut the time render. Nothing is more annoying than to have to wait a long time before you can have a finished render.

See my take on a kitchen. I love the European apartment but dam is render slow with that asset. So i just use the furniture's on the boys dorm room. Who will know the difference?
Much fast render and if i am honest, the character is in the center of the image not the asset. What i mean by that is that as long as you know this is a kitchen, it should be fine.

I will, out of curiosity, try your settings and see how that will come out.

For this i am using two ghost lights and one spotlight. The spotlight is only support on the character.

View attachment 3576120

I suggest you to hide bodyparts that not visible on scene, you can basically hide everything but whatever is on the camera that will faster your iray previewing and rendering. Also hide\remove any kind of geoshells(vaginal parts etc) if you are not doing any sexual scene. Those are also heavy for your scenes.i also suggest you to use dof + better hdri because her apartment looks like in a plane atm : D i dont recommend ghost lights much(in most cases) because they're are harder deal with. Spotlights easier and less headache. Most people are also using lightrooms and other ps improvements on their pictures.i personally dont use any of that but thats also an option. Im using only highpass+saturation+exposure adjustments on gimp and thats it.

 

[Turning Tricks]

Thanks for sharing.
Lightning is one of the hardest thing to do so its nice to hear from someone else. You only can learn.

I watched SY doing lightning and it looked very nice.
Though since i am inpatient, i usually always use IRAY cam to cut the time render. Nothing is more annoying than to have to wait a long time before you can have a finished render.

See my take on a kitchen. I love the European apartment but dam is render slow with that asset. So i just use the furniture's on the boys dorm room. Who will know the difference?
Much fast render and if i am honest, the character is in the center of the image not the asset. What i mean by that is that as long as you know this is a kitchen, it should be fine.

I will, out of curiosity, try your settings and see how that will come out.

For this i am using two ghost lights and one spotlight. The spotlight is only support on the character.

View attachment 3576120

I like this render! The only thing I would do is possibly add a single spot in a position to create catchlights in her eyes. That would draw the player's focus to her face and the expression she has. Right now, the scene outside the window kind of draws my eye.

 

[xell_]

I have to be honest... these settings to me look .. bad. 35K iterations is just a waste of time, IMO. So is messing with Tonemapper settings, outside of using it to correct issues with an already made scene. If your scene is lighted properly, then you should never need to mess with those settings. Any minor adjustments can be done in Post Processing is a few seconds instead. Changing any default settings (other then the most commonly used and variable ones) is a recipe to fuck up some future scene because the changes carried over.

The thing with upping the Quality settings for DAZ is that DAZ sometimes has issues with calculating Quality above a certain point. It could be for many reasons, but it's usually light related. Daz Studio itself has explained that, and why they chose to use 0.95 as the base.

Most devs I know ignore the Quality setting completely, specifically because of this issue. Instead we turn it off and just run some test renders to determine a good iteration count that gets the best quality in a reasonable time. Then run that through a denoiser.

I mean, I've watched devs spend hours making a single render... doing iterations 10-15-20K.. wasting all that time to just try and get rid of a few grains of noise from the shadow under an armpit, for example. When the render was ok at 2K iterations - needing only to be denoised to get rid of those grains.

Would you rather spend 3 hours on a single render, just to try and get it 132% in one pass? Or would you rather make 10-20 renders in that same time frame, needing only to do a few minutes of post processing in Photoshop or another editor afterwards.

I won't even talk about using DoF all the time.... how you would have to render a scene multiple times to bring people or objects in and out of focus, while running a scene through in layers (Background, characters separate) and then applying blurs to different layers, is so much quicker and allows much more options for creativity. That's a whole other topic.

That's a personal choice, afterall its your game your decision, i prefer Quality>Quantity, so thats not a waste time for me, i rather create 1 good quality render instead 10 shitty quality render. The quality of the render also shows how much you care about your players. Details are always important. People always remember good quality stuff.
EDIT; if your PC is weak you still can achieve good quality stuff you just need to hide alot of things on your scene. and keep the sample 15k, that will give you avarage quality and use 1 figure for each scene.(or most)

 

[coffeeaddicted]

I suggest you to hide bodyparts that not visible on scene, you can basically hide everything but whatever is on the camera that will faster your iray previewing and rendering. Also hide\remove any kind of geoshells(vaginal parts etc) if you are not doing any sexual scene. Those are also heavy for your scenes.i also suggest you to use dof + better hdri because her apartment looks like in a plane atm : D i dont recommend ghost lights much(in most cases) because they're are harder deal with. Spotlights easier and less headache. Most people are also using lightrooms and other ps improvements on their pictures.i personally dont use any of that but thats also an option. Im using only highpass+saturation+exposure adjustments on gimp and thats it.

I am actually torn between that.
Ghost light seems to be an easier solution. Though i use usually spotlights but its harder sometimes imo to get the right results.
Postwork is something i am not really good at so i like to do as much as i can in the render. Small touch ups in postwork.

Btw. i didn't even knew that. Yes, genitals are probably one of the things most perhaps forget about it and i admit that i usually have them on the figure. Something to think about it.

 

[coffeeaddicted]

I like this render! The only thing I would do is possibly add a single spot in a position to create catchlights in her eyes. That would draw the player's focus to her face and the expression she has. Right now, the scene outside the window kind of draws my eye.

Mm.. good idea. I have a free ring light that can do the job.
As far as environments go, i want to have them less taxing. There are really nice new assets but they slow my system really down. I avoid any FG asset even though they are actually really appealing but i never got them to the point that they were easy to render. Especially if you add figures to the scene.
Ohno, the sky? lol... have to experiment on that. I thought it were already close to the character but with widescreen it's harder to get the focus right.

