What exactly is Uberenvrioment?
Scavenger
Posts: 2,664
in The Commons
So I pretty much have been using the Core Lighting pack to light my scenes. They make sense, and I get good results with them.
BUT, I really don't know what they're doing.. They load a uberenviroment light, and a directional "Sunlight" and A specular light. I understand what the latter two do...but I really don't understand what Uberenviroment does...
I mean, I get it fills the scene with what is "ambient room light" but..what's actually going on?
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http://www.omnifreaker.com/index.php?title=UberEnvironment2
Gives options for different kinds of environmental lighting, ambient occlusion and/or global illumination.
...tch.. should of gone with my instincts and say "Please don't just give me the link to the wiki page." I had it typed in, but thought "No..that's not neccessary"
I'm trying to understand what it's doing.. not how to use it or it's controls.. a more basic "what is this thing"
It's the 'rest' of the light...the stuff the direct lights don't do.
It's like when you take a walk outside at night, but while it's dark you can still see where you are going because there is starlight, moonlight, a streelights the next street over glowing in the air over the buildings, light reflected off the underside of the clouds in a city, light leaking through people's closed drapes into the road, light from passing cars' taillights and cabin lights, your phone's display, etc. It could be coming from dozens or even millions of different sources at varying distances from your scene. It doesn't make sense to try to duplicate all this, so instead they just made up a generic "ambient" light level that lights up everything in your scene even though you haven't bothered to put all these numerous and distant light sources in it. It's fake, but does a halfway decent job of faking it with zero effort.
As you said Ambience increases brightness values on all surfaces in the scene evenly as if everything was being lit, I used uberenvironment with 3delight renderer since it also adds ambient occlusion which are the dark spots where light gets trapped, so it appears darker in crevices and corners. It is another form of shadows. For example when it is darker under the armpits or corners of the room in the real world. Ambient occlusion is something you don't get with the default lights under 3delight.
If you look at the link davelits posted you will see some examples. The one which says Ambient (No Ray Tracing) is lighting the scene evenly, you see no shadows or shading at all because everything is evenly lit. The picture labeled occlusion w/Soft Shadows has shadows generated by calculating how light would get trapped in the corners. Depending on the setting for ambient occlusion rendering time increases.
There is also Global illumination which calculates how light color changes as it bounces off surfaces. For example if you had a white spotlight aimed at a red wall, red light would then bounce off that wall lighting whatever the bouncing light hits red like a white floor woould be lit red.
If you are using Iray renderer, you don't need uberenvironment lights since Iray already does ambient occlusion and global illumination naturally as well as many other lighting effects like reflections.
Honestly, if you are going to add ambient occlusion, global illumination and reflections to your renders I would just stick with Iray Renderer. Since adding all this will increase rendering times significantly in 3delight and Iray already does all of it faster even with just cpu rendering.
Iray is extrodinarily crashy on my computer.. runs a lot slower than 3Delight, and currently has me worreid it's going to burn out my graphics card.
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I guess part of my "what is iray" question is..it makes texures look so much better...like when I first started, I was using distant lights to give ambient light, cuz that's what the tutorials I found said to do. It worked, but I wasn't getting the....super reality feel of the world that I felt was the hallmark of 3d art that i saw on Deviant Art etc.. And when i first tired using an UberEnvrioment ...Bang, that ..textured feel was there just like I had always wanted.
Maybe this discussion is helpful: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/5320/
Sort of like Poser's IBL?
I understand the "please don't just post a link" idea. Thing is, I just figured out UberEnvironment myself. I loaded a simple indoor set and just played around with the settings. However, the information at that link and its accompanying video clarified things I learned experimenting. Iray is cool and all, but sometimes the "fakery" possible in biased renderers is preferable in a scene for artistic reasons. As said by Sriesch above, UE/UE2 fills in the ambient light.
UE2 has several options, including Image Based Lighting. You can load an HDRI and use the environmental sphere to see the orientation of the texture in your window. The environmental sphere isn't rendered by default and can be resized to view at any position in your scene while putting it together. Just rotate the base UE2 "light" to get the orientation you want which you can see in the sphere in real time. Change the color beside the hdri texture to vary the intensity of the ambient lighting.
OK, thanks. Never liked Poser's IBL, will try UEs and see if that works better...
Ah.. so that's why that's there..I'm gonna have to really look at that, since I started learning about hdri's for iray use...do you put the image on both the light and the sphere?
There are some built in presets. Select the UE light and then open the Lights tab. The HDR presets are in Materials. If you load a different HDRI, then it seems like the image needs to be assigned manually to both UE and the sphere. So long as the sphere is the child of the UE light, rotating the light will do the same to the sphere. The sphere isn't moveable by default, but its transforms can be unlocked in the Parameters tab.
Another thing to keep in mind: When you're setting up the lights in the scene including your HDRI, set UE to "Ambient (No Ray Tracing)" in the Editor of the Lights tab. You will get a fast render to allow tweaking things before committing to longer render times.
an environment light lights a scene up in general I would say, I use the AoA Ambient Light because with this you can also adjust the range of the ambient light what is I would equal to an environment light. I do not know if you can scale a range also with UE Light. The AoA Ambient light also have some other values you can ajdust and you can flag something in a scene that shall not be lighten up I think, but never used this.
Very weird..I can't see the sphere...no matter how high I scale it or how small I do..it's visible...oppacity is off..no sphere.
