Looking For Users Experienced With My iRadiance HDRIs
DimensionTheory
Posts: 434
I'm hoping for some feedback from users familiar with my recent Iradiance HDRIs (Variety Pack One), mostly to run some ideas by and get statistical information. If you've been using this set and feel you can provide valued opinion please contact me VIA PM here on the forums! I would also love to see your renders so feel free to share them here or through PM 
Post edited by DimensionTheory on
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Don't have it yet, but I'm wanting it. It's in my wishlist.
While I have you, might I suggest you provide a little more documentation with your products. I have your HDR mesh lights, and while functional, there was nothing in the package about usage. Yes, I can self-discover, but it really doesn't take that long to prepare some documentation, maybe with a tips-and-tricks section. Like most users, I don't have countless hours just to experiment, though I wish I did. A headstart saves time.
I don't mean to single you out. Increasing, Daz vendors are releasing product without even a readme. Some of it -- especially Iray -- requires a step-by-step, because it's new. Even experienced users need a push in the right direction.
Hi, DT, I am a user and firm advocate of using your Iradiance products. I have all three. The promos for my Metamorphosis product were all done with the Studio HDRIs. This image was done with your Variety Pack, I beleive it was the mountain B, but might have been A. They've enabled me to do what I hope for in Iray by providing me with a great variety of lighting that can be used alone or with your mesh lights or other lights.
Thanks
I find the HDRI iRadiance set to be very user friendly but I haven't had much luck with the Mesh Light sets - I'm still an Iray newbie and like click and go options. >_>
I'm a huge fan of your light sets for the AoA lights so your Iray sets were an easy purchase. Can flood the thread with lots of test renders, if wanted. lol!
Just picked these up over the weekend and not had that much time to play with them yet.
Thank you all for the feedback! I'm trying my best to address concerns and make improvements so the next things I release are better represented.
My main trouble with providing documentation is not knowing what individual users need to know, or where to draw the line with the amount of information I provide. It's a balance that I've struggled with and talked about struggling with in the past. There is a blurry line between teaching customers how to use my products and teaching them how to use the software (DAZ Studio, Poser, Carrara etc), which I often don't know how to address. Hopefully you guys can see this from my point of view and understand my reasoning.
There's times where I've done full video tutorials on detailed usage for my products (HDR Prosets) or PDF ReadMe's describing every single aspect of a product (Shade of Life Shaders). When I do I usually end up with users asking for more videos and more detailed guidelines sometimes on other subjects completely unrelated, so it ends up being a situation where there's always something missing and someone I need to say no to. Any information needs to be presented in a way that doesn't raise additional questions, shown and written in a way that everyone understands. The more information I feel needs to be provided in order to cover bases the longer documentation takes to put together. Render examples or illustrations and cohesively worded descriptions take time to produce, any one tutorial video or PDF overlook I've created took at least a full day's worth of work. Often I won't receive any feedback on the provided information so there's no way for me to know if it was of use. It becomes hard to justify when I only know that maybe every 1/200 people benefit at all from the investment I make.
For the iRadiance Meshlights it's something I don't know what users need to know about. To me they are just load and render, especially the presets. They all import pointing at the default loading position, loading a DTML-Preset then loading your figure or prop and rendering should be all you need to do to make them work as intended. The individual lights just need to be loaded, positioned and pointed (basically a customizable DIY version of the presets). Color presets only need a single meshlight's material selected before loading to adjust it's hue and saturation accordingly. If there is anything specific anyone would like to know I'm more than happy to provide help where I can.
Thank you so much! I'm glad you are able to find use of my products, I've always been a fan of your work and I'm very happy to hear that you feel my sets compliment what you do. That render is beautiful
There are plenty of products here on DAZ that come with documentation that do a very good job of describing their use, and don't delve into using the software. Let these be your examples. Even a one page description of concepts is useful. Sorry, but I don't see your point that because you're unsure how to write a cohesive basic introduction to your product that you should simply skip it. What you wrote in your post is a good start. Expand it a little. Talk about how to position scene objects so the mesh lights don't show in the render. There are plenty of threads here about people trying to use mesh lights. Distill the problems they've encountered, and describe a couple of ways your product can help.
