Daz Harsh criticism pls

[noping123]

a quick preamble before I post some images. I have no idea what I'm doing. I've been working with daz for just over a week now, and put some random stuff together that popped in my head. I'm not doing it for any particular reason other than to try and learn it atm and see what I can and can't do. One of my bigger hurdles is that my PC is a potato - well no my PC is great. My video card is a potato. An AMD potato even - so I'm doing full CPU iray renders atm. (the ones below took between 45m-3.5h ea). I ran them all through a denoiser afterwards some were bad some not so much, but most came out looking "cartoony" more so than I'd like. I *DID* notice if I spotrender about 25% of the viewport, I can do that in 10-20 min (depending on the scene), and it comes out with a lot less noise, so I might just do that 4x instead of doing it all at once - but that's a tomorrow problem. Also, I did look at both 3DL and Blender for my "Amd" woes, but I wasn't terribly happy with either so cpu iray it is for now.

Video tutorials just don't do it for me, I'm really no good at learning from them. Written ones I can work with - if you know of any please point them my way (I've read through what I've found so far but most stuff is video). I generally learn much better from just trying, fucking up, and then trying to figure out why/how it fucked up. People telling me "you fucked that up, here's why" also helps (hence the thread). If youre just gonna tell me "you fucked this up" without a "why", please don't. Or do whatever I'm not your dad. But I'd appreciate if you could throw in the "here's why/how" - that's what will help me.

Also any suggestions on stuff I can do that significantly more difficult than what I've done. I'm pretty sure this stuff is fairly basic (and also fairly not good, but that's ok.), I'd like to know the sorts of scenes/poses/etc that are really difficult to set up properly - so I can try those, fuck them up miserably, and then try to figure out how to do it correctly. I do have a bunch of stuff rendering now that's indoors with poor lighting - I tried a few ways to make it look decent, so I'll see tomorrow if it came out any good or not. Also any tips on how I can improve the type of stuff I did here, cause it really feels mediocre at best, but I don't know enough yet to know how to improve it. I also tried messing around with a bunch of things just to figure them out, like camera focal length and stuff like that. I'm still not sure when it's good to use and not, but I'll eyeball it for now.




But yea. Please pick apart anything you can, as long as you can tell me why it's wrong or how to make it better, it'll help a ton.

 

[MissFortune]

You suck, do the world a favor and stop rendering this garbage.

Seriously though, these aren't really deserving of 'harsh criticism'. One big problem I see right away is that your lighting/sunlight is way too bright (and perhaps too white, unless that's what you're going for. I've had my fair share of bright summer days here in the desert, so they definitely are a thing), I believe this is a Dreamlight scene, no? I'm not sure if you're using your own lighting setup alongside the HDRI, but something is bleaching/washing out the environment. I'm guess you either have the environment intensity/map turned up, or you're using seperate lights. In cases like this (outdoors), you're almost always best off using the HDRI as your base lighting (for render times, especially), then add others if needed (a rim light, for example, though a well placed HDRI could do it on it's own).

I just pulled up the same scene (at a different angle) and toyed with the environment map and tint for more of a 'sunny' color, along with the dome rotation for a not so hard shadow:



Unfortunately, not having an Nvidia GPU is going to limit what you're able to do, but you're clearly already aware of that. I'm not aware of all the things you can use to speed up renders. But I believe Depth of Field will be your friend here, though, as there's less for the CPU to render. Thing is, this stuff just sort of comes with the territory of, as you said, fucking up and learning from it. A good Nvidia GPU (not even talking about a 30 series, honestly. Anything at a 10 series or above should do far better than what you've got.) will do wonders for what you're able to do with your scenes. If you plan to get serious with Daz/Blender/etc, a good graphics card should be a priority, provided you can afford it.

There's some other minor issues that you'll pick up as you get better with Daz. The third, fourth, and fifth image all show the figure's fingers clipping into the female characters skin. Not a huge deal, but something to pay attention to. Close-ups (like the seventh image) are a bit of a double-edged sword. Too close and the pores start looking too artificial, too far and you don't see any of the good stuff. Again, this kind of stuff is hard to notice without being able to render as close to real time as possible, and I doubt you want to sit for 20 minutes until the viewport noise clears up. The sixth image, as a bit of a nitpick, is unrealistic. No human man is going to cum that much (again, provided he's human. Don't know the story behind the render). Maybe play around with a more normal penis size, as well.

