How do i use lux render
witcherask_a3dd58a1c6
Posts: 194
I experimented a lot but havent been able to make good realastic looking renders with daz. Can any1 tell me how to do it.
Heres a scene i render with lux using one spot and one distant light. It has one victoria and nothing else.
Can you tell me how to get good render with this scene. I am using reality
demo1.png
906 x 882 - 153K
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Comments
First, it would help to have either some scenery for the light to bounce off or the use of an image based light to give more overall lighting. One of the problems with doing renders on the 'void' is that there's nothing for the light to reflect off, so you get a very flat and uninteresting image. Luxrender uses a very realistic light calculation, which makes this bounce light all the more important for good looking scenes.
Learning how to master Luxrender is an entire topic by itself, and I strongly suggest you look at the Luxus discussion to pick up some tips. While some are specific to Luxus due to features which Reality 2.5 doesn't support, there are many tips which you can use for all Luxrender images such as scene composition and lighting choice.
As Herald pointed, at least use an HDR Image to light your scene or some meshlight. You may also have to tweak your shaders.
Even in DS to get a better lightning, use Uber Environnement with an IBL to get more realistic result. That goes for any rendering system
What will also be needed is to tweak any material specifically to the render engine. Luxrender has some advanced feature like cloth shaders, a sunlight system etc... and it's better to use them
What version of DAZ Studio are you using and what version of Reality are you using? This does make a difference
I'm more than happy to answer specific queries regarding Luxrender, but bear in mind that there is a very steep learning curve if you're used to biased render engines.
Reality 1 is still used by a portion of Studio users as well.
and if you're using Reality you should not be using the default lights from Studio as they are, you will have far better ease and success using the ones that are included in the Reality content folder.
development info on Reality 3 for Studio can be found here.
http://forum.runtimedna.com/showthread.php?77925-Reality-3-for-Studio-Development-journal
I'm more than happy to answer specific queries regarding Luxrender, but bear in mind that there is a very steep learning curve if you're used to biased render engines.
Oups I didn't see the OP was referring to reality. Just read the title and responded with Luxrender capabilities in mind
Looks like you aren't using any shadows with this render? Using uberenvironment for IBL is one way to get more realistic lighting, but there is more to it than that (also, isn't the only way). You will often need to use other lights in combination as IBL. Once you get your lighting sorted out you'll probably find you need to tweak shaders too. Depending on the how realistic you are shooting for, realistic can be very hard to achieve whatever render engine you use.
LuxRender is a very tricky program. If you use Luxus I've actually written a good intro guide (well, people tell me it's good). http://www.digisprawl.com/blog/tutorials/
If you chose Reality 2.5, the second part of the guide should offer some useful info. If you buy Reality 2.5 now the upgrade to 3 should be very reasonable. I was able to side-grade from 2 for DS to 3 for Poser for 12 bucks or so.
I thought uber environment didnt work with lux renders so i never used that.. I will give it a try and post the result here
A background does help in bouncing/reflecting light towards the subject and I use that a lot :)
Sometimes I do want a black background like this render with Guy Gardner (still a wip because so far it's 1.1k s/p :P )
imo you'll have better luck with mesh lights, which is my default light (and suggested by Paolo, Reality's creator). In the scene with Guy I had 1 mesh light off at an angle, converted the interior of the Power Battery to light and scaled the intensity way down, then put a mesh light above the Power Battery, reduced it to 25%, intensity of the light was reduced as well).
You can also use mesh lights both as a background and key light for a high key look like this shot of Gia :cheese:
UberEnvorimnent is strictly for 3Delight's rendering engine which is vastly different from Luxrender, in fact the environment sphere in UE may actually cover any lights you create and you'll end up with a black render.
There are 3 possible interfaces from Daz Studio to Luxrender, they are Reality, Luxus and LuxrenderDS (DS3 only) and each one needs the scene to be "tweaked" in their respective interfaces to get it to work efficiently in Luxrender. If you're just loading your scene and going into directly into Luxrender you're overlooking some things that need to get set up correctly.
