Instructions/demo for using light kits

paulawp (marahzen)

Is anyone aware of documentation or a demo video showing how to use one of the HDRI light kits? They're similar enough to each other for the most part that practical how-to on any of them will do; I have a lot of them anyway. I find that I spend a lot of time clicking things randomly without any real understanding, particularly what the relationship is between the lights under Lights and the assorted environments, generally under Render Settings. 

Most documentation on lighting is more about creating and configuring lights from scratch rather than using any of these kits, and while there's lots of threads here about the various kits, I haven't found a lot of info about practical usage of them.

I might be the only person who is unclear on how to use these correctly. 

I'm referring to kits like, just for example:

Fast Production Lights for Iray | Daz 3D

Scintillant Portrait Lights for Iray | Daz 3D

Just to name a couple. 

Gordig

HDRIs work entirely through render settings, and these lights in particular are designed to be one-click solutions. All you need to do is navigate to the product however you do it (content library or smart content) and apply the desired HDRI, then render. Since these aren't physical lights in your scene, you won't see anything until you render, or at least Iray preview. You'll need "draw dome" in the environment tab of your render settings pane to be turned on if you want to see the background, but even if it's turned off, you'll still get the benefit of the lighting. Environment mode needs to be set to either "dome and scene" (if you're adding your own physical lights) or "dome only". If desired, you can use the additional tone mapping presets to modify the lighting to taste.

evilded777

Pretty sure I proof read the Read Me/Docs for Scintillant Portrait Lights, so I think there's a doc for that, but I might be misremembering.

paulawp (marahzen) said:

Is anyone aware of documentation or a demo video showing how to use one of the HDRI light kits? They're similar enough to each other for the most part that practical how-to on any of them will do; I have a lot of them anyway. I find that I spend a lot of time clicking things randomly without any real understanding, particularly what the relationship is between the lights under Lights and the assorted environments, generally under Render Settings. 

Most documentation on lighting is more about creating and configuring lights from scratch rather than using any of these kits, and while there's lots of threads here about the various kits, I haven't found a lot of info about practical usage of them.

I might be the only person who is unclear on how to use these correctly. 

I'm referring to kits like, just for example:

Fast Production Lights for Iray | Daz 3D

Scintillant Portrait Lights for Iray | Daz 3D

Just to name a couple. 

 

paulawp (marahzen)

You are right about Scintillant, Evilded777. Funny I used that one - which was one of several I bought in yesterday's $2.99 sale - as an example. I see that Scintillant's Read Me has some tangible details, including about selecting both the light and the render setting from a given pair; many Read Me items I'd looked at only included a general product description and file list. I have found that using one or the other (light/render setting) would often result in a change in the render and I remained unsure whether you were supposed to use them together or if they were different tools to do different things.

Again, I know it's a totally stupid question, but with some of these kits, there are numerous features and additional settings which are clearly meant to enhance or tweak a basic result, to the point that I wasn't sure what was needed/expected to get the basic result to start with.