Rising Sun Environment (Usage Tipps)

Rod Wise Driggo

This stunning set was briefily discussed in the "appreciate new releases"-thread.

But I think it really deserves a thread on its own. Was a bit sceptial with regards to the price but it is definitively worth every cent.

Now since I started playing around with it I wonder what folks are doing to have the characters populating the environment properly lit. Started to merge some figures into the scene but they appear quite dark once I do not alter anything. So any ideas on best ways to let characters shine in that environment?

Masterstroke

In Vue, you could set the Interface bottom with a radius.
I thought it to be a cool idea for DAZ Studio' environment settings too.

jbdiminnie

I've noticed that once characters are added to a scene they look very poorly lit as well (when using the default scene cameras and lighting), even though the scene (I am working on a scene in one of the Private rooms) looks OK in a spot render with no characters added.  I have added a few ghost lights (wall and ceiling) to up the overall lighting of the room and that has helped a lot, but the test renders are taking a long time to converge, probably because the default light fixtures have emissives and it seems that indoor scenes with a lot of emissive objects are slow to render.  Tonight I will try replacing all the emissives with ghost lights and see if that speeds up the render process.  Render times aside, I am very impressed with this product, and the sheer number of zero props that can be used for kit-bashing will make it well worth the purchase.

jbdiminnie

Last night worked some more on my scene--as I suspected, replacing the emissive lights with ball or dome ghost lights dramatically improved the render speed, and gives a little more control over the overall lighting.  It is a little tedious to have to position all the ghost lights in the scene, but well worth it for the time saved in running a render.

nomad-ads_8ecd56922e

I bought Rising Sun, but haven't used it yet.

I do hope Iray renders improve again wrt mesh-lights.  Didn't they used to be faster or something?

In any event, I'm likely to do a bunch of kit-bashing when I get around to using this set, since I want it to look like it exists entirely in a Decopunk sort of world, down to the point where even the desktop computers look decopunk, or maybe get away with some of the props I'd substitute being steampunk.