In short, play around with Depth of Field and take advantage of HDRI's where possible. They'll save the life of your CPU (some say it's okay, but I don't think rendering at full load with a CPU is healthy for it temperature-wise). It's really your lighting and framing that need work. Everything else just comes with experience. If tutorials don't do it for you, then watch famous movies or movie scenes and study how they compose their shots and/or

You must be registered to see the links

them. Then study how they apply lighting, and research some of their

You must be registered to see the links

(the shot at 4:34 is something I use a good bit in my later renders).

You may not like them, but tutorials in 2021 are almost always going to be in video, and they're usually the best way to learn. I'd recommend taking a glance at Dreamlight's Three Point X Light series, and perhaps 8 Point Light (once you get a higher end GPU going, probably.). Still might be worth watching as he's talks about more than just lighting, but the fundamentals that go along with what makes a render appealing to then eyes (mood, color, and even some framing/camera placement logic). He gets a lot of shit, but he's good at what he does.

 

[mickydoo]

For starters not shabby at all. But yeah without a nvida card you will always be pushing shit uphill.

But my two cents -

Just render the girl for practice, two characters will take longer than one

That scene is by Dreamlight, he is a bit blah for me, but a few things about it -
His render settings are stupid, the already bright HDRI with it is turned up
The resolution is weird, if I were you I just go 720p for the sake of time.

Also the overly bright HDRI is not doing you any favours. Better idea is to use another one and turn the dome off. I just tried one with this

You must be registered to see the links

at a dome rotation of 135 and it came out alright. Before you do so but, he has the environment intensity wound up, they should all be greyed out numbers except for your dome rotation, click on the little cog next to the love heart and select reset. If you render it out as a .png you can just put a background behind it in photoshop or whatever.

The other issue with it is it is too white, its reflecting too much off it and making the whole thing looked washed out, the surfaces tab where it says diffuse colour, change the white overlay to a grey until you are happy. It will still look white, just gets rid of glare.

 

[noping123]

believe this is a Dreamlight scene, no? I'm not sure if you're using your own lighting setup alongside the HDRI, but something is bleaching/washing out the environment.

Actually its *just* the hdri. I added no lighting here at all. I guess the enviroment itself is a bit too bright? I really know nothing at all about lighting here, so I honestly haven't considered messing around with the base enviroment. (Also I don't know how yet so I guess I should look into that).

The third, fourth, and fifth image all show the figure's fingers clipping into the female characters skin. Not a huge deal, but something to pay attention to.

This is something I struggled with. A TON. I'm really not even sure how to rectify it yet. I spent, probably 4 hrs across all these images, trying to fix all the tiny little clipping issues I noticed. My issue was with a lot of them, if I "fixed" them, the space was obvious. If I didn't "fix" them (as seen in the images), you can barely notice the clipping. I'm still trying to figure out that balance.

The sixth image, as a bit of a nitpick, is unrealistic. No human man is going to cum that much (again, provided he's human. Don't know the story behind the render). Maybe play around with a more normal penis size, as well.

To be fair the female isn't human either. The penis size thing would *usually* bug me, but for now I didn't care about it as much as again, trying to learn, not actually produce anything for show. (As a side note, check out the 3rd and 4th images. the penis size there is approx 2 ft long. I hadn't really figured out focal length stuff yet, and it was the only way I could figure out to get the angle without the camera clipping.) (just for laughs and reference this is from the viewport):

They'll save the life of your CPU (some say it's okay, but I don't think rendering at full load with a CPU is healthy for it temperature-wise). It's really your lighting and framing that need work.

