Do Not Move this question into the Reality thread!!! There are over 223 friggin pages in that thread & counting! It'll just get lost in everything else there in no time & be impossible to find!

These are newb questions anyway. I only speak English, not Tech. 

I've looked over Paulo's store and website a bit and am wondering if either Reality 2 or 2.5 is right for me.

I've been very frustrated trying to learn lighting in DAZ and am hoping for a simpler, more intuitive system that actually makes sense. Something that applies to the laws of light and physics in this universe. Unlike DAZ.

My understanding of Reality & LuxRender is that you can make very realistic renders of outdoor, ambient light scenes with just one light.

WHAT I NEED is something that mimics the pretty simple and minimal light sources in photo backgrounds I will be using. In some cases they will be outdoor scenes. In many cases they will be photos of houses, apartments and hotel rooms.

WHAT I NEED is Even, Natural, wraparound lighting like you would get from a giant 6-12 ft(2-4 meter)softbox in the big commercial photo studios. Or standing outside under good ol Mister Sun, who's been around for several billion years now and no one's created a better light source since.

My V4 model will be standing in the foreground most of the time, occasionally in the background in the photos, but I need realistic even lighting that flatters her, but also creates soft, realistic shadows. Occasionally I will need reflections. But I can do reflections and shadows if necessary in Photoshop. Not a deal breaker if I can't get shadows on a photo background.

WHAT I DO NOT NEED is to create objects & props or clothes or buildings. Reality & LR do a superb job of that from all I've seen, but that is not something I'll ever need.

FIRST AND FOREMOST, I just need a good lighting system. Something akin to light in the real world and that will NOT require me to use a dozen lights to mimic the look of a single candle flame or single bedside lamp and take 72 hours to render!

So what is the difference between Reality 2.0 & 2.5 besides the latter requiring me to upgrade to DS 4.5? DS 4.5 which I do not trust considering all the problems I've been reading about people having with that.

Another thing you need to know. I'm not a CG whiz kid, so you'll be talking way over my head if you use too much tech jargon. English please. 

A no-brainer light set for Daz (with or without Reality)

UberSoftLightKit - I use it in D|S 3 - 4.5

Do a search on Daz for it.  Get the lighting packs as well as it has presets for what you want.  Just click and apply - done.

You can suppliment that with spotlight(s) as needed or for other lighting effects.

-AniMajik

Hello Mark.

Let me start with a simplification: there is no Reality 2.0 anymore. That was the initial release of the 2 series. We are simply talking about Reality 2, which is currently at version 2.5. That requires Studio 4.5.1.6 or above.

Reality, which is the interface to use LuxRender, allows you to use any kind of light. It is not designed for exteriors alone. If you look at the Reality Gallery on dA ( http://reality-plug-in.deviantart.com/ )  you will see plenty of images done with indoor lighting. Here are a few examples:

http://fav.me/d5idnvb
http://fav.me/d3bf4mj
http://fav.me/d5iwqar
http://fav.me/d3beceh
http://fav.me/d4v4lga
http://fav.me/d4n8sd5
http://fav.me/d45qzpy

Now about your questions.

Reality and Luxrender are not made to do any modeling. Reality is the plugin that interfaces Studio with LuxRender. It takes all the Studio lights, materials and objects and it converts them to the format used by Lux. It launches Lux automatically so that you can get your scene rendered in Lux. It provides a fully-features material and light editor that give you complete control on the materials and lights for Lux.

Lux is designed to simulate faithfully the real world. So, if you take the supplied mesh light in Reality, which is like a large studio softbox, and scale it up very large you will get, like in real life, very soft light. 

If you are used to real light then you are in for a treart. Reality and Lux only work with real light. That means that all the photographic tricks, like boucing light off a reflector, work exactly like in real life. 

If you want a gold reflector you can place a plane in the scene, select the Metal material in Reality, select the Gold preset and you have a perfect gold surface to bounce your light around. 

I'll gladly answer any question that you mightr have.

Hope this helps.

Paolo,

Thanks very much for your reply & info.

I'll watch those videos and look over the info on your site some more & think about it.

But I'm cringing at the thought of having to remove DS 4.0 from my comp which does work and has no compatibility problems & replacing it with 4.5 in order to use Reality 2.5. A lot of people have reported problems with DS 4.5.16. I know that my current version is stable.

So what are the advantages of Reality 2.5 compared to 2.0? Besides faster rendering times.

