Carrara Skies Lightdomes Bundle [commercial]

Tim Payne

Whether you're new to Carrara, or a long-time veteran, Carrara Skies Lightdomes make fantastic lighting results easy!

http://www.daz3d.com/new-releases/carrara-skies-lightdomes-bundle

Tim Payne

More images:

Tim Payne

These lightdomes have some notable advantages over conventional skylight global illumination and HDRI in Carrara.

They typically render faster than global illumination of comparable quality, particularly in complex scenes, and require no pre-render lighting calculations. They are image-based, which means that unlike skylight, the light realistically varies in color and intensity across the sky. They include a super fast approximation of indirect lighting, which prevents the unrealistically dark object undersides that are so prevalent with global illumination. And, the lightdomes produce very natural specular reflections (blurry reflections) with NO increase to render time - this completely eliminates the dull, flat, unrealistic look produced by GI and HDRI in Carrara.

The simulation of blurry reflections is particularly significant.

In the real world, highlights are actually very blurry reflections - every type of surfaces is reflective to some degree. This isn't true in Carrara - mostly because its physically accurate blurry reflections are so slow that they're almost always impractical to use. The highlight/specularity shader component in 3D graphics is meant to fake super bright blurry reflections from point light sources.

Scenes lit primarily with Global Illumination (Skylight, IBL, and HDRI) tend to look very, very flat. This is due primarily to there being no highlights whatsoever from the global illumination. A shader's highlight and shininess channels do nothing with this sort of lighting. Also, the effects of the bump channel are minimized.

A lightdome, however, is made from hundreds of very dim lights that create very subtle highlights from all directions, and roughly approximate realistic blurry reflections from the sky. The first set of example images below uses a completely black shader with an extremely high (150% highlight) but soft (10% shininess) specularity - the reflection channel is unused, and yet the objects appear reflective. It's not perfect, because the reflection only comes from the sky, and not from any other objects in the scene, but the overall effect is a huge improvement over GI, and can dramatically improve realism.

argus1000

Can you use those light domes with animation without them shooting up the render times to the sky?

Tim Payne

Hi argus,

That's a difficult question to answer simply. :) It all depends on what kinds of objects are in the scene, the desired realism of the results, how much time you want to spend on setup, how much compositing you're willing to do, and what is considered "too long" for rendering each frame of the animation. :)

Personally, for animation, there aren't many situations where I would consider using a lightdome (or any other form of global illumination) to illuminate full frames. It's inefficient, and too much of a "brute force" approach to lighting.

A good rig of shadow buffer lights and colored ambience is the way to go when render speed is paramount (this is all that was used for Pixar's Toy Story). This can take quite a bit of time to set up, but overall it's probably the best way to light animations in Carrara.

If greater realism is necessary, the most efficient route is to break the scenes into several passes, and then use whatever lighting methods are ideal for each pass. The lightdomes would work very well here - especially for static background plates, but also for characters and other objects that are to be composited into the backgrounds. Not having to render the full background for each frame will save tons of time, lighting quality can be adjusted for different objects, and the overall render time for the animation could be very reasonable. With this approach, the animation can look every bit as realistic as my promo images. But again, this involves a lot of setup.

As a benchmark, the promo images for the bundle were rendered at 2600x1000 and most took about 1-2 hours to complete on my aging 2.4Ghz Q6600 quad-core. That is significantly faster than comparable GI, but way too long for individual animation frames.

Hope this helps.

PhilW

Great products, Tim, and definitely recommended! And some amazing work on the promo images too, all very impressive!

Jonstark

Agree completely with PhilW, these are some of my favorite Carrara products, and have been very useful to me since purchasing. Can't go wrong with them, and they enhance your lighting drastically.

scottidog2

Love using your Lightdomes Tim. Very useful indeed!

argus1000

Tim Payne said:

If greater realism is necessary, the most efficient route is to break the scenes into several passes, and then use whatever lighting methods are ideal for each pass. Hope this helps.

Thanks for your balanced answer, Tim. I just started to use composites in my animations, so I guess your domes will be useful. And especially with the advent of Octane for Carrara, maybe the GPU render times will be considerably shortened compared to the usual CPU renderings.

Philemo_Carrara

I use them a lot too.

There is a (little) work to use it with gamma correction (Thanks to Philw, I never render human skin without Gamma :-) ) :
- Use master light to lower light intensity of the main group down to 60%
- Use a paint program to create an ungammaed version of the background image. This part is if you don't have Carrara skies and only once per sky.
- Don't use ambient light

That done, it does give nice results and far quicker than skylight rendering in most of the cases;.
Often, when I decide to move from a skylight render to a skydome one, I have to lower the intensity of some highlights settings because it does render highlights far better. It's a bit of a PITA with dynamic hair shader to find the right setting.