Not a worry. My PC (and cooling) is a beast. Running it at full load for like 10+ hrs straight and it never broke 45c. And my fans aren't even turned up all the way. Honestly for this stuff I didn't even look at the lighting I just used the default on focused on... everything else. (I have an indoor scene I'm trying to build now, in THAT, the lighting is a big issue I'm working on so we'll see how it goes). The framing, well yea. I have no clue. Right now I've just been going 'Well. How do I fit everything I want in here" without much regard to anything else. I guess that's something I should look into more.

You may not like them, but tutorials in 2021 are almost always going to be in video, and they're usually the best way to learn.

It's not that I don't like them, it's that they're useless for me. I can't give you a good reason why, I just know from plenty of experience that video tutorials never help me, ever. I need to be able to read stuff - or just do it, or both. Which is why the stuff you've added here is 10x more helpful than any video tutorial would ever be - even the stuff you didn't explain, you gave enough reference that I can look it up and read about it- because starting out, I have no clue what to even look for.

Just render the girl for practice, two characters will take longer than one

I'll start doing that when I'm more focused on stuff like mentioned above - lighting and framing, and how to make stuff look "good". For now my focus has been "How much can I push my cpu and what are my actual limits here, since I don't have any GPU rendering available)". The answer? My limit is 2 characters and not much additional lighting. I did a 3 person scene while I slept, with a whole mess of reflective surfaces and light sources - 9.5 hrs later and it finally finished rendering! Good thing I was tired and slept forever.

As far as the resolution goes..... Yea, Idk how that happened. I meant to do everything in 1920x1080... and somehow i fucked it up on a bunch of images. I decided "fuck it, it's still 16:9, I'm not redoing this, it's just for testing purposes anyway".

If you render it out as a .png you can just put a background behind it in photoshop or whatever.

....
....
...
This is why I ask for help. This is obvious. It's something an idiot should figure out. I didn't figure this out. In fact, I specifically used the dome lighting and rendered it, BECAUSE I TRIED TO RENDER A PNG AND IT HAD A TRANSPARENT BACKGROUND AND I THOUGHT THAT LOOKED STUPID. Obviously I can just render it as a png, open paint, add a background layer, add a background, merge the layers, and be done with it. (ok there's slightly more to it than that, but still). I have a bad habit of overlooking the stupidly obvious stuff, and occasionally need someone to smack me over the head and tell me.

Also the overly bright HDRI is not doing you any favours. Better idea is to use another one and turn the dome off. I just tried one with this

You must be registered to see the links

at a dome rotation of 135 and it came out alright. Before you do so but, he has the environment intensity wound up, they should all be greyed out numbers except for your dome rotation, click on the little cog next to the love heart and select reset. If you render it out as a .png you can just put a background behind it in photoshop or whatever.

The other issue with it is it is too white, its reflecting too much off it and making the whole thing looked washed out, the surfaces tab where it says diffuse colour, change the white overlay to a grey until you are happy. It will still look white, just gets rid of glare.

Ok a few things here. First off - I'd prefer to try to use "overly bright HDRI", and then figure out how to adjust it to work, rather than just use something else. Reason being, I'm sure occasions can pop up where the HDRI I find is perfect visually, but the lighting/whatever is off, so rather than search for something "better' I'd want to know how to fix it. I didn't even consider actually editing it tbh, or know how to yet - like I didn't even know editing dome rotation was a thing. I should definitely look into all of this. my next goal - redo all the above with the same HDRI but try to "fix" it.

Also, while I'm sure the lighting doesn't help, at least some of the "Washed out" look is post-processing. A lot of these come out really grainy which is something I haven't been able to figure out, except to write it off as "CPU problems". If I let it render pure iterations, even after ~5-6k it still has some grain. If I do a % based, at 98% it still has some grain. Running through some sort of denoising ends up washing it out a little bit - moreso than originally. I agree it's still a problem with the original render, but a good portion of it is definitely post. I'm still working on figuring out how to fix that.


Anyway thanks for all the help, I now have approx 2 days worth of reading to do before I start trying again.