We had two major updates: 2.2 and 2.5. Some changes were bug fixes, others were the support for newer versions of Lux and Studio. Some changes improved the handling of specular color, bump map and displacement. I also added support for the DOF controls of Studio to control DOF in Reality/Lux.

The big one was the support for the .duf file format. Reality stores its own data in the Studio file, to provide total integration, and so the new file format was crucial. For that reason I cannot keep compatibility with older versions of Studio. The conversion between the old .daz format ti the new one is complex enough and there is no turning back.

There is a list of updates in the News section of my website, http://preta3d.com

Cheers.

OK, thanks. 

Mark - in the for what it's worth category.....

I held off on installing DS 4, and DS 4.5 due to all posts with people having problems. I have installed 4.5 on 3 separate systems, 2 were upgrades and one was a new install. It's stable on all 3, and I haven't experienced any of the issues that others have had. I guess the important thing to keep in mind is that there are probably several thousand successful installs, we just here about the problems. I followed the instructions for upgrading very carefully to help ensure success.

Of course this doesn't mean that you won't have issues with 4.5, but the odds are very much in your favor that the upgrade will work without any issues. I just thought I'd relate my experiences should you want to upgrade. Paolo as implemented some nice new features in Reality 2.5, and for me it was worth the upgrade - in fact Reallity 2.5 was one of the main reasons I upgraded (plus I wanted to use the Carrara 8.5 beta and Genesis).

Having worked in IT for over 25 years now, the whole continual upgrade thing (and stuff breaking with newer versions) has gotten a bit old, so I fully understand  where you are coming from. I guess the bottom line here is that I'm glad I upgraded, I just wish in both instances I would have upgraded sooner. I just thought I'd throw this out as food for thought, but I also understand that your milage may vary.

Mark I use reality and Luxrender almost exclusively and it should fit your needs very well. Like Dustrider, I have had no problems going from DS4.0 to DS4.5, then again most of  my content is in poser runtime format in an external directory, so problems with any content were non existent.

Agree with the above... I tried daz studio and gave up after a couple of tries proved that lights and shadows did not behave as expected from real life. Reality came along and opened the door to the promise of utilising the realistic real world lighting by allowing the use of LuxRender. I must admit that I still use ds3.1 and reality 1.25 and lux 0.8, but as soon as I started using it I found it crazy addictive. To actually get renders that I could set up as it would be in a photograph meant no learning all the bad habits that go with trying to 'simulate' lighting.

Even though I have not jumped to daz studio 4.5, I can assure you that Paolo and the very happy band of followers and users will always be available to offer constructive advice. The best solution available right now, (In my opinion), is to render via Luxrender using the Reality plug-in... I'm sure you will not regret it! `¬)

Thanks FSMC & mbin,

But what i dread most about the move to 4.5 is that supposedly I have to uninstall 4.0+ and everything in it, and then reinstall everything(characters, props, clothes, poses-a BIG one right there, etc, etc, etc)afterwards. That's going to be a major hassle and chore! I'd rather have a root canal!

And I can only hope all that works in 4.5 as it did in 4.0. Especially all the Xameva & Meipe stuff I need for V4.

Anyway, not looking forward to having to reinstall e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g-!

And then the learning curve of a totally new program for me that is Reality and LuxRender.

Mark, you are not required to uninstall your figures. I had the same Runtime configuration since DS3 and I didn't change anything in it.

Mark.. I've been using the 4.5(daz)/2.5(reality) combo since the day they were both released.  I'm not sure what you've been reading and where; but, those who are having problems with 4.5 are probably the same people who are using Windows 98 due to compatibility issues.  When it comes upgrading studio, I'd suggest just trying it.  Don't install it, use it for 5 minutes, declare it to be crap and uninstall it.  Give it a few weeks.  Myself, I find it indispensible now as you no longer have to use the transfer utility for 98% of your content.  With the new dson formats you have cross platform functionality between DS and Poser and (for me) it's just slicker and sleeker.

The second thing I wanted to address is your wish to not put your original post in the reality render thread.  I can understand the thought pattern with most forums; but, it's a horse of a different color when it comes to the reality forum.  Most of us are there period to show off our work, explain how we did it and to help others overcome their issues.  I can't even begin to count how often I've been helped over various hurdles in there.  Most of the time by Paolo himself.. and usually within a couple of minutes.  I've never had to wait more than an hour or two to get an informed semi-professional (or professional in the case of Paolo) answer for any of my reality issues.  It's why we're there.  So don't be afraid of posting a question, render, WIP or whatever in the Reality thread.  The REASON why it's at 230+ pages is because we're there all the time helping each other.