That's quite strange. If you use a blank scene and load UE2 into it, you don't see a sphere? It can seem quite large from the default view, but if you zoom out you'll eventually see it in the center of your scene. I also take it that you've selected the sphere in your Scene tab, and then in the Parameters tab you've unlocked the Scale transformation parameter.
Just a little rant. Ignore if you don't like editorializing. ;-)
The real problem with all the Uber-whatsits that DAZ calls stuff is that it is all basically a way to come up with a trademarked name for industry standard advanced lighting or GI based lighting practices packaged together in a handy bundle that DAZ and their vendors can sell and that the average user doesn't understand yet. The naming scheme does the DAZ Studio user no favors when they feel they have hit Studio's limits and want to venture into the wider world of 3D software, including other DAZ owned title like Carrara or Bryce, because no one else calls using Indirect Light or Ambient Occlusion an Uber-anything.
I have no problem with vendors or DAZ selling lighting bundles, hdrs, presets for GI or AO render settings, etc. But please, stop the asinine naming schemes! Or at the least include some kind of documentation so that the purchaser knows what it is that the settings do, beyond just sliders with esoteric names or acronyms.
I'll have to do some more experiments today, see if I can figure out the issue.
I was re-reading Adam's guide, and this line jumped out as something to investigate further "Another is to use UberSurface to exclude unnecessary items from Raytracing / Occlusion. "
Good point, evilproducer. At least Uberenvironment2 isn't an additional product one has to buy since it's included in the current version of Studio. New users might feel a bit lost when a character preset comes with a lighting setup, since we don't really understand that it's merely a suggested setup for testing renders with that particular skin and not required for every render with that character.
I've had the Uber Shader Pack in my wishlist for a while, but it seems that some of the components have been superseded by newer versions of Studio, and are no longer useful. The name and promotional images might make new users think that it is a product that turns their renders into pro-level stuff. The added options to shaders and lights are great, but it still takes experience to effectively use the tools. Ultimately, there is no "make art" button, and there never will be.
For a dense hair object, select it in the scene and then go to Surfaces > Editor. Select the hair object again (right under "Currently Used") and then click on Presets. Ctrl/Cmd double-click on "UberSurface Base" and make sure "Selected" and "Ignore" are set in the pop up menu. Back in Surfaces > Editor, scroll down to Raytrace and set if to off.
From the Wiki: "Transparent objects will slow down UE2 (ie hair). You may wand to use UberSurface and turn Raytrace Off so that the hair is not seen be UberEnvironment2 in order to speed up your renders."
Just learned this myself! Hope it helps you out, too!
No. The various uber products are simply omniFreaker's products to address particular functions, they aren't a device to trademark concepts (and I don't think the names are trademarked). There used to be another environment lighting shader for DS, but it was not updated for DS 3+ as I recall. There are certainly alternatives to the uber surface shaders (pwSurface 2 and the Age of Armor SSS Shader in particular) and uber light shaders (again from Age of Armor, the Advanced ... Light shaders).
If you are planing your own experiments, take at least this line in the Omnifreaker Wiki very serious:
Otherwise your rendertimes will be unpredictable. :-)
And maybe you will find a solution for your sphere problem there: Using Uber Environment 2’s Sky Dome by Szark
Well, basic UberEnviroment gives me the sphere like it should..
Putting an image on the sphere, and in the light in the appropriate places... should it be throwing the image as a reflection? I put a sphere and plane with the shader mixer chrome shader on it and tried it, I certainly got the colors of the image, but not really a reflection.
The sphere loaded with the Core Lighting packs...doesn't seem to be there.. I unlocked the scale, set the xyz's to 5000 then played with the all scale...should have seen something.. didn't. :(
When you apply a basic preset like the Cornel Box or Kitchen to the UE2, it shows up on the environment sphere automatically as a diffuse image. If you're inside the sphere (in the default perspective view), then it should be immediately visible all around you. Changing the scale and moving the sphere can be done afterward should it interfere with setting up the scene. I usually set it to be invisible unless I need to verify ambient light direction for some reason. The environment sphere doesn't cast light, the UE light takes care of that even though it remains in the center of the scene.
The image was on both the light and the sphere. I saw it fine.
I'm asking about how it works.
using HDRI in iray, you'll see a reflection of the image on a chrome sphere.
I did NOT see a reflection in the chrome sphere or plane. For sure, there was the dominate colors of the image, but not the image itself.
sriesch, thanks for the explanation of uber environment. I also had no idea what the heck it really was either.
Ok, the presets are blurry for one thing. If you're using a more detailed image, then it could be the settings in UE. I would run a few quick tests to help you out, but I've been watching a render slowly develop for a while now... One of my figures has Sharon hair for Genesis, and I left it rendering last night with Indirect Lighting/Soft Shadows, not in Progressive mode. This morning I saw that the render was at a standstill in the hair after seven hours!
So, yeah, I've been rendering it again, first in Progressive mode, and again with raytrace turned off for just the hair. I'm seeing progress now, I think...
UE itself does not produce reflections (and the supplied HDR images are far too low res to be useful). The sphere is just a guide and is set not to render - if you have a high-enough resolution image you can override that by setting Visible in Render to On.
Thanks for the clarification, Richard. I suppose that the HDRI could also be applied directly to any object to fake environmental reflections as well if it's intended to be metallic anyway, right?
Yes.
Two things...
Default load of the UberEnv sphere is 'Visible in Render: OFF' (that is under the Parameters tab) AND, more importantly for reflections, Raytrace:OFF (Surface tab). Both of those need to be switched to ON to get reflections from UE2.