I'm missing something basic about lighting in Daz - please help

kaisersozai_ba517560e2

I feel very foolish but I'm obviously missing something basic in Daz. I'm trying to render a figure in bright sunlight and just trip to achieve a reasonable level of brightness using a point light. No matter how I increase the intensity, it seems to make little or no difference in the rendered image (using iray). In the preview screen I see the figure look slightly brighter but in the render it always looks the same. Is there another parameter I should be using? I have jacked the intensity up to 8000% - my poor model should be getting sunburn by now... I'm understanding the autoheadlamp is only in use when there are no other lights present so I don't think its the issue...

Any advice appreciated - thank you!

Tottallou

For Iray you need to increase Lumen  (Under Photometrics)

kaisersozai_ba517560e2

Thank you for the quick answer. Thank you for taking the time to help. Much oblidged!

frank0314

You can also adjust the ISO in your render setting under Tone Mapping

Tobor

Also remember that a point light illuminates in 360 degrees. When you set the lumens (or intensity) value, that's for the entire light, not just the relatively small amount that is directed to your scene.

Iray has a sun light source builtin, and works as long as you're not also using a physical skydome. If Aiming the sun can be a big tricky, but here's just one (of several ways):

1. Replace the point light with a spot light.

2. Change the View so you see the scene through the light. Change its position so it's above the scene, and the light is coming from the direction you want.

3. Select Sun-Sky Only, and find the SS Sun Node entry. Click on the button there, and choose your spotlight. Your spotlight now serves as the directional source for the sunlight.

The above works if you're not using an Iray environment dome image (the sun won't "shine" through the image), and you haven't changed the dome rotation (if you do, the sun will appear to come from some other direction).

You can fiddle with various sun parameters for things like soften the shadows (haze), and so on. Remember that Iray will take the angle of the sun in consideration for adjusting the color of the sunlight -- late afternoon is more yellow; noon sun is more blue.

 

SpottedKitty

kaisersozai_ba517560e2 said:

I'm understanding the autoheadlamp is only in use when there are no other lights present so I don't think its the issue...

I wouldn't trust this completely if I were you, especially in an Iray scene — some types of light, e.g. Environment and Mesh lights, do not toggle the Headlamp to switch off. I always select every camera in my scene and set the Headlamps explicitly to Off.