I understand Sharkbytes...,

I just didn't want it to get  lost in a much much much larger thread and then be a particular discussion that's like a needle in a haystack to find later.

Thanks by the way to everyone who has replied. Your time & assistance has been appreciated and I've bookmarked this particular thread as well.

Thanks again everyone, including you Paolo. 

Another question:

How much RAM is recommended for Reality and LuxRender?

Especially if I want to make some larger size renders, say 16x24 inches(40.6x 61cm) or larger. 

That all depends on what you have in your scene... as well as how much subdivision might be used. If you want to get a feel for it, open task manager before you call Reality, then watch the memory use in the processes tab of the Luxrender.exe as it parses out the scene file; you will see the memory usage go up, and eventually the lux render window will appear. Check your scene set to a small size and see... I ended up fitting 32gb ram, but most of the time its because I might be running several smaller test renders at the same time. If you look at the memory usage in this way you should get a good feal for what happens to memory usage if you add complexity / subdivision / image size. The one thin you don't want to do is have a scene that takes more memory than you have, as if it starts to use a disk swap file, the render speed will slow down by massive amounts...

Basically the more memory you have, the bigger and more complex scenes you can render. There are ways of conserving memory usage, I'm sure Paolo or someone can give a more expert view on this! `¬)

P.S. as far as physical size goes, it depends on what resolution (pixels per inch or dots per inch you want? - screen size or print size)

In DS 4 it is rendering my images at 96dpi I believe. And that is with the render quality at the highest level next to the turtle symbol for slow.

But if I have only one subject, say V4 and nothing else but a photo background I'm supplying and I want good, soft, natural looking wraparound light(mesh light?) and don't know yet if I would need more than 1 mesh light, and I want to render @ say 16x24 inches as mentioned earlier, what do you think I'm likely to need?

For props, the only thing would be her wedding ring(always) and maybe simple clothing. I guess the only large prop I have would be the Ultimate Bed by Powerage(available here). And I don't use that all the time.

Also, I would only be doing one render test at a time.

I can't comment on what ds4 does, (or ds3 either), as I do not use the daz render page (and have no idea of the slow turtle symbol... lol!)

As far as I know, Luxrender simply renders an image which is so many pixels by so many pixels... I gues that if you wanted a final print at 96dpi, (dots per inch) you would need to render the appropriate size image, such that you print a 96 pixel by 96 pixel the size of one inch square? I'm not particularly familiar on how a print would be done from a generated image, but if you want to print at 96dpi to a size of 16x24", that could corrospond to 1536 pixels by 2304 pixels... but I am assuming 1 pixel would relate to one dot... I think this has been discussed somewhere before... If I find a link I will post it.

I also cannot say how much memory you would want for your items, as it depends on geometry, sub division settings, as well as textures etc. I suggest you try rendering the image at small size and then you can calculate how much memory it would take... sorry I can't be more specific! ...have you looked at memory usage in task manager for the Lux process when you hit 'render' from reality?

Just for the record, there is no 96dpi, 72dpi or any other dPi. Those concepts do not exist when you create an i age, they are just relative to a given device. When you render an image, in Studio, Poser, Lux or other software, you render an image at so many pixels of width and so many pixels of height. That's all. Density comes in place whe you display the image or when you print it. We need to make the right calculations, but when you ask Studio to make an image 1280x720, for example, that is exactly how many pixels you will get.

All the best. 

When I'm rendering an image in DS4 alone,(no Reality or LuxRender yet) with the render "Quality vs Speed" settings slider in the upper left corner with the Worst(Hare) at 1 and Best (Tortoise)at 4, I've got it set at 4(Best). I'm also using render quality settings under3Delight that one of the experienced DAZ users recommended and all that does produce an excellent image.

Now here's where the 96 ppi comes in. In Photoshop under Image>Image Size>Document Size>Resolution the rendered images are 96 pixels per inch or 37.795 pixels per centimeter.

When I asked someone in the DAZ forums on their site about how to change the ppi to something else like 300 or 360 which I'm familiar with in photography, he said that ppi doesn't really matter & you can change it to whatever you want later.

So apparently 96 ppi is the default setting in DS4 which cannot be adjusted until after rendering in a PS type image editor.

Hi.

Well, as I said before, those values have no meaning when it comes to defining a bitmap. There is no "density" when it comes to a PNG or JPEG file. The only values are the resolution. Photoshop provides a conversion factor when you use somethin glike cm or inches. But the only unit of measure for a bitmap is the pixel.