Yes, you have presets. But what do they do? Apart from color, they differ in the geometry of the profileand their positioning. What's that for? How might a user benefit in common scenes, such as portraits, or outdoors, or simulated indoors? A single paragraph and a table of suggested presets for different settings is all you need.
You are the expert, selling products to people who aren't. You will sell more if your products are more approachable to a wider audience. No one ever sold fewer copies of their product because they had decent documentation.
I own and adore all of the Iradiance lights. The HDRI sets are just awesome. I use them both as backdrops and just for lighting. I've had absolutely no problem using your lights and I think your documentation was more than adequate! Certainly, there was a learning curve with using Iray, but there was nothing in your product that required "extra effort." Truth told, I think the Iradiance lights are about as "one-click-and-go" as you're going to find with Iray. Anyone with a vague understanding of PBR and/or HDR lighting should have no trouble with ANY of these products. I'm actually waiting patiently for more of these. :)
Thanks, DT, ditto!
So, things I didn't know:
Mesh Lights.
I normally set my scene and then add lights, so are you saying it should be the other way? Or is it a matter of you can do either?
When I first started using the presets, sometime the mesh lights were visible in the scene. I thought I could just not render them and was told they will always render and that I just had to move them out of the camera's line of sight. That tidbit, if correct, would be something users may need to know.
HDRIs
Took me a while to figure out that I could light just with those or supplement with fill lights (something I'm still learning to get right). I also wasn't aware of the "Draw Dome" so that I could light with the HDRI and turn off dome to have an alpha at render and composite an image background, such as I did with the image I posted.
Also didn't realize you could rotate the hdri when I first started out.
In general, I would love to know more about what settings affect the HDRI which in turn affects the render. Things such as the numerical settings for Environement Intensity and Map and what they do. I keep hearing about tone mapping. I don't know which things would be suitable for info in reference to the HDRIs and/or mesh lights.
Thanks. :)
The easiest for use with iRay were yours http://www.daz3d.com/daz-studio-iray-hdr-outdoor-environments
and http://www.daz3d.com/daz-studio-iray-hdr-interiors
I really like them very much and already used them couple of times.
All the provided scenes renders very fast and included cameras are very handy to quickly setup the desired view.
I have also bought yours http://www.daz3d.com/iradiance-studio-hdris-for-iray
and http://www.daz3d.com/iradiance-hdr-mesh-lights-for-iray
They render not that fast and require more tweaking to get some good results.
I would like to know some tips and tricks about using these products
(may be to start with, how the promo pictures were created).
It will be awesome, if you can provide that knowledge.
I also like your video: "Merits of HDRI in 3D Rendering" - great comparisons of different lights,
but not so much about, how to set them up with your products.
A lot of this sounds more iRay specifics for lighting techniques as opposed to product specific, although I understand the links. I found with regards to tone mapping (the camera/photography settings) and just lighting with iRay in general I was helped greatly by http://www.daz3d.com/super-quick-easy-ds-iray-tricks it gives a great overview, although if I remember correctly it's only brief this is here for HDRi lighting.
I own all three Iradiance products. I do use the Studio HDRI's and mesh lights for portrait renders. The HDRI Variety Pack One, I used one of the interior shots and it loaded with unnaturally large images of the furniture/furnishings. I thought it was weird and never go around to send it out a support ticket for it. I'll have another go at it when I get home tonite to make sure I am not just imagining things.
I'll second that. I also purchased the Mesh Lights as well as the Studio HDRIs, I'm beginning to get to grips with the Studio HDRIs after some experimentation but I haven't been able to figure out the Mesh Lights yet.