 

[noping123]

How is this? Now the problem is, to me, it looks fine. (Note: I'm talking about lighting only. Everything else I'm ignoring atm, so any other flaws I really didn't pay attn to).



first one is just quickly through the render process, 2nd is after denoiser. I'm trying to wrap my head around lighting atm. Like I said, to me that looks fine, but I'd trust the opinions of others over my own on this. (As a note: that is something I built before the ones above. It contains 4/5 lighting sources. 1 outside hdri, 1 light above slightly behind to the left looking down, one on the far left aimed at the characters, one back in the area the woman is looking towards (that one is lower temperature light, but provides most of the illumination on the scene), and 1 low intensity towards the front of the bed - plus a very modest amount of scene lighting provided by the environment. (there's some, but if I remove my lights everything is extremely dark so it's not much).

 

[MidnightArrow]

To light up a room, lights should be big, like 50 by 50 or 100 by 100. And make sure you don't leave them on the default geometry, point, because it looks terrible. The bigger the lights are, the softer the light will be. Also the bigger the lights the higher you need to turn up the luminous flux so it can be seen. It should be a couple hundred thousand to start with. Put some point lights around the room, over the figures heads, to cover up all the dark spots until the lighting is nice and even, like a porno set.

 

[MissFortune]

How is this? Now the problem is, to me, it looks fine. (Note: I'm talking about lighting only. Everything else I'm ignoring atm, so any other flaws I really didn't pay attn to).

View attachment 1367329 View attachment 1367330

first one is just quickly through the render process, 2nd is after denoiser. I'm trying to wrap my head around lighting atm. Like I said, to me that looks fine, but I'd trust the opinions of others over my own on this. (As a note: that is something I built before the ones above. It contains 4/5 lighting sources. 1 outside hdri, 1 light above slightly behind to the left looking down, one on the far left aimed at the characters, one back in the area the woman is looking towards (that one is lower temperature light, but provides most of the illumination on the scene), and 1 low intensity towards the front of the bed - plus a very modest amount of scene lighting provided by the environment. (there's some, but if I remove my lights everything is extremely dark so it's not much).

That's definitely pretty good. I'm assuming the other (the more warmer one) light source is a hall light of some sort here? If that's the case, it's definitely giving off that effect. Like I said in the last post, lighting just comes with experience. It's a bit of a bitch at first, and easy to over do. Think about your stereotypical bedroom, the lights inside of it, and the time of day. How will the lights interact with each other? Is it early enough that they'll be off? You already seem to have a solid understanding (more so than a lot of devs on here.)

Your HDRI is playing the main the light source here, and it's creating a nice effect on his back while also creating some pretty good natural shadows, while the girl is kept softly illuminated from the other light. It could be a slight bit dimmer, but that's just a taste thing for me. Another alternative lighting angle here would be

You must be registered to see the links

(basically lights that can get extremely bright if needed, but remain invisible in the scene.) to fill the room softly enough to illuminate it from above while still keeping your main light source intact and ditching the hall light at the same time. It's quick and dirty, but if placed right, can do a lot while lowering render times at the same time. If there were any nitpick on that render is put something more elegant on the glass to hide the HDRI some, like a frosted

You must be registered to see the links

. Elegant and not at all out of place while also taking away notice from it and bringing the focus back to the main event on the bed.

It points back to that earlier point. If the lighting is simple, then there's no need to over complicate it. When you're lighting, ask yourself what is illuminating the room/figure and what the best method to get that effect is. For example:



In the example, there's three different light sources, but only one shown and two others implied. The tv and the roof light play the main light sources, and of course, you wouldn't want to drop a spotlight right in front of the TV. It'd just look out of place. So, there is where a ghost light would be useful. They create something of a rim light on his shoulder and her right side, creating the illusion of illumination from the television in the same way the street/moonlight does. While the unseen spotlight from above takes up the brunt of the work as the main light source. Lighting is one of those things that nobody will compliment (unless you're PhillyGames), but will immediately call out if it's not good. Getting it to feel natural and not seen (unless you're after that effect, like above) is a step in right the direction. The rest just comes with experience/time/knowledge, knowing what works, and what'll look good for that particular scene/environment.

 

[noping123]

You already seem to have a solid understanding (more so than a lot of devs on here.)

