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Another question.
Is it possible to rotate (on Y axis) of the created HDR in the environment settings
and count that the lights from the HDR will follow the rotation?
@Artini : if you don't hold down the CRTL key, the cameras are created with the x,z translation values of the Perspective View, and only the perspective view, with a 150 cm height. If you want to check this yourself, create a super small sphere at a given location in your scene, let's say x,y,z = 100,100,100. Move your perspective view until you are inside the sphere. Create a V3D Env Camera and have a look at its location in the Parameters tab. It will be almost 100,150,100. The "almost" is because your perspective view will never be exactly at the middle of the sphere. The 150 is because it's a good start height for a hdr rendering with a ground at 0. Furthermore, the V3D Env camera created forces its X and Z rotation to zero. It is obligatory because otherwise the horizon line is no more horizontal (it would result in a tilted hdr). This is why you are under the impression that it's not like the perspective view, it's because the height is not the same and the angles where changed so that the horizon line is horizontal. But you are at the perspective view location "in the horizontal plane" (you can check it the way I mentioned just before) and you keep the perspective view Y rotation (but not the X, Z one which are locked at 0). The only tip I can give you is to start from a perspective view 'as horizontal as possible' to be as close as possible to the 0,0 Xrot Zrot of the V3D Env Camera.
Furthremore for your second question, before rendering your HDR, you can Y rotate any V3D Env camera in the first tab of the interface before you render, and once the HDR are rendered and applied, you just have to go to Render Settings, in the "Environment" group, you change the "Dome Rotation" dial. You can change it from 0 to 360, and of course the lighting of the HDR will follow the HDR orientation.
The product is long out of print, something I bought 10 years ago in the V4 days which is made for Poser. It's just a model of the Oval Office in the White House. I was able to get it rebuilt (i,e, added all the textrures and furniture back) and test again. I did get it to work using no scene lights and in safe mode - just in case - and got a usable EXR ouf of it.
However since I didn't want my characters to look like barbie dolls standing on the furniture I did try again with different camera positions and settings but kept getting an error about how it couldnt render (something like EXR not found in expected location) or renderer already in use. . Killed Daz Studio, tried again, it only seemed to work in default camera position Might be something weird about the geometry of this one model (n-gons? poser CR2 embedded geometry?) or just user error. . I have I have gotten it to work in other situations witout any issues. I'm satisfied that it's probably not going to work ias a backdrop in this one uniqe set, such is life. Otherwise I've had great success with the product and am quite happy. Thanks for your patience.
Thanks for the information! I'm glad to know that you finally managed to have great success and that you are quite happy!!!
Obviously something went wrong with this specific enviromnent, but since I cannot test it because it's so old that it disappeared (lol), it's difficult for me to debug anything. (I think it does not come from the fact that it is cr2 because they have been tested too). Concerning the exr not found, this can happen when the script tries to find the rendered file "where it should be" written by Daz Studio but that the file is not there. I wonder if it's not a matter of timing. That's why I am in an update where now, when the file is not found, the script keeps on searching it every second during 15 seconds, (with one intermediate message saying it's searching). Then at the end either you have the "exr not found" message now also asking to contact me, or you have the exr found and no message. (Hard to debug otherwise since it never happened to me, yet I rendered TONS of scenes from super light to super heavy). For the renderer in use, it could come from the same issue so this solution I hope should solve it too since it forces the script to "wait" for the exr to be written and found. For the other camera locations there is not reason that if it worked once, it failed then just because of a location. My guess is that there must have been a manipulation issue somewhere (I say this because, I almost never saw my error messages, except when I triggered them on purpose, and this script was already rendering end of december 2022, the rest of the time was to improve its quality).
Concerning your scene once you have an hdr, using an interior as an hdr is not as easy as an exterior, but most of the time possible : you must use a camera, and not the perspective view, and adjus the frame width and focal length for a better match of the scale of your figure versus the scale of the scene. Then you must adjust the interaction of the figure with the environment. You can do it by the figure location but there are also other tricks but this should be too long to explain here, I think there must be the info elsewhere on the forum.
Anyway this product is planned to be improved over time if necessary, and feedback such as your will help me improving the remaining imperfections.So thanks a lot for your feedback!!!
Maybe rename the Safe Mode checkbox to something like Scene Lights to make it more obvious?
Question: Does the Creator incorporates the Render Settings from DS, specifically the Max Samples, Max Time and Rendering Quality? It seems to render much quicker than a normal DS render.
Actually that's they use DS render settings, but not totally. The way the exr are rendered, they kind of seem to "ignore" some the usual controls (max samples or converged ratio for instance) on them, as if it converged with good quality with less samples (the convergence is reached super fast). I did not mentionned it in the documentation, but If you feel you need a higher quality, what you must do is increase the Min Samples (eventually set limits OFF to increase those min samples) and to activate denoiser (all to on) if you have noise issues (the renders are not much longer with denoiser). I never had quality issues doing what I said here way, and in practice, most of the time, I did not have to increase the Min Samples. Now why does it render so fast? Mystery....
edit: I confirm, I had a look at my renders at different min samples and denoiser on and off. Of course increasing min samples helps, but the best help is clearly denoiser on. Mayber I'm gonna use the space at the bottom of the first tab to include denoiser and min samples controls. I have to think about that...(normally I should not, but since people don't read docs....)...
I read docs (when things fail)
Thank you very much for the detailed answers, @V3Digitimes
I was under impression, that your camera is created at the current view,
but it looks like it follows Perspective View camera, which I almost never use
Had problems at first. But now it has worked for me too.
Are you using lights? If so, enable the Safe Mode box.