It certainly never hurts to add instructions for the best use of your products, but the problem with deciding how much info to include with a product definitely originates in the rather, er, vague documentation that goes with the software. This: http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/interface/panes/render_settings/engine/nvidia_iray/environment/start actually does a very good job of explaining the use of the dome and just image-based lighting, in general. But DAZ needs to update this: http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/userguide/chapters/lights/start or this: http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/new_features/start to include info on photometric and mesh-based lights for Iray. Photometric lights are touched on, but not much "meat and potatoes" info is given. And nothing at all is mentioned about using "glowy" objects as lights, even though our real-life lights are commonly made of "glowy" objects like light bulbs. Since Iray is the default render engine, I feel like the documentation ought to START by covering Iray lights instead of 3Delight lighting. The 96-page pdf document that opens in DS 4.8 when you go to help/user guide doesn't even mention Iray!
That said, I think the one thing that would be a useful addition to your product info is a quick explanation of color temperature and luminance/luminous efficacy for the emissive settings of the mesh-based light's shader. This: http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/interface/panes/surfaces/shaders/iray_uber_shader/shader_general_concepts/start#emission explains it in a general sense, but doesn't give users a feel for what ACTUAL numbers should be expected in these settings. Changing the emissive color is easy, but the emission temp can simulate natural lighting without deciding which shade of orange looks like candle light. Explaining that low temperatures (2000-ish) simulate cande light, whereas high temperatures (8000+) simulate daylight would be useful, as would giving some sample numbers for the brightness settings, should user wish to customize them.
Here's my latest experiment with the Studio HDRIs. Stopped rendering after about 12 hours (CPU only, 2.4 Ghz quad).
Is there a way to preview the IRay light settings/positions like there is in 3Delight, btw? It's tiresome to make 5-10 min test renders all the time to get a clue about how the final look will be.
That's true, but vendors have a valid reason to not document the underlying software. That's the job of DAZ, and vendors shouldn't feel compelled to take up the slack.
But that said, just because D|S lacks up-to-date documentation doesn't mean vendors get a pass with their individual products. Not all products need more than a few sentences -- applying a MAT or morph to a character, for example. But others, like GenX, need far more robust docs. (Fortunately, GenX does indeed come with such documentation. And no, he does not try to teach everything about D|S.)
A while back I got some morph products for G2F. Not a word on where to find the morphs in the parameters setting. No readme at all! Not what they were named, nor where they might be found. I had to drill through the morphs in the distro package, and try to glean the morph names from the filenames -- they were all binary, so I couldn't open the files to get the actual morph names. This is just plain nonsense. It would have taken the vendor 10 minutes to create a readme that contained the pamemeter names and their peoperty groups. Not only did I have to pay for the product, I had to take extra time to figure out where to even find it!
Unfortunately, this is becoming more and more common, especially here on DAZ. DAZ does not require a readme, even when a product ought to have it. By comparison, a 75 cent product I bought over on RDNA last week included a readme with installation and usage directions, and it offered a very helpful tip about turning off IK (as many pose products should, and often don't mention).
No one expects the documentation to talk about what posing, detail the history of Poser or V4 or mesh modelling, or take time to explain what IK is. But if there's anything non-obvious to the average user, we should expect more. These aren't freebies. Even on sale, many of the newer products here go for $10-15.
I suspect one of the problems with the slow render may be low light levels. Iray likes light (note I didn't say "lights," plural). Try boosting the Environment Intensity, and play around with the tone mapping settings. The latter works like a film or digital camera: lower f-stops and shutter speeds = more light. Higher ISO values = more sensitivity.
Is this a setting, or is the environment just from the HDRI? If you're using a setting in your scene, remember that the Iray dome provides environment light that cannot penetrate ceilings and walls. So what you get is a dimly lit scene where the only light is coming through windows or doorways. Try a render without the setting, just the character, and see where that leads. If the setting has a removable ceiling or front walls -- like a movie set -- try hiding those to let the light in. You'll still get the flavor of indoor lighting if the HDR depicts an indoor scene.
Thanks for your suggestions, it's beginning to make sense now. Couldn't figure out why the lights acted weird when I changed their position but that must be because they were shining through the windows only. I've made the ceiling transparent now and turned down the light intensity and that made quite a difference, not least when it comes to rendering time. Here's how it looks after just 35 minutes rendering. The room is a bit too bright perhaps and the character appears a bit too dark but I guess that can be fixed with some adjustments.