Heres a render with 1 mesh and 1 spot light. Looks good still no where near to those great ones
It's not bad for an early effort :) What are your settings for the skin and hair, specifically the glossiness strength?
At any rate, I'd argue the lighting isn't the problem in your last render, but rather the materials you've used. The material settings for items in your scene will HUGELY impact the final output. It changes how the light behaves when it interacts with a surface, how the light is reflected and therefore how the reflected light then responds to new surfaces and so on. This domino effect means that poor material choices can cascade into ugly lighting and vice versa.
Reality has an ACSEL shader download built in, but I've personally found it next to useless so I prefer to set up my own material options and use them as presets. While I haven't used Reality much since getting Luxus, I can recommend some choices. First, use glossy for skin, nails and hair. Since there's no glossy translucent, you'll have to make do with second-best. Keep the gloss over 8k, but no higher than 9k, except perhaps for the nails if you want them to be more reflective (good for nail varnish). For the floor, again use glossy with a reasonably high value. If you put this value to maximum or close you can actually get reflections in the floor, which make it seem very polished.
The rest comes largely from experimentation and experience. Picking the right type of material for the surface is vital for making good renders, so play around to see what works for you.
For render in my previous post i had mainly used all matte material with default values.
Heres new render with skin and stuff glossiness value to 8k.
I have to reduce spot light otherwise it seems to bright.
Even with matte textures you can get decent results.
Try experimenting with the different Film Response settings. Under any given lighting the different film responses can make a huge difference. Fortunately you can experiment live in the LuxRender GUI. Try changing light colors and levels with the film resonses. The differences can be quite dramatic.
The problem with spotlights is that they don't really 'work' in the real world. Spotlights in 3D programs like Daz start at a point and cone outwards, but in the real world light disperses in ALL directions from the light source. The reason real spotlights work is because they use plates to funnel the light to a specific area. The closest you can get using pure lighting in Luxrender would be by using an IES file to simulate the light path.
Other than that, it's really a case of playing with the material settings to find a good balance. I personally disagree with Vanguard's opinion that you can get good results using pure matte, and feel you should always use the appropriate material for the surface where possible. In lieu of cloth material for clothing, again I recommend the use of glossy, glasses and metals should also be used where appropriate.
The film response is really exactly what it says. It won't affect the lighting directly, nor will it change how the materials react but it will change how that information is translated to the camera. You can emulate older cameras or the latest high-tech movie cameras by changing the type of 'film' being used. It comes with multiple presets to choose from, and can add interesting accents to an image.
Edit: Wrote 'Gobo' when I meant snoot. Curse these silly names
Edit #2: Here's a quick example I put together which was rendered using Reality. I used two 'spotlights' as the only illumination in the scene, both of which used the softbox and snoot combination to emulate a real world spotlight.
Apologies. I misread your original post. I thought the image was a 3Delight render and you were looking for advice on how to make it better there, or failing that, how to approach LuxRender. So, as everyone has said, and you yourself understood, uberenvironment does not work with LuxRender. It has its own implementation for IBL.
With Luxus you can convert DAZ Spot lights to Lux spots, and they do work fine. Mesh lights are great, but won't make you happy in all situations. There is no one light that fits all situations. And you CAN get good skins using variations of the matte material (such as matte translucent with homogenous volume). Says so right in the luxrender wiki, and I tend to agree, but I’ve had just as much success with similar variations of the glossy translucent. Getting the basics of people is fine, but be wary when they start to give you art lessons, as well meaning as they might be, they can blind you to other possibilities.
My suggestions were within the limitations of the plugin he was using, hence why I made them.
for sunlight in Reality
create a scene, add a distant light, rename a distant light "sun"
render in Luxrender using Kernal set to Linear, Sensitivity set to 100, Exposure set to 1/125, FStop to 16 and Gamma to somewhere around 2.0 - 2.6 depending on your monitors calibration.
This exposure is commonly known as the "sunny 16 rule" by professional photographers.
Lighting in Reality is closer to lighting a scene for photographers than 3Delight in Daz Studio is so it might make sense to look on line at how photographers generally light a scene and it will really make a difference in your renders.