So, I open Daz4.9. I load a character.

When I render, to my understanding, I'm looking at GI lighting, it's everywhere, shadowless, and as far as I know, can't be turned off.

So if I want to play with lighting I need to enclose the model.

So for experiments I create a box and put her inside.

Now I get darkness renders, as expected.

So to get some lights on, I create a point light and place it where it should go.

Looks great in texture-shaded preview window, just as expected, but when I render, it's very, very dark.

Adding more point lights does not improve matters.

Questions:

What light do I need to add that's going to cast shadows but be bright enough to look like an actual light?

What setting do I need to change to make the lighting preview in "texture shaded" look more like what's going to happen in an iray render?

Thanks.

In Iray, like every other PBR render engine, you get realistic shadows. They are, generally, not going to be as sharp as you are used to with Firefly, 3Delight, Lightwave, Carrara etc. but they are there.

Note what you are talking about is the same things that photographers have been talking about for years. :)

Two things will influence your light in Iray. First is the light itself. You have the intensity of the light, and the distance of the light from the target you want lit. The second thing is the Camera settings (which are actually on the render settings under tone mapping).

You can't take a camera and set it for a bright sunny day (the default tone mapping setting) and take it inside turn on a single 1400 lumen light (About 100 watts) and expect the image to be bright or well lit.

Just like with a camera sharp shadows can be done in Iray, or other PBR render engine, and you basically have to set up your shot the same way. Here are a pair of examples. One lit by a daylight HDRI

.

This one is an interior shot using a Paramount Light rig, that I built based on information in a photography book.

I played a bit with the tone-mapping settings, but the results seemed kind-of "Chromatic" and not organic at all. I finally figured out to just crank up the Lumens on the light itself; that seems to have done the trick. Now, to figure out why my rather small render is 6% in one hour. Not good enough.

More lights and it renders faster.

Also make sure under Render settings, under the advanced tab, please check the OptiX check box. (Unless you have certain AMD/ATI cards, that is the "magic go faster setting." (Stealing a quote from SickleYield.)

Okay, DS decided it was done with my render, which is set to "Photoreal" and what I have is a ton of noise.

Why do I have a ton of noise?

Its probably noisy because the light levels in your scene are still low and Iray was stopped before it had enough time to build up the samples the scene needs.

You don't need to use an enclosing box to stop that overall light. Just switch the render settings to 'Scene only' and the dome will turn off. Better for me is 'Dome and Scene' with the dome intensity turned down. I tend to use spotlights instead of point lights and give the spotlights some geometry.

William_the_Bloody posted at 7:58AM Wed, 02 March 2016 - #4258680

Okay, DS decided it was done with my render, which is set to "Photoreal" and what I have is a ton of noise.

Why do I have a ton of noise?

A render stops when it hits one of three conditions. The number of iterations. (Default is 5000), the amount of time (Default is 7200 Seconds) the amount of convergence (Default is 95%). It stops when it hits the first one of those conditions.

Usually, if you are looking for a final render you are, usually, looking for the convergence to hit 95%. Never fear, those stop conditions can be changed, during a render, or even if the render is "Finished." On the left side of the render window is a small box, about halfway up. Click that. Under Progressive Render, you can adjust the stop conditions. You can even change the limits. Once you do that, if you render has stopped, the resume button will become available. If it is during a render, then it will just keep running until it hits one of the new stop conditions. (You can also make the changes before you start the render in the render pane, if you prefer.)