The Mesh lights are easy to use - I just didn't know if I was supposed to use them with a HDRI or by themselves. :) I just don't get as nice results with portraits as I do with the HDRI set.
If I load a preset and the mesh light is in the way, I just move it. Easy!
I really love the iRadiance HDRI set though. So good for portraits! Sometimes I'll stick another HDR from hdrlabs so I can get a bit of colour in there. :) I'm not sure if I own any of your HDR sets.
You proabably don't want to hear it, but an Nvidia GTX970 or better or an older GTX780 would render that scene in an hour or less. You could check lights in a minute.
I know that an appropriate NVidia card will speed up render times, and I'm also planning on getting such a card. Still, fixing the setup helped a lot in that respect, as the next example shows. :)
Got the pack the day it dropped. It's now my "go to" Would love more interiors Sci-fi usable, strip clus, hangers, school, operating rooms..
I have always had excellent results with your products, both in 3Delight and your new releases for iRay.
The only thing I would recommend is to include 'plates' with your product. I use this product with DAZ even though designed for MODO and get excellent results:
https://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/modo/kits/hdre-urban/
In my workflow I will always manipulate the background in post, often compositing other elements. These plates save me the trouble of rendering out separate passes since the plates are calibrated to the camera and HDR lighting. It's a small thing, but does save some time.
Here are two renders, one using Variety Pack One, the other HDR Environments,. In the first using VP1, Very nice, subtle shadows on the translucent wings, demonstrating to me the high quality of the light information in the environment lighting information. In the second one I compositied the island in the background.
Keep up the good work!
to be honest. your hdri's are my go-to lighting choice for all my promos.
all iray... all DT lights.
My responsibility is to provide documentation for my products specifically. I find it difficult to see people having trouble with using mesh lights in general or in certain situations as something to do with my product specifically, which (as bad as it may sound to some) is much of the problem I was trying to get out there. To me that falls under teaching people to use the software. Teaching people how to position individual lights isn't specific to my products, it's core usability of the software. It'd be like expecting a character creator to provide documentation on how to pose their figure in a way that works in X render, asking a pose creator to explain how to make their specific pose work with a specific chair. If I had invented mesh lights it would be a different situation but they have been around for a long time, they function in Iray the same way they have in 3Delight and other software for years.
Same thing goes with explaining things like what temperature and emissive settings do, my lights use the shader that has these values and use the values themselves but just because they are used doesn't mean I should have to explain what they do. That to me would be the same thing as asking a character creator to provide documentation on the material settings for their skin, asking them to explain what the translucency etc values do. Again, if I had created the shader and added these values myself I would explain them through documentation as I have with shaders I've created in the past.
I wouldn't mind explaining these things to someone if they asked, if I'm not busy I'm happy to share any knowledge I have on a subject. It just doesn't seem like it should be a requirement to automatically provide documentation that isn't specific to what I release even though I have done it numerous times in the past, and I shouldn't be expected to know exactly what isn't obvious to a new user. As someone who's used the software an average 8+ hours a day for numerous years it is literally impossible for me to put myself in the mindset of a new user. I'm also someone who is self taught so I inherently may not see as much need for documentation as others, my experience is derived from using the software.
I will continue to provide included documentation when I feel there is a need for it, products I release that revolve around new ideas like my shaders or ProSets will come with full documentation along the lines of what I have done in the past. In situations where my products fully rely on preexisting ideas and concepts I will provide general usage information, but if you are having trouble with them send me a PM or file a support ticket with DAZ. They will do their best to help you and send me an email asking for response if they need to.
You can set your scene up and load the lights in any order that you wish, in general I do it the same way you do by putting my surroundings together first then lighting accordingly.
Usually meshlights will always show in the render. That's just how Iray works, 3Delight had a lot of tools to change individual settings like "visible in render" or "cast shadows" per object that Iray lacks because of it's dependence on physical accuracy. However in the case of mesh lights you can turn their opacity down very low and they will still cast lighting while being essentially invisible. Change your opacity value to 0.00001 or lower and test it out, you may need to change your brightness settings but it should keep the mesh light's geometry from casting shadows or showing up in your render.