Cheers.

So when we render something with Reality & LR is it saving the image as a .BMP file, .JPG or other?

If I were to open the rendered image from Lux in Photoshop, what is it going to show for resolution?

I don't mean the image dimensions like 1280x720, but the ppi.  

In DS4 with 3Delight regardless of the image dimensions, the resolution always shows 96ppi after I open it in Photoshop. 

The default format is PNG, you can set that in the Output tab of Reality. I can't answer your question about ppi as that unit of measure does not apply to a bitmap. The ppi applies to a device, like a screen or printer.

Cheers.

Paolo,

You said the default format(for Reality & LR?)is PNG. Can it also work with BMP?

If I try to render my V4 model in DS4 with any photo backdrop I have with PNG format, I lose that backdrop. Nothing shows up in the image behind her but the empty white & grey checkered background. I need to be able to keep the background I want to use. And the photos I'm using are in Jpg and sometimes Tif. 

Out of curiousity, what is the largest size render you have ever made?

Bmp is not supported for output. Of course you can easily convert from PNG to BMP if you want, but there is usually no reason for doing that. For input Lux supports almost all bitmap formats, and probably BMP, but, again, that is a format that should be avoided. The backdrop in Studio is not support. If you want a backdrop you need to place a plane with your choice of bitmap for texture.

My images never go beyond HD format, 1920x1080, but that's just me. Others have made larger images. The limit that you have is based on the memory available and the time to render the image.

Cheers 

EDIT; Ha! Paolo beat me to it! ...I probably rambled on a bit! `¬)

The default rendered image you end up with is .PNG. This is not related to any images used in the original scene for either maps or backdrops. I assume for back drops you mean setting an image onto a plane within your daz scene before you render... http://fav.me/d4aky2i You can either add the image to the plane in daz studio, or you can load the image onto the item in the Reality interface as indicated here...

I hope it is not too confusing in that I am illustrating with an older version of DazStudio and Reality?

...as far as render size goes, I generally render the same size resolution of my pc screen which is in my case 1920 x 1200 pixels. That means it will fill my whole screen when viewd full size. I cannot see much reson to render bigger than this, as otherwise to view full size on screen means having to scroll around the window!

On the other hand, if you wanted to print out your render poster sized, you might want to render an image with higher resolution but this will depend on the printer resolution. This is where your 'ppi' comes in. It gets a bit complecated, as it can take several 'dots' on a printed image to resolve a single pixel colour...

ppi is a bit redundant when it comes to a monitor, as most 'standard' monitors these days (rather than top rate graphics monitor which would/could have far higher resolution), are 1920 x 1080 for widescreen (my screen is 16:10 rather than 16:9 - the ratio of the width to the height). Depending on the physical size of your monitor will determine how many pixels per inch you will have. A 1920 x 1080 pixels on a 28" monitor will be far less ppi than on a 18" monitor...

This is just my opinion, I'm sure others may be able to give good reasons to render at other sizes...

Incidently, I would not render full size you want until you are happy with all your settings. I generally start test renders at about 50% size, as I can see the results faster. Once most of the tweaks are done, I may go to 75%, and when I am happy with the whole scen, I will then go to a full 100% size render. That way, you can see how your scene / image progresses as you add or change items. Until you are very familiar, it is probably not a good idea to fill your scene and set it all up before doing a test render. I will start a scene and test render each item I add or change. Sometimes I will set up a completly seperate scen from my original if I want to test some settings on only one object. Once it looks right, I can then add it to my main scene knowing the settings are right - rather than rendering lots of other things in the scene that I'm not interested in at that point.

At the end of the day, if your target 'audiance' are viewing on a monitor, then its probably best to match the 'avarage' monitor size, and if your target is to print out posters, then you will likely need to render larger to take into account the requirements of the poster size and the capabilities of the printing process used. Some usefull info here if you really want to delve into it... (personally it just made my head hurt! `¬)

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dots_per_inch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_density

Hi - Is Reality a fast render, or does it take a long time to render a detailed image with lighting like uber? I can currently render with Urber lighting in high quality, not the best quality, in about 2 minutes. So how fast is this plug-in?

Quote - Hi - Is Reality a fast render, or does it take a long time to render a detailed image with lighting like uber? I can currently render with Urber lighting in high quality, not the best quality, in about 2 minutes. So how fast is this plug-in?

Reality is not a renderer.

It just exports a file that can be used by Luxrender