I think you over-estimate me. All I'm doing is going "What looks natural? Where is this light coming from, and does it make sense". If stuff is too dark (like in the above, the girl on the bottom was WAY too dark at first), I try to figure out a light source that would brighten it, but make sense. That took me about 7 attempts before I found something I could live with. Like you said, that bit comes with experience, just "knowing" how to set it up after doing it often enough, for now it's just a lot of trial and error until I feel like everything makes sense.

Still it's nice to know I'm at least heading in the right direction with it all. Thanks for all the input, now I just need to go keep trying different stuff until I'm more comfortable putting things together. Maybe eventually a single scene won't take me 3+ hrs to design.

 

[Gallant Trombe]

I know you're just dipping your toes into DAZ at the moment, but looking at your renders, I could see the lighting has no direction to them. I don't mean the direction the lights are pointing at, I mean the purpose of each light. Sure, I could see the subjects well, but I'm not seeing the tone, the atmosphere, the focus, and the message.

Since you said you prefer reading, I recommend reading articles on three topics - ISO, exposure, and 3-point lighting. Even just knowing the basics of these three topics will actually speed up your workflow and you'll get better results. Saves you render time too.

Two light source is more than enough. The key light to expose the subject and get the shadows you want, the fill light to balance and smoothen things out. With this, you can test render just the subjects until you're happy with it, then render the background itself. Once you get better, you can add more lights, but those are accents, flavours.


So using your indoor render as an example.

First, decide the tone of your render. Is this a morning fuck fest? If so, turn off the indoor lights except for the two hanging light bulbs, those can be there to fill the scene as background objects.

Set the ISO to something like 400, that's what I would use for indoors. I recommend developing your own ISO preferences for different daytime and locations. I use 400 for indoors with good outside lights, 1200 for nighttime outside, etc. This way, you'll know roughly how bright your lighting needs to be for every scene.

Place a big emissive at around 45 degrees outside, that's your key light. Use a spot light (set the diameter to 100) for this if you want more dramatic shadows and you want the shadows of the window/door frames projected onto the room. The key light needs to be bright, so up the luminance without brightening the walls and furniture too much. With the key light being behind the subjects, what you're looking for are the bright outlines on the subjects to get some cool silhouettes.

Now place another emissive right behind the camera, that's your fill light. The purpose of this light here is mainly to make sure the subjects are actually exposed, but not bright enough to ruin the balance.

The intended effect of this setup is to get that morning tone. Blindly bright outside, dim inside. Usually, in the morning, people let the sunlight in and leave the room lights off. Ergo by simulating this, the render can evoke the right kind of atmosphere and tone (morning being peaceful, serene, a bit drowsy).

Lastly, make sure the background and objects like furniture are not as bright as the subjects. That's going to end up looking very flat, and the render won't have any focus to it. Your indoor render has a really bright right-hand side for no reason. The subjects are to the left, but the bright reflection on the floor is drawing our eyes to the right side, and the next brightest thing is the white dresser to its right, drawing it further away from the subjects. Besides having better camera work, if you could angle the outside light towards the bed, not the floor, it would have been a lot better.

 

[noping123]

Im not going to try to dismiss anything you said, because plenty of it has value, but I will say this.

I am not an artist. I never will be. Things like "tone, atmosphere", etc. These things are lost on me - they aren't things I think of, nor will I ever. I look at things purely from a technical standpoint. The "purpose" of the lighting as you put it, was to illuminate things. There was no message. The "message" was "You can now see stuff that was dark before". That's the extent of it. That back right light you said existed for no reason? It was there intentionally - because at least to me, it made logical sense that it would be. I wasn't thinking of things like drawing attention from this or to that, or whatever. I was thinking "Does this make sense".

You could (And I think successfully did) make the argument that it's unnecessary to achieve my goal - which is very simply "Be able to see the dark stuff", but I'll never look at things from the same perspective you do. And it's not like I'm being obtuse here, I just know how I work and think and know even if I tried, I'd default pretty quickly to not thinking about it.

