Daz lighting wonking out on me

[theders]

Hey guys, does this problem seem familiar to anyone? I'm trying to look for replacement environments but so far it looks like I gotta make this one work.
However you'll notice the huge trails of white dust through the render. I've been tweaking light settings for about 3 hours now to no avail. Generally speaking if I darken it, the white streaks get worse. And they won't really start to disappear until the image is so overexposed the render nigh on becomes a solid white square.

I've gone high with luminance and low with luminance. Crushed blacks, burnt highlights, changed the balance between fstop/exposure/shutter speed, tried denoisers/bloom/fireflies etc.. but no change. Any suggestions?

 

[doku99]

It's called fireflies. It happens either when you do an incomplete render or the lighting is set up wrong (or both). A lot of people use stuff like this: https://f95zone.to/threads/nvidia-ai-denoiser-2-4.35677/

But ideally you want there to be none even on a complete render. You can find a lot of info if you just google "daz fireflies"

 

[MissFortune]

Part of what you're seeing here simply looks to be partially the reflections off of the wall coming from the lights. The other part seems to be noise from not letting it render/bake long enough (not sure if this is in preview or not, though.). I used this set not too long ago, I ended up just turning the glossiness (or top coat? Don't remember.) down. Though, I feel like ghost lights would solve this fairly quickly.



So, grab your surface selection tool (should look like three diamonds/squares.) > Select the wall > Go to your "Surfaces" pane > Look for Glossy Reflectivity and Glossy Roughness > Turn Glossy Reflectivity all the way down and turn the Glossy Roughness all the way. This should take the shine out of the walls some. > Repeat for anything you find too shiny. Some might not have "Reflectivity", so "Glossy Weight" should be there instead, just turn that down (usually works, but sometimes doesn't.)

Secondly, how are you lighting it? Are you just taking the preinstalled lights and blasting the brightness up with them (this isn't a good way of lighting really, at all.)? That's kind of what it looks like here. As mentioned above, try using ghost lights. If you're on 4.20, SY Invisilights are what you'll need. If you're pre-4.16, then

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should do the job.

That's how I did the image above. Ghost Lights for environment lighting, and then two spotlights. One behind the camera to enhance the shin on her hair and a pseudo-rim behind her for her shoulder/crown of her skull.

 

[theders]

Part of what you're seeing here simply looks to be partially the reflections off of the wall coming from the lights. The other part seems to be noise from not letting it render/bake long enough (not sure if this is in preview or not, though.). I used this set not too long ago, I ended up just turning the glossiness (or top coat? Don't remember.) down. Though, I feel like ghost lights would solve this fairly quickly.

View attachment 2026216

So, grab your surface selection tool (should look like three diamonds/squares.) > Select the wall > Go to your "Surfaces" pane > Look for Glossy Reflectivity and Glossy Roughness > Turn Glossy Reflectivity all the way down and turn the Glossy Roughness all the way. This should take the shine out of the walls some. > Repeat for anything you find too shiny. Some might not have "Reflectivity", so "Glossy Weight" should be there instead, just turn that down (usually works, but sometimes doesn't.)

Secondly, how are you lighting it? Are you just taking the preinstalled lights and blasting the brightness up with them (this isn't a good way of lighting really, at all.)? That's kind of what it looks like here. As mentioned above, try using ghost lights. If you're on 4.20, SY Invisilights are what you'll need. If you're pre-4.16, then

You must be registered to see the links

should do the job.

That's how I did the image above. Ghost Lights for environment lighting, and then two spotlights. One behind the camera to enhance the shin on her hair and a pseudo-rim behind her for her shoulder/crown of her skull.

Thanks for the responses guys.

I'm using the stock lighting that came with the asset, i.e. applying the shaders to the bulb surfaces. It was very much underlit at first but I also applied the render settings from the asset and that produced a lighting equivalent the demo shots for it. I didn't actually tweak the light settings in the image you saw. I did however leave it to bake very shortly as I just wanted to see if the problem would occur at all.

 

[theders]

Part of what you're seeing here simply looks to be partially the reflections off of the wall coming from the lights. The other part seems to be noise from not letting it render/bake long enough (not sure if this is in preview or not, though.). I used this set not too long ago, I ended up just turning the glossiness (or top coat? Don't remember.) down. Though, I feel like ghost lights would solve this fairly quickly.

View attachment 2026216

So, grab your surface selection tool (should look like three diamonds/squares.) > Select the wall > Go to your "Surfaces" pane > Look for Glossy Reflectivity and Glossy Roughness > Turn Glossy Reflectivity all the way down and turn the Glossy Roughness all the way. This should take the shine out of the walls some. > Repeat for anything you find too shiny. Some might not have "Reflectivity", so "Glossy Weight" should be there instead, just turn that down (usually works, but sometimes doesn't.)

Secondly, how are you lighting it? Are you just taking the preinstalled lights and blasting the brightness up with them (this isn't a good way of lighting really, at all.)? That's kind of what it looks like here. As mentioned above, try using ghost lights. If you're on 4.20, SY Invisilights are what you'll need. If you're pre-4.16, then

You must be registered to see the links

should do the job.

