Help!! Daz Interior Lighting and Ghost Lights

[Anonymous]

First off, I'm glad I don't pay for this shit. It's one garbage product after another, each priced at like $15 a piece. The rate of 'good product as advertised on the promos' is like 50 to 1, if that. I feel like I should kick creators like Rhiannon and Sickle Yield a few hundred bucks just for making good products that work like they're supposed to.

I'm having problems with ghost lights in this case.

On this one, I'm trying to just increase the interior lighting. I've got windows, so I can't jack up the exposure without washing out the HDRI environment background shining through the windows. Therefore, I'm using a series of spheres throughout the room in an attempt to just make things all around brighter while preserving some light through the windows. If I don't do this, the renders come out way too dark, especially when I transfer them to my phone.

I loaded up one of those small room kits, a series of spheres designed to do just that: make everything brighter in the room. Bland light. Just brighter. (I'm not even trying to do anything uber artistic at this point.) When I couldn't get the orbs to disappear without taking the light away, I took individual ghost lights, spheres, and put them in exactly the same place where the kit lights were. Once I tried to adjust the lumens of the ghost lights, everything was okay. Until I got to like light number 12. At that point, when I took it from 1500 lumens down to like 700, every other light, as well as the one I adjusted, disappeared and all that tedious work was for nothing. No restarting the program or anything else fixed it.

All I'm trying to do is get a nice, basic environment for one room in my game. That's it. No depth of field, portrait lighting, nothing fancy.

What kits/ghost lights are you using, with the LATEST VERSION of Daz, to just get some basic brightness without washing out any HDRI backgrounds you can see through your windows? Just a product that works. How do you light up a room enough for a decent render while keeping the background the same?

I don't mind the tedium of fine tuning poses or adjusting clothes to fit huge tits, but this is ridiculous, and way harder than it should be.

[Niala]

Ghostlights are objects with a luminous material that are rendered invisible by using a small opacity.
There has been a dramatic change in the way such objects are rendered by iray around DS 4.20. Previously, the luminance and the opacity where considered as independent parameter by iray. A couple of years ago, nvidia decided for some reasons that the effective luminance of an object in iray will be the product of the object nominal luminance and opacity.
Hence if an object is fully opaque, the luminance is unchanged, but if it has an opacity of 1/1000000 (typical of ghost lights) its actual luminance is divided by one million!! This immediately obsoleted all existing ghostlight products and if you use them with the newest DS version, you may expect problems. The change in iray took place around SKU 84000 and any product with a smaller SKU should be avoided or fixed.

AFAIK, the products adapted to the new iray behavior are invisilights by Sickleyield and iray ghost light kit one and iray ghost light prop kit by Kindred

SY Invisilights Iray

https://zonegfx.com/iray-ghost-light-kit-one/

Iray Ghost Light Prop Kit

Older products (also by Kindred) can be used, but must be fixed either by largely increasing their luminance or by increasing the opacity and using a free script that adds a new iray property making the items invisible to the first light rays https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/548061/iray-ghost-light-fix-dse-for-daz-studio-4-20-o-later/p1 (Note that this new parameter "Iray Visible to Primary Rays" does not make the objects fully invisible as they can still cast shadows, but it avoids using insane luminance that may add some problems/grain to renders and depending on the light position in the scene it may be the best solution.)

Besides ghostlights, a good solution for lighting is to use "iray section planes" that cuts part of the scene and allows this way a direct lighting by the surrounding HDRI. The simpler to use them is with a script that creates a camera with iray section planes parented in a way that makes them effectively invisible in the scene; There is a free script by HeroineAdventure or a similar commercial product by Riversoft.
https://www.deviantart.com/heroineadventures/art/Iray-Interior-Camera-V1-4-758604718

Camera Cutaway

Besides that, yes, lighting is difficult in 3D (and this also true for real movies). Ghost lights are not always the best solution. I frequently prefer to use a set of properly positioned regular lights. Some light props in the scene with a proper luminance to give the main scene lighting. Completed by some additional iray spot lights for filling or adding some spot illumination. The may advantage of regular light versus ghostlights is that you can control the lighting angle.

But lighting is still what I find the most difficult in 3D. I have looked at many tutorials, but any new scene is a new problem to solve.

[darksoul1978]

I agree with your thoughts on paying, I just wish I found this site sooner after being almost $7k in the hole at daz. A lot of the stuff they show for product images is rendered by professionals whose job is to wake up and sit on this program for 10+ hours a day making the items look flawless. And don't get me started on their support, still have a ticket sitting open for 6 MONTHS now with no fix whatsoever from them. If you spend the kind of money I have, support should be there instantly. So now since finding this place, only time daz will see money is for an amazing deal to share here.

[Frank21]

You can always use this site as a try-before-you-buy as some do here. If you're happy with the quality of a product you can buy it and support the vendor, and conversely not reward those whose stuff falls short.

[eino4706]

I'm not fond of Ghost Light Kit one or Invisilights. If you add point lights to a scene that contain those, for example, ghost lights on the environment (candles, lamps, etc.) and point lights on your actor, an absolutely bonkers amount of noise is generated. Anybody know what's up with that or have any suggestions to fix it? The usual tricks (Nominal Luminance for example) don't mitigate it. Thanks in advance!

[Ethiopia]

A point to note....
If something sucks, say that in the vendors forums. Be polite, show examples, and be specific.
Give their support people 10 days to answer and then return the offending product if there's no help, making note of it in the forums. Nothing will change unless people scream bloody murder.

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