I know to an extent the technical aspects and the artistic go hand in and, and without one you'll suffer, but I also know that's something about me that's never going to change, and if my renders suffer because of it, then they suffer and I'll have to live with that - and I'll consume as much of the technical stuff as I can to try and improve, and like I said, plenty of what you mentioned has value. But, if you look at anything I do looking for any sort of tone, or atmosphere, or message, you will be disappointed.

 

[mickydoo]

I am not an artist. I never will be. Things like "tone, atmosphere", etc. These things are lost on me - they aren't things I think of, nor will I ever. I look at things purely from a technical standpoint. The "purpose" of the lighting as you put it, was to illuminate things. There was no message. The "message" was "You can now see stuff that was dark before". That's the extent of it.

Me neither, I've being doing this for years and have no idea what half of that meant.

I use the KISS method - keep it simple stupid. When you have a scene there are only two primary lighting objectives.

1. Light on the characters, not just to see them, DAZ skin relies on it.
2. Background/ambient lighting.

There a wrong ways to use lighting, but no really right way, everyone does it different. Look at this pic below -


That's just using a sun node to aim the sun through the wooden slats and there one solitary emissive plane in front and off to side, put there with little thought, I just moved it a tad as needed.

But as I said before, the two issues here are light on the females, and background lighting (I cant tell you which one to worry about first as that changes all the time). But basically I break it down to those two basics.

You also hear ppl go on about the 3 point set up, that is great for artistic portraits, for a VN scene you dont really need them. As someone else said, two are enough, small room one will do. because the light bounces off walls ceilings etc, more or less giving you the backlights etc.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

I am not an artist. I never will be. Things like "tone, atmosphere", etc. These things are lost on me - they aren't things I think of, nor will I ever. I look at things purely from a technical standpoint. The "purpose" of the lighting as you put it, was to illuminate things. There was no message. The "message" was "You can now see stuff that was dark before". That's the extent of it. That back right light you said existed for no reason? It was there intentionally - because at least to me, it made logical sense that it would be. I wasn't thinking of things like drawing attention from this or to that, or whatever. I was thinking "Does this make sense".

Man, I feel I read myself one year ago \o/. Not an artist tho and don't worry most people that does render here neither. It's more loose assets mashed more or less well together to (or try to) bring a result.

Imo, you should forgot about "realism", "technical standpoint", blabla and so on, it ain't gonna work (or look very boring).
Lightening is not really about "real life" but more like "cinema" and quite on steroïd at that (because you can cheat even more).

That's the real harsh criticism you need lmao

 

[Dilly_]

Some brief advice:

-If you have potato hardware, don't bother going overboard with lighting a million characters. Use one or two at most (preferably one). Even with good hardware I like to keep things simple. It's perfectly doable to light a scene with a single HDRI and have it look good. This will also be the fastest option in terms of render times.

-Some tonemapping settings to look into:
1. Film ISO: Fast way to brighten up your scene. Overdoing it can distort the details.
2. cm^2 factor: A great way to brighten up your characters using HDRI. Can be used along with or instead of Film ISO
3. Burn highlights/crush blacks: Lowering these can provide a more "natural" looking image, though it's mostly personal preference and can be ignored. You can also do this in post work.

If you had good hardware and could afford longer render times, I'd recommend not using a denoiser at all. However, in your case, I'd recommend rendering at maximum 1920x1080, though you may even consider 720p. Don't use the built-in Daz denoiser, either use Nvidia AI denoiser (I believe it works with AMD cards) or Topaz DeNoise AI.

No matter what your hardware is like, post work can always improve quality. Take a look at a program like Adobe Light Room for an easy way to adjust your renders. Boosting the contrast/sharpening almost always makes a scene look better.

There's plenty of ways to "cheese" the lighting, especially with interior scenes. Iray section planes can allow light from HDRI to enter far more nooks and crannies of an interior environment than would otherwise be possible. There are even assets like

You must be registered to see the links

that come with a camera that has Iray section planes attached to it that hide everything not visible in the camera view. This will decrease render times and allow you to light interiors using only HDRI.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

3. Burn highlights/crush blacks: Lowering these can provide a more "natural" looking image, though it's mostly personal preference and can be ignored. You can also do this in post work.