All in all, it's a nice product I'm happy to own and I do recommend it.

PhilW

argus1000 said:

Tim Payne said:

If greater realism is necessary, the most efficient route is to break the scenes into several passes, and then use whatever lighting methods are ideal for each pass. Hope this helps.

Thanks for your balanced answer, Tim. I just started to use composites in my animations, so I guess your domes will be useful. And especially with the advent of Octane for Carrara, maybe the GPU render times will be considerably shortened compared to the usual CPU renderings.

A light dome is really a solution for Carrara rendering, normal Carrara lights are not used in Octane and it will therefore have no effect.

bytescapes

I really like the 'look' of images rendered with Tim Payne's lightdomes; Carrara + a lightdome has pretty much become my go-to for rendering these days. They just make things look better. For example, I used them for this image and this one, and this one ... and a few dozen others on my site.

I got momentarily excited when I saw that some TP lightdomes were in today's sale ... and then saw it was just a bundle with the skies (which I also use heavily). Oh well.

Anyway, if you use Carrara and don't have these already, I recommend them strongly.

P.S. Mr Payne has not paid me to say any of this. I am just a satisfied customer.

P.P.S. Tim, could you please release my family members now? Thank you.

P.P.P.S. Seriously - they're great. Go get 'em.

Tim Payne

Thanks everyone! :)

Philemo said:

I use them a lot too.

There is a (little) work to use it with gamma correction (Thanks to Philw, I never render human skin without Gamma :-) ) :
- Use master light to lower light intensity of the main group down to 60%
- Use a paint program to create an ungammaed version of the background image. This part is if you don't have Carrara skies and only once per sky.
- Don't use ambient light

That done, it does give nice results and far quicker than skylight rendering in most of the cases;.
Often, when I decide to move from a skylight render to a skydome one, I have to lower the intensity of some highlights settings because it does render highlights far better. It's a bit of a PITA with dynamic hair shader to find the right setting.

All in all, it's a nice product I'm happy to own and I do recommend it.

A few years ago I came to the conclusion that the unnatural color shifts, specular burn, and unrealistic light falloff that sometimes plagued me in Cararra were a result of problems with its internal processing of lighting and shaders. I did a bit of research on it, but for some reason I didn't connect it to the gamma setting, and I eventually decided that there wasn't much that could be done about it without DAZ updating the render code. So, many kudos to PhilW for bringing gamma correction to the attention of Carrara users!

This year I've started doing some of my projects with a gamma correction of 2.2, and for some types of scenes it has been a big help in achieving the desired results a lot faster and with fewer adjustments. I experimented with a lot of different things and was very pleasantly suprised with how well the lightdome presets transitioned to the higher gamma, particularly since Carrara Skies Lightdomes were designed to counteract some of the issues caused by the "nonlinear lighting workflow" resulting from uncorrected gamma. As Philemo mentioned, the lights may require some minor intensity adjustments for high gamma. Their colors also tend to desaturate somewhat, but overall they still work great.

And yes, finding a good setting for dynamic hair highlights can be really tough. Part of the problem is that hair can't have colored highlights, but I think there's also an issue with some aspects of the hair shader not being implemented correctly.

I really like the 'look' of images rendered with Tim Payne's lightdomes; Carrara + a lightdome has pretty much become my go-to for rendering these days. They just make things look better. For example, I used them for this image and this one, and this one ... and a few dozen others on my site.

I got momentarily excited when I saw that some TP lightdomes were in today's sale ... and then saw it was just a bundle with the skies (which I also use heavily). Oh well.

Anyway, if you use Carrara and don't have these already, I recommend them strongly.

P.S. Mr Payne has not paid me to say any of this. I am just a satisfied customer.

P.P.S. Tim, could you please release my family members now? Thank you.

P.P.P.S. Seriously - they're great. Go get 'em.

LOL. Thanks Angus, that made my day.

Really nice images too. A stroll through your galleries is always very enjoyable. :)

PhilW

Tim - I'm glad you are finding the gamma correction stuff useful, coming from you that is a huge endorsement!

makma

I've bought most of the lighting rigs available in DAZ store but actually I use only Tim's rigs. They are very good and give a lot of possibilities. Unfortunately most of them give a light of a day from nun to dusk. I had to make a morning light myself.

Greetings
Marek