The values for Environment Intensity will just increase the brightness of the HDRI, both as a background and as lighting. Using this you can increase the intensity of it's lighting in relation to other lights in your scene. When thinking about photography, if your camera is set at the proper exposure for an indoor shot everything outside will be completely blown out in relation. So if you are doing an indoor scene that's fully lit yet there is a window showing the outdoors, you could increase this value to properly expose the background and get the correct amount of lighting coming in through the glass.
Tone mapping isn't restricted to HDRI rendering. It's there as a set of tools to affect the brightness range of your render similar to the way a "Curves" effect in Photoshop works. You can adjust "Burn Highlights" to make the brightest parts either brighter or duller, changing "Crush Blacks" will make the darker portions darker or lighter. Gamma will affect the middle range of levels in your image and change the overall contrast, while Exposure settings will change the overall brightness. Film ISO, F/Stop, Shutter Speed and cm^2 Factor are all Photography terms that affect exposure. In Photography they did other things along with affecting exposure (like F/Stop affecting depth of field and Film ISO adjusting light intake at the sacrifice of noise or grain), but in the render settings they will all just affect Exposure.
Thank you! You don't need to use them along side HDRIs but it's fully open to you doing so, that is usually the workflow I go for when doing portrait stuff. When doing real world lighting using my Real World HDRIs I don't use any mesh lights usually, just because those are designed as complete solutions and the lighting is calibrated to the background. The Studio HDRIs however work really well with any additional lights you want to add.
I have been thinking about "plates" quite a bit for a while. This is actually one of the things I hoped to address with those who PMed me with feedback. I've been talking to quite a few people about this, but at the moment there's no real solid way for me to put it together as a product that loads easily. There's a few things that Iray does which puts a damper on things. The same exact concept would work fine in 3Delight but the new renderer's dependence on real world accuracy means I can't really trick it into working the way I want. It's something I'm hoping to get resolved though. I'll PM you some of the thoughts I had on the matter so you can see exactly where I'm coming from.
Man I so understand your issue DT. I started to write a number of tutorials to sell, all centred on DAZ3D, but due to the lack of real help I couldn't get it off the ground. I have a talent of putting things in plain English when I set my mind to it but it is hard work. Too much work for one person. Anyhow IMHO you shuld always concentrate on your product and how to use it DAZ3D without the need to explain basic DS functions. We can't expect anymore than that and we as cistomers shouldn't expect it.
I haven't brought any new HDRI's from anyone for a long time so I can't comment. But time/work commitments allowing I could give your giudlines a read over and make suggestions if you want.
I avoid this forum most days now, but someone on deviantart told me about this so I had to chime in.
I don't have iRadiance yet. I use your Indoor and Outdoor HDRI products a LOT, though. My Ultra Templates are doing very well right now and one of your Outdoor sets is prominently featured in the artwork for them.
As for documentation... I used to include a lot of it. Then I cut back on that because 90% of users wouldn't use it, it was wasted effort, and time is money - neither a video nor a .pdf manual is fast and easy to do properly. Ultra Templates has docs, but they're shorter than those for previous, similar products for exactly this reason. I got tired of dying a little inside every time someone on the forum said how do I use this no I did not read/watch the docs (which still happens, there was a thread like this as recently as Beautiful Skin Iray).
We are not responsible for teaching everyone to use base features of the program. I try, though. That's why I have a bunch of YouTube tutorials on how to use Iray. Only one of them has significant views. I just updated it recently for new information.
I feel for you, DT, and I hope you have lots of future success. If you did a sky-only HDRI set we'd all buy it!
That sounds good, and is all I'm asking. Several in this thread have said they don't feel they've gotten full use of the mesh lights product, so I think it's clear it needs a readme, even a basic one of a few paragraphs. You have excellent products and obviously put a lot of time and effort in making them. Taking an additional few minutes on a readme that explains key points (NOT how to use D|S) makes them even better.