Even as far as or near 0. Especially if you render with the default setup. Could save a plenty of details in under/over exposed situations.

 

[noping123]

Ok so. I took a lot of what was said here while I was sleeping (and some other stuff), and tried to apply it. I started with this (took 1h,35m to render while I was asleep - 98% convergence, no post done).




I then went back to it and made a ton of changes. I removed all the original light sources (2 enviromental lights which while provided by the enviroment I had edited quite a bit, and 1 main light focused on the character).

I also messed with a bunch of settings in the above posts.

Ultimately I ended up with 2 light sources - 1 emissive plane in the back, and 1 spotlight off to the side with a high spread. Trying to render this always ended up with a ton of noise - I messed with a whole bunch of settings, different lighting, different lighting placements, and always ended up with insanely high levels of noise.

In the end I rendered it as UHD, denoised with topaz, sharpened, and downscaled. The end result was this(total render time: 11 minutes, stopped at 36% convergence):



Now while I feel that second one is definitely a step in the right direction (and I feel like I cheated with the downscaling to compensate for not knowing how to place the lights, but), I definitely feel like I'm doing something very wrong still.

That second one also contains a higher iso (300 i think?). I messed with that setting a bit - any lower and it was too dark, any higher and everything seemed too bright.

My first question is: where did I go wrong on the 2nd attempt? Idk my second question, but I'm sure it exists, so I'll defer that for now.


Mainly atm I'm trying to take all the stuff people are telling me, plus whatever I can read/find on my own, and attempt to apply it. Some of it hasn't worked at all and I've just tossed it aside for now, some has shown better results. ATM I'm just trying to "perfect" this image here, and more importantly, understand what I'm doing rather than just making small edits until it's "correct", so I can try to apply it to lots of stuff going forward

 

[Dilly_]

Ok so. I took a lot of what was said here while I was sleeping (and some other stuff), and tried to apply it. I started with this (took 1h,35m to render while I was asleep - 98% convergence, no post done).

View attachment 1372878


I then went back to it and made a ton of changes. I removed all the original light sources (2 enviromental lights which while provided by the enviroment I had edited quite a bit, and 1 main light focused on the character).

I also messed with a bunch of settings in the above posts.

Ultimately I ended up with 2 light sources - 1 emissive plane in the back, and 1 spotlight off to the side with a high spread. Trying to render this always ended up with a ton of noise - I messed with a whole bunch of settings, different lighting, different lighting placements, and always ended up with insanely high levels of noise.

In the end I rendered it as UHD, denoised with topaz, sharpened, and downscaled. The end result was this(total render time: 11 minutes, stopped at 36% convergence):

View attachment 1372887

Now while I feel that second one is definitely a step in the right direction (and I feel like I cheated with the downscaling to compensate for not knowing how to place the lights, but), I definitely feel like I'm doing something very wrong still.

That second one also contains a higher iso (300 i think?). I messed with that setting a bit - any lower and it was too dark, any higher and everything seemed too bright.

My first question is: where did I go wrong on the 2nd attempt? Idk my second question, but I'm sure it exists, so I'll defer that for now.


Mainly atm I'm trying to take all the stuff people are telling me, plus whatever I can read/find on my own, and attempt to apply it. Some of it hasn't worked at all and I've just tossed it aside for now, some has shown better results. ATM I'm just trying to "perfect" this image here, and more importantly, understand what I'm doing rather than just making small edits until it's "correct", so I can try to apply it to lots of stuff going forward

Consider using emissive planes in the 3-point lighting configuration to light your character:



You want direct lighting on your character to make the skin look good.

To illustrate, here is a simple render lit only with HDRI:

You can see the lighting is very 'flat', and also the character is too dark.

Once you apply 3-point lighting, things start to improve:



One thing you could do is create your own lighting preset using emissive planes. Create a new plane primitive object, make it emissive, position it according to the 3-point setup, then group them all together so you can easily move + rotate the lights. The preset I used for the above render looks like this:



After you have the planes positioned correctly, you can decrease the cutout opacity to 0.0001 which will hide the planes from view while still providing the light.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

Consider using emissive planes in the 3-point lighting configuration to light your character

Pls no lol. By the almigty find your own way, not everything as to be a perfect studio shot. Situtation matter.