Yes, this is pretty typical of a bad "lights interaction". I can come from scene lights + dome or sun (which is solved by safe mode), or from special effects such as fog or haze. If you already tried safe mode and have the same issue, then there must be because of haze or fog or a similar effect acting on light somewhere... In this case the possible solutions are described in the documentation, second paragraph of page 5, and to make it brief, consist either to render with png xEV script and recombine the png at different exposure to hdr (in photoshop for instance, like you do for real photos), or to use a 50000 corrective factor in the exr script, and then, when you reload your image as your environment map, you have to try various values between 0.00001 and 0.001 for the environment intensity. This last solution always worked for me when I had such issues even if it's not optimal. The last solution, not mentioned in the documentation, is to find and remove the "special effect" which causes the issue... And whatever happens, the png xEv allow you to be sure to be able to handle these kind of scenes as soon as you have an external combiner (I use photoshop).
OMG! Indeed a lot of sun effects. If I were you I would first try the 50 000 corrective factor with the exr creator, then, when your reload your exr as the Enviromnent Map, it will appear full white and you'll have to apply a 0.0001 (around that value) on the "Environment Intensity" of your render settings. If it does not work, then the solution you have (if you don't want to disable your effect) is to use the png xEV creator with 4 or 5 values of exposure in the list dedicated to this purpose (you can enter a list in the interface with ";" between numbers, such as 12;13;14;16 for instance), and then recombine them in photoshop. (It failed once for me with "seams" visible, but the haze was a haze prop and not a Daz Haze.. But my effects were not as strong as yours so I hope it will be fine too).
Another HDR with dimensions of 16000 by 8000 pixels made from https://www.daz3d.com/ice-land
Rendering time of this HDR took 4 minutes 53 seconds
The scene below using this HDR took only 1 minute 12.46 seconds to render.
I am still impressed and like such rendering times.
Just a final followup with good news on my Oval Office issue. First off, I use safe mode all the time now but was still getting the errors about no EXR found. I tried different hard drives, no go. However I did adjust the drive to have no special characters (and old habbit from Unix when an exclamation point at the front of the filename would put your readme at the top of the file list). I was trying different things so I can't be sure that it was THE issue but I do know that it was one of the last things I tried and I have had no more issues in general except whith this one scene. However I cleared it out and used all new props and I no longer have a problem. So it wasn't the set, it must have been a prop. All is working.
After futzing around with camera settings I was able to get something that worked from one angle only (it turns my character into a dollsized person if you rotate left or right more than a bit). So whi;e it's not a perfect one-size-fits-all-sitations HDRI it does work and I am sure could render out to multiple cameras so I could use the environment from differnt points in the room if I want since I'm only doing stills anyway.
So for proof,here's a render of it using nothing in the scene but G8F and the EXR HDRI lighting from HR Creator with draw dome turned on.
By the way, it was taking a loooong time to render for some reason (none of my other scenes did) so I set it up to use noise filtering and I think that's why it got sort of blurry. I do not have any depth of field on so that's probably it. Well, I stopped the render after 16 minutes so it's a tradeoff I can live with since it's just this one situation so far.
Any tips on getting the brightness of the created HDRI down?
It happens quite often, while using sun lightning.
With the default time of the day, the render is too dark.
Changing the time to 15 minutes later, HDRI comes very bright.
Yes, super easy.
Directly on the renders :
You change, in the second tab, the "Luminance Corrective Factor" from 3 to 2 for instance.
You click at the bottom on "Save all current settings" button so that now it's remembered.
You render and have a look if you have to increase or decrease the Luminance Corrective Factor.
Or you can do it after loading the maps as enviromnent maps :
The second option is, once the render is made and that you loaded the hdr in a scene, you simply go in "Render Settings", "Environment", and you lower the "Environment Intensity".
I must be misunderstanding something. I cannot get the V3D Env Camera to be loaded at the location of my existing camera. I have my camera selected in the Scene pane and it is also the camera that I am viewing the scene from in the viewport. I click on V3DHDRC 03 Create Or Add Camera. I do not hold down Ctrl or any other key. The V3D Env Camera gets created in the Scene and is now the camera I am viewing the scene from in the viewport. But the location of the V3D Env Camera is not the same as the camera I was using. My camera is at X 247.38 and Z -401.04. The V3D Env Camera is created at X 145 and Z 370. I have tried multiple camera and multiple scenes, so I must be doing something wrong.
Thanks a lot for the explanation.
Hi, this is normal, your create the V3D Env Camera at the Perspective View location, not at the current camera location. Maybe I've been not clear in the documentation. Eventually this can be implemented in the update, this should be possible, but I don't remember I said it anywhere it was on the active camera... Did I ?
Edit : in the meantime, you can try to copy and paste to pose of your scene camera to your V3D Env Camera. You won't have exactly the same view since the x and z rotations are locked to 0, but I think it should work.
Edit 2 :I just saw my tip and my documentation, indeed this is not clear. I'll update the camera creation.
OK I updated my camera creation, and now the V3D Env Camera can be created at the ACTIVE camera x,z location, at an altitude of 150 cm with the active camera Y rotation (and all other rotations at 0). My question is :
is this an update you would want? Is is useful in any way?
OK, validated for the update I'm testing it right now: the V3D Env Camera will now be created at the ACTIVE camera location, but still with Y = 150 cm, and x Rotation and z Rotation = 0;
This is what I saw in the documentation that made me think it would set it to the current camera. I actually says "current camera". I'm not viewing the Perspective View, so I did not expect it to set the location to the Perspective View. I look forward to the update. Meanwhile I can workaround it with your tips.