That's how I did the image above. Ghost Lights for environment lighting, and then two spotlights. One behind the camera to enhance the shin on her hair and a pseudo-rim behind her for her shoulder/crown of her skull.

Alright I just ran a test after switching the glossy reflectivity/roughness for those surfaces and that did indeed resolve it, thanks.

 

[MissFortune]

I'm using the stock lighting that came with the asset, i.e. applying the shaders to the bulb surfaces. It was very much underlit at first but I also applied the render settings from the asset and that produced a lighting equivalent the demo shots for it.

I'd look into Ghost Lights (or making your own, if you're short on cash.). PAs/Creators of these environments never light with characters in mind. They simply light it to make the environment itself to look good. Learning how to plug and play ghost lights is going to not only make your life a lot easier, but they're usually going to look better, as well. Lighting with spotlights is going to help bring out your characters while the ghost lights do the heavy lifting for environments, but meh. That's up to you at the end of the day.

Glad you got it working for yourself regardless.

 

[GoldenTentacles]

maybe try increase 'rendering converged ratio' to 100% (the default is 95%). if that still doesn't work then only post denoiser like intel or nvidia denoiser that can removes those white dots

 

[das8k]

Render Settings > Filtering section,
Post Denosier Available ON,
Post Denosier Enable ON,
Post Denosier Denoise Alpha ON choose as and
Post Denosier Start Iteration (default) 8, if you set as, these dots will be blocked from the first render.
This is the best solution I found for this problem. If it doesn't work after a while, restart the program.

 

[MissFortune]

Render Settings > Filtering section,
Post Denosier Available ON,
Post Denosier Enable ON,
Post Denosier Denoise Alpha ON choose as and
Post Denosier Start Iteration (default) 8, if you set as, these dots will be blocked from the first render.
This is the best solution I found for this problem. If it doesn't work after a while, restart the program.

All this is doing is removing noise while taking unnecessary detail out of the render. At its root, this is a lighting issue and not so much a noise issue. All that aside, though, I'd recommend staying away from Daz's internal denoiser and going with Intel or Nvidia's AI denoisers. That way you can merge the original and the new one together to find a happy-medium between detail and no noise.

 

[das8k]

All this is doing is removing noise while taking unnecessary detail out of the render. At its root, this is a lighting issue and not so much a noise issue. All that aside, though, I'd recommend staying away from Daz's internal denoiser and going with Intel or Nvidia's AI denoisers. That way you can merge the original and the new one together to find a happy-medium between detail and no noise.

https://f95zone.to/threads/nvidia-ai-denoiser-2-4.35677/

Nvidia's AI denoiser you're talking about, is it the topic discussed in this thread? If so I will try it. If not, I'd be glad if you could help. Thank you.

 

[MissFortune]

https://f95zone.to/threads/nvidia-ai-denoiser-2-4.35677/

Nvidia's AI denoiser you're talking about, is it the topic discussed in this thread? If so I will try it. If not, I'd be glad if you could help. Thank you.

That's the one.

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is slightly better in my opinion, but it's marginal at best. Are you familiar with command line stuff, though? You'll need to be somewhat familiar if you want to work either Nvidia's or Intel's denoiser. If you aren't, I'd honestly recommend the Drag n' Drop GUI by Taosoft. Makes it super easy. Just use all the links on

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(instead of the others.) and you should be good to go.

 

[3D Reaver]

Unless daz really fucked up, and it might be the case, the in engine denoiser should be superior to other denoisers simply because it has access to more information. its not just looking at what the surrounding pixels are and guessing.

 

[MissFortune]

Unless daz really fucked up, and it might be the case, the in engine denoiser should be superior to other denoisers simply because it has access to more information. its not just looking at what the surrounding pixels are and guessing.

It's inferior because it's giving you only the denoised copy, for the most part, not because of the quality. Though, Intel's denoiser is marginally better in my eyes. But both are fine. The issue is, again, that you're only getting a single denoised render without also getting the original.

The whole idea behind denoising renders, at least as far as Daz goes, is that you drop the noisy render into a photo editor and the drop the denoised version on top. From there, you can either lower the opacity of the denoised version or you can layer mask away parts of the denoised version you don't need, which is going to inherently help you retain skin and hair detail.

 

[MidnightArrow]

It's inferior because it's giving you only the denoised copy, for the most part, not because of the quality. Though, Intel's denoiser is marginally better in my eyes. But both are fine. The issue is, again, that you're only getting a single denoised render without also getting the original.

Intel's denoiser is much better, but you need an albedo and normal pass. Daz doesn't make those. If it did, the quality would be pretty much the same until you start going to 2x resolution and higher.

Daz3d just puts the bare minimum effort into their program.

 

[3D Reaver]

Intel's denoiser is much better, but you need an albedo and normal pass. Daz doesn't make those. If it did, the quality would be pretty much the same until you start going to 2x resolution and higher.

Daz3d just puts the bare minimum effort into their program.

You should be able to do this with canvases

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[MidnightArrow]

You should be able to do this with canvases

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I looked into it but apparently canvases aren't good enough. Instead people on the Daz forums had to build their own scripts, with mixed results:

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I only render in Iray because it's faster if I don't have to fix materials for another rendering engine like Cycles (which does have albedo and normal passes). Messing around with scripts for denoising data would defeat the purpose I think.