renders in dark lighting

[khumak]

I've been having trouble getting any of my renders that are not brightly lit to come out right. It seems like areas without much light Daz just doesn't know what to do with. The scene below is intentionally dark but I do have a few strategically placed lights to make sure everything gets some light. Most of the light in this shot is coming from the window across fromm the mirror on the far side of the room.

This render I let run last night for more than 7 hours and the dark areas are still grainy. If I do the same render closer to the window in the same room where there's way more light, with the same assets I can get a finished render in about 30 minutes.

Is there some extra filter or something I need to set up for renders in low light to work right or does Daz just not like dark scenes?

 

[Volta]

Shadows are tough on Daz, if you're on a machine that doesn't have GPU, VRAM and cuda cores to spare it will take more time, in your case your using reflections and shadows, this will weigh down even more, i'd suggest:
- striping down on all excess vertices that you can, if it's out of shot scrap it or at least hide it
- dropping image quality and increasing render size, followed by downsizing the image in post production can be a neat way of doing things, some say this is a massive time saver, i've only had a modest saving personally.
- reducing the number of lights, honestly intersecting shadows are a bitch in my experience, use reflectors rather than additional lights, think like a photo studio in that regard
- play with shadow settings, a less harsh shadow may render faster, thoug hif harsh shadows are what you want you've got them really well defined so far.

Brighter scenes tend to render faster, if you can up the light and give a convincing "dimming" effect in post work this could save you time, though i haven't tried this and don't know how effective this will be.

 

[basium]

Make sure firefly filter is enabled. Noise filter helps too.
If i remember correctly the architecural sampler can increase render speed in in-door scenes.
And caustic sampler was for when there's lots of reflections. Just google those 2 to get better and correct answers.

Play around with render quality. Try to set it to 1000. It gives your render passes of higher quality but the render will basically never finish so you have to do it yourself.

Darkness and shadows are a bitch. Best would be to render really bright images then jerk around in any paint program.

Or save that image then do a shit ton of smaller spot renders (life saving tool)

 

[GuyFreely]

Another thing to consider is post process darkening. You can render a scene that is moderately lit and then darken it after the fact. It can take a while to find the right balance, but it's an option. It could probably also be done using canvases, but that's a more advanced topic that I can't really speak to myself.

 

[exer]

I have a pretty mediocre machine, and it already takes a good 12+ hours for a normal render. So what I do is just a normally lit room, and then darken it in Photoshop. It tends to look better than creating just a dim lit render and takes way less time too.

Attached is a sample of what I mean.

 

[khumak]

Ok after some more testing I definitely agree that rendering at higher light levels and then using Photoshop or Gimp or equivalent to reduce it again after the fact is probably the way to go. I just did this render in 1 hour using textures that were twice as big as the one I tried with low light and it turned out a lot better.

 

[GuyFreely]

Ok after some more testing I definitely agree that rendering at higher light levels and then using Photoshop or Gimp or equivalent to reduce it again after the fact is probably the way to go. I just did this render in 1 hour using textures that were twice as big as the one I tried with low light and it turned out a lot better.

View attachment 175186

Here's a quick attempt to make that render a bit darker. Like I said, you can play around with it.

 

[khumak]

I stumbled onto another method that also seems to work fairly well. I disabled all of my lighting and just cranked the intensity of the headlamp on my camera way up and was able to render this one in about an hour. I wonder if having all of the light come from a single source did that or if it's the fact that the headlamp seems to provide some light for the entire scene, similar to just having ambient light.

Still trying a few other options to see if I can fine tune the lighting while still keeping a reasonable render time. I'm hoping I can get away with adding a few point lights to tone down the shadows just a bit in a few places. I like the contrast in this one although the shadows are a bit darker than I'd like for her face and their legs in the mirror.

 

[Joraell]

Lighting is always magic