First Effort: Creating an IRay Glamour Portrait Studio Set

thrain9

As the title says, I am about to build a complete 3D CGI studio set for still images, as a preset.

It will include:

1. primitive plane(s) for flooring, background. they will be much larger than any current product provides.
2. two preset camera positions, plus a "free floating cam" with optional atmospherics or effects attached.
3. three or more different IRay emmisive light setups, locked into the correct positions on load-in. 
4. a collection of props, background drapes, IRay texture/shader sets for the primitives, costumes/clothing etc. I will build as much as possible from primitives, plus bits and pieces of content I have purchased from the Daz store.

This is not going to be a product for release.  It is a learning exercise, to be used for my own renders once I get it all working. Clearly if all I wanted was to start rendering, there are a lot of products available.

I need guidance, tutoring, and links on:  1. adding atmospherics to Daz Camera/building your own Daz Special Effects camera, 2.  how to save the various presets, props and shaders, and costumes, so they are all available in one place.

Even very basic advice is useful. Google Search and YouTube are producing some help, but I could use search term advice.

Thanks for reading and thank you in advance your help.

 

Khory

Ok here is an atmospheric tutorial for Iray  http://sickleyield.deviantart.com/journal/Tutorial-Creating-Dust-And-Atmosphere-in-Iray-522291773 . It is not camera driven however.

Saving your set up. You have two choices. One you can set up a folder in props with the name of the set up and then have sub folders under it for each type of thing. So you would have a main "My thing" folder and under it you would have a folder for shader presets, the different props and so forth. You would save what ever inside that folder as a preset or a scene subset (for things like hair and wardrobe or even fully kitted out characters. The other alternate would be a new content library then do basicaly the same thing.

Tobor

Your setup isn't very Iray-centric. Few of the things you want to do will perform cooperatively well with Iray. It sounds like you're mixing render engines and expecting Iray to behave like 3DL, Octane, Lux, or something else. Iray is Iray.

1. Why make huge backgrounds? First, that inhibits easily framing the scene using the D|S controls (requires users to select a specific scene element to prevent zooming way out), and second, you have the option of perfect 360 backgrounds with the HDRi environment dome. The HDRi can (properly) contribute lighting to the scene, or if used with a low-dynamic image, provide just the picture (indistinct lighting) of the many various backgrouns you want. There are even free HDR images made to look like photo studios. An HDRi won't preclude loading a plane background those times you want one, or adding in props, but it will serve as controllable ambient light and image.

2. Iray doesn't provide for environmental cameras. It's far more crude than that, relying instead on geometries that are shaded with a material that allows for subsurface scattering. This is how Iray creates volumetrics, which is how atmospheres are produced.

3. Emissive lights are very inefficient in Iray (takes longer to render a decent image), and they only provide diffuse lighting. Iray provides internal light sources that are "mapped" to the built-in D|S light types: spot, point, and distant. The emitter area of spot and point lights can be enlarged to produce reduce shadow effects. Emissive lights are best used for in-scene lighting, where you want a lit effect for a scene element. Secondly, and perhaps as important, depending on where you want to go with your experiments, emissive lights produce no illumination when using Iray in Interactive mode -- a mode you may wish to play with if you want to turn shadows on and off.

thrain9

@Khory, thank you, a very useful link.  and thanks for the organizing tips too.

@Tobor, Concerning mixing IRay and 3DL, yeah I may well be thinking of IRay like it was 3DL. I am still trying to wrap my brain around how IRay works and what I need to do to get what I want.   I am going for Film Noir style lighting, as well as other types of high contrast dark shadow lighting in a studio setting. I haven't found ways for domes to do that yet.  Emmisives have been driving me nuts, and you may have just told me why.  I have discovered that using the spotlights that come with DS in photometric mode, and altering several parameters on each is getting me closer to what I am after, but this method may be the "headless chicken" approach and there is a better way.

 the large size is desirable for some objects and group glam shots. These are the type  that can benefit from domes. Example:  Pick your favorite automobile and try to stick it into one of the studio sets available for purchase... scaling up these sets has some odd results, and so does scaling down the vehicle, usually involving texture break down.  I find it simpler to use 2 primitive planes with a solid color like white, than add background patterns with gobo's

After reading both your posts several times, all I can say is I have a whole lot to learn to be effective with IRay.

Thanks for your replies. I really appreciate it.