 

[Dilly_]

Pls no lol. By the almigty find your own way, not everything as to be a perfect studio shot. Situtation matter.

3 point lighting is pretty standard, no? I learned about it in the very first Daz tutorial I ever watched, and it's produced consistently good results. I don't think its only use is for creating the "perfect studio shot", I've used it in a variety of situations to good effect. Of course it's not the only technique you can use, but it is a good technique to have in your arsenal. Especially if you create a preset, then all you have to do is tweak the temperature/color and rotate the lights and you can get decent lighting pretty quickly in many circumstances.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

Indeed, and I got what you mean (I think?). That said nobody have time for this imo.
What I mean is any dual light source hdri with a correct neutral will do better and (very) faster.
Add a backlight if it's you kink.

If you are making a game you don't want to merge those 3 planes for every scene/figure, it's madness.
I don't think it's a good advice tho IMHO.

 

[Gallant Trombe]

Look, about the whole 3-point thing. I've been working on my own game for almost 6 months now, and I will say this about it, you don't need it. However, you need to understand why it is to CONSISTENTLY create good renders. I could work on one poster render for days to fine-tune it, but that's impractical for a VN. This is why I'll keep telling people to read up on photography and cinematography standards. This isn't just an artistic thing, it's for practical reasons too. The better handle you have on it, the fast and more efficiently you can render good images. This isn't like drawing where you need months if not years of practice to be good at it. It takes a few hours of reading and watching, and then a couple of practical applications to see the results.

Like I said before, you don't even need three lights, two is plenty enough. Think of the time you save from having to set up three lights vs. two over hundreds if not thousands of renders. But to actually make good use out of just two lights takes a little bit of reading up on how lighting works. In a VN, a scene would involve different camera angles, so if you want the lighting to make sense with the environment for every angle, it needs to be planned out and set up properly. How could one do that if they don't even know what setting up lighting even means?

Also, most people use premade environments anyway, they should all come with sufficient lighting for themselves, it only takes another light to expose the subject.

Now about the artistic vs. technical thing. I get it, I don't consider myself an artist either, but my point is about quality and efficiency, not anything artistic. Why do you think there's something wrong with your renders? Because they don't look right. And they don't look right not because you didn't tweak certain settings, or you don't know DAZ has this thing you need to use, etc. In my honest opinion, it is because it has no direction, or purpose if that's the word that makes more sense. Like your threesome render from before, if your goal for the render is to make sure everything is brightly lid, then jobs done, it is brightly lid. What else is there to say? The two new images are the same idea. Yes, the second one is faster, and slightly better because brightness makes more sense for the scene, so if that was your goal, you did it. I would say keep trying and you'll get better at the whole thing. But if you want to render something that looks right, don't you need to define what is right first? And if you don't know what is right, isn't that the crux of the problem?

Using my own experience as an example. I came into this knowing absolutely nothing about DAZ or 3D art in general. I never studied photography, I don't ever take photos on my phone, it's just wasn't me. Like you, I just wanted to tell my stories and I ended up choosing VN as the medium. And not being an artist, I chose DAZ because that's the only feasible way I could see myself being able to produce the visuals I'll need. I started off by setting goals for myself, I actually maintain a dev journal here, from day 1 to preset. For the first two months, it was all about learning. I had a goal for each day or week, and with a goal, I could see the puzzle I need to solve, then I just look up how to solve them.

Maybe pick a scene in one of your stories, and just try to render one shot of it. Like a POV shot of a character talking in a cafe or something, whatever you think fits with your story. As the writer, you'll see what's wrong with it, and you'll have more concrete obstacles to overcome. For example, when you try to render your character in the cafe, you'll notice the renders ended up very noisy despite hours of rendering and with 98%+ convergence. That's a problem to solve. Or when put your character into the scene, you'll notice the cafe's ceiling lights aren't good for the camera angle, because they're right above the character's head. That's another problem to solve. Keep solving these problems and your renders will look right soon enough.