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Description

Eagerly purchased Reality 4 for DS first thing Monday morning. A little ashamed to say that I stayed up until 1 AM EST on Sunday night hoping the product would be on sale. Unfortunately this week I haven’t had enough free time to “play” so I have kept my positive and negative comments to a minimum.

On the negative side; I have run into a fair number of errors / bugs, but none of them have been show stoppers and there hasn’t been any more than I would expect from a new release. As with all new products, especially ones as complicated as this one, I save a lot. And have multiple save files at different portions of my effort. So none of the problems I experienced had any more than a momentary impact on me.

On the positive side; I haven't had any errors which resulted in me having to step back through my various file save iterations. So that alone is enough for me to say that this is a very solid release. Otherwise I would rather let my images speak.

I am going to explain my workflow (which is standard for most of my images):
1. Loaded in Stonemason’s Urban Sprawl 2. The big one, with all of the blocks and the skydome.
2. Positioned camera, did a quick test Reality / Lux render to check for errors / problems.
3. Went back to DS and started deleting out the aspects of the scene that I didn’t need. Pretty much everything that was not in view was deleted.
4. Went back to Reality and started adding lights.
a. Skydome was already set to emit light. Left as is.
b. Streetlights were already set to emit light. Left as is.
c. Picked through the textures for the building windows and converted a lot of them to light.
i. Associated these window lights as one light group.
ii. Modified the gain of each window light to vary them between each other (important for later).
iii. Applied the building texture to each of these lights so that the windows still had character.
5. Started the render. And it rendered fast. 2:17:35 total render time, 8 threads on 2 nodes (so a total of 16 threads), both nodes are i7 Quads, 1.29 kS/p. Normally I would take this to 5 or 10k. But this started out as just a test.
6. Exported each image with each of the three light sources isolated. These are the images that I then take into Photoshop and start layering together.

Normally I would add a "Sun" light source, but at 4 in the morning (when I started this effort) a night time scene seemed more appropriate. Plus personally I have found night time scenes harder to accomplish.

The important for later bit (mentioned above, which I almost forgot to explain)... By changing the gain of the window lights, I estimated their light properties in proportion to each other. That way when I was in Lux I would only have three light sources to work with: skydome, streetlights and windows. This reduced my flexibility a bit, but increased render time (I believe) and still allowed me to tweak the overall lighting.

DAZ Studio/Reality/LuxRender/Photoshop

Description

Eagerly purchased Reality 4 for DS first thing Monday morning. A little ashamed to say that I stayed up until 1 AM EST on Sunday night hoping the product would be on sale. Unfortunately this week I haven’t had enough free time to “play” so I have kept my positive and negative comments to a minimum.

On the negative side; I have run into a fair number of errors / bugs, but none of them have been show stoppers and there hasn’t been any more than I would expect from a new release. As with all new products, especially ones as complicated as this one, I save a lot. And have multiple save files at different portions of my effort. So none of the problems I experienced had any more than a momentary impact on me.

On the positive side; I haven't had any errors which resulted in me having to step back through my various file save iterations. So that alone is enough for me to say that this is a very solid release. Otherwise I would rather let my images speak.

I am going to explain my workflow (which is standard for most of my images):
1. Loaded in Stonemason’s Urban Sprawl 2. The big one, with all of the blocks and the skydome.
2. Positioned camera, did a quick test Reality / Lux render to check for errors / problems.
3. Went back to DS and started deleting out the aspects of the scene that I didn’t need. Pretty much everything that was not in view was deleted.
4. Went back to Reality and started adding lights.
a. Skydome was already set to emit light. Left as is.
b. Streetlights were already set to emit light. Left as is.
c. Picked through the textures for the building windows and converted a lot of them to light.
i. Associated these window lights as one light group.
ii. Modified the gain of each window light to vary them between each other (important for later).
iii. Applied the building texture to each of these lights so that the windows still had character.
5. Started the render. And it rendered fast. 2:17:35 total render time, 8 threads on 2 nodes (so a total of 16 threads), both nodes are i7 Quads, 1.29 kS/p. Normally I would take this to 5 or 10k. But this started out as just a test.
6. Exported each image with each of the three light sources isolated. These are the images that I then take into Photoshop and start layering together.

Normally I would add a "Sun" light source, but at 4 in the morning (when I started this effort) a night time scene seemed more appropriate. Plus personally I have found night time scenes harder to accomplish.

The important for later bit (mentioned above, which I almost forgot to explain)... By changing the gain of the window lights, I estimated their light properties in proportion to each other. That way when I was in Lux I would only have three light sources to work with: skydome, streetlights and windows. This reduced my flexibility a bit, but increased render time (I believe) and still allowed me to tweak the overall lighting.

DAZ Studio/Reality/LuxRender/Photoshop