 

[Turning Tricks]

That's a personal choice, afterall its your game your decision, i prefer Quality>Quantity, so thats not a waste time for me, i rather create 1 good quality render instead 10 shitty quality render. The quality of the render also shows how much you care about your players. Details are always important. People always remember good quality stuff.
EDIT; if your PC is weak you still can achieve good quality stuff you just need to hide alot of things on your scene. and keep the iteration 15k, that will give you avarage quality and use 1 figure for each scene.(or most)

My PC is just fine thank you. And I finally have a good GPU now.

I could achieve similar quality to your example render above in about 2500 iterations easily and in less than 20 minutes. But I wouldn't render it one pass with DoF. I'd do two layers, background and then the character sitting in her chair in the foreground. No point in doing it in one pass, since she has no shadows interacting with any of the environment, outside of her chair.

To each is own. But personally, I think telling new DAZ users to start changing core render settings and use massive amounts of iterations is not helpful. Those settings are default because people much smarter then us did a lot of testing and determined them.

You are talking about 30k iterations and yet the Genesis character in your example looks like it's at subD 2. And if you want to passively-aggressively imply that I do not care about my players because I prefer to not waste time rendering to 30K iterations, then maybe you should show enough care to pose your props and accessories, like that earring that is defying gravity. It's a very minor thing that many, many devs miss, but it's something that your brain notices to determine if this is real or not.

I'm just trying to give one perspective to a new Daz user, like many others have given me in the time I have been learning on here.

 

[no_more_name]

Those settings are default because people much smarter then us did a lot of testing and determined them.

Maybe an unpopular opinion but Daz default render setting are very well balanced, despite what you read here and there.
Having 30k(!) iterations for a single render is just brute force into a problem one fail to understand.

 

[xell_]

My PC is just fine thank you. And I finally have a good GPU now.

I could achieve similar quality to your example render above in about 2500 iterations easily and in less than 20 minutes. But I wouldn't render it one pass with DoF. I'd do two layers, background and then the character sitting in her chair in the foreground. No point in doing it in one pass, since she has no shadows interacting with any of the environment, outside of her chair.

To each is own. But personally, I think telling new DAZ users to start changing core render settings and use massive amounts of iterations is not helpful. Those settings are default because people much smarter then us did a lot of testing and determined them.

You are talking about 30k iterations and yet the Genesis character in your example looks like it's at subD 2. And if you want to passively-aggressively imply that I do not care about my players because I prefer to not waste time rendering to 30K iterations, then maybe you should show enough care to pose your props and accessories, like that earring that is defying gravity. It's a very minor thing that many, many devs miss, but it's something that your brain notices to determine if this is real or not.

I'm just trying to give one perspective to a new Daz user, like many others have given me in the time I have been learning on here.

Calm down bud. Im not here to piss fight with you, I told him my settings just like you told him yours, after all this is not your thread. It's up to coffeeaddicted to decide which path he wants to go. Your "rights" are not universal neither mine. I want him to have best quality as possible he can. 30k vs 2500 is not a "minor" difference, we're talking about ferrari vs a golf car but if he cant render 20 or 30k he can get similar result with 15k sample aswell.

 

[no_more_name]

>go atleast 20-25-30k iteration.That reduces the noises on the picture aswell.

Indeed. Maybe.. Maybeee, there is shit ton of things to do before reaching that point?
Like having a minimum understanding of your environment?

>They're balanced for avarage graphic cards, not because they're the "best settings", if you have RTX4080 like mine

No, they are engine balanced in a way they put somewhat elegant barriers in something that is infinite.
Having a RTX4080 or GTX1060 just make that point being shorter or longer in time, it's not that important.

 

[Jumbi]

They're balanced for avarage graphic cards, not because they're the "best settings", if you have RTX4080 like mine, you should go atleast 20-25-30k iteration.That reduces the noises on the picture aswell.

Those are too many iterations for most cases. And depending on the complexity of the scene and the resolution used, it can make the rendering process go for many hours, even on the most robust graphics cards.

One thing I would recommend anyone to do is to always render to a new window when you are going to be present to check the progress. That way you can always stop the render at any point as soon as it looks good to your eye and then save it.

 

[coffeeaddicted]

Wow, easy.
It's just an exchange of ideas.

As for me, i like to try everything that comes across. What ever works best for my purpose is what i like to use.
I am lucky as i don't develop a game. Perhaps maybe down the line?
Just selecting clothing is already a challenge. And then male characters.

I do this for some time now and i am still not that great in it and of course i have a weaker card, namely the RTX3060. For my purpose it is fine though.

 

[coffeeaddicted]

Btw. it just popped in to my head.
When dealing with an environment asset. How do you reduce the texture size?
For the European Apartment, i still don't know why the kitchen is the only room that takes the longest. Any other room is actually quicker to render with standard settings.
This is one thing i did not really learn which probably is very important, besides lightning.

 

[xell_]

>go atleast 20-25-30k iteration.That reduces the noises on the picture aswell.

Indeed. Maybe.. Maybeee, there is shit ton of things to do before reaching that point?
Like having a minimum understanding of your environment?

>They're balanced for avarage graphic cards, not because they're the "best settings", if you have RTX4080 like mine

No, they are engine balanced in a way they put somewhat elegant barriers in something that is infinite.
Having a RTX4080 or GTX1060 just make that point being shorter or longer in time, it's not that important.

Correction: im talking about 30k samples, not iteration themselves, when you set 30k samples it iterates like 7000 or something(depends on the scene)