After waiting even more time for the scene to render things seems to clear up a bit, but not miuch. This is where the sinking feeling in the stomach hits you. Will all scenes be like this? The answer is a resounding “no”! What happened in the scene above is simply a lighting mistake caused by inexperience.

When you work with Lux you must remember that it uses real-world physics. If you had been shooting that scene with a photo camera and with the same lighting conditions, you would end up with a similar result: lots of noise.

So, here is the secret on how to avoid that from happening to you:

when lighting a scene you must light for the camera, not for your eyes.

Repeat that to yourself five times, until you memorize it. What that means is that, what your eyes see is not what a camera “sees”. In fact cameras have a much more limited range than our eyes and when we push a camera too far it shows characteristic noise in the image. Surely you have seen grainy pictures made with either film or digital cameras. That noise is the desperate attempt of the camera to see in the darkness.

You know why Hollywood movies don’t show the same problem? Because they are lit by professionals!

Those professionals, called cinematographers, know cameras and film stocks and they know what works and what doesn’t. That scene in “Lord of the rings” that seems lit by candles? No candles were use to light it! It had tons of other lighting appliances that you don’t see. The candle is just a prop to make you think that the scene is lit by the candle. So, today I’ll show you a “secret” of the trade and in the process we will get rid of the noise forever.

Lux needs light to paint what is on the screen. If an object is visible by the camera than it needs to be painted, but only light allows Lux to paint the object. If not enough light hits the object then you end up with noise.

Here is a typical example of a scene that will not work:

There is only one light in this scene: a sun pointed from outside to shine through that opening at the top. You can see by the position of the camera that we look at the inside of the crypt. Specifically, there is a spot on the floor, in front of the camera, that has a splash of sun light. See the first picture for the example of the render. The rationale of the aspiring artist is that situations like this happen in real life, and that the sun is usually providing enough light to show the inside of the environment.

That is correct if you base your evaluation on the human eye but it’s a grave mistake to do so. Remember, we are rendering with the software equivalent of a digital camera and that camera has not enough latitude to replicate the scene as planned.

When rendering a scene like that we are asking Lux to paint an impossible image. This is demonstrated by doing a test render and setting the exposure correctly:

Notice that the splash of light shows the texture for the floor in full detail. That is how it should be. Unfortunately the rest of the scene is almost pitch black. This is a function of the camera’s latitude, the ability of a camera to render both bright and dark areas of the frame. Every camera has a very defined range of light that it can represent. This dynamic range, aka as latitude, is the range from the brightest spot to the darkest spot of the image that can be rendered by the camera . Very good, very expensive cameras can have a latitude of 11 stops (f/stops). This is the range of pro-level film stock or $100,000 digital cameras like the Sony F900 (without lens). Prosumer cameras might have around 9 stops of latitude. Point and shoot digital cameras might have much less than that. I didn’t measure Lux’s latitude (aka dynamic range) but that doesn’t matter. It has a fixed latitude and we have to deal with it as legions of photographers had to deal with it in more than 100 years of practicing the trade. Here is were all the nonsense about “digital photography not needing lighting” falls apart. The way you light a scene today has not changed in decades.

If you look at the “Single sun light correctly exposed” image and you try to adjust the exposure to “see” in the dark areas you end up with this image:

The dark areas are all noisy because Lux didn’t have enough samples and, most importantly, the floor is badly overexposed. You simply can’t have that, it looks ugly and unprofessional.

So, what’s the solution? To answer that question you have to first formulate the problem correctly. The problem is that the contrast ratio between the dark areas and the light ones is too high. The contrast is so high that it’s beyond the capabilities of our camera. So, the solution is to re-balance the contrast ratio. This is done by adding lights!

Ask yourself: what do we want to obtain from this scene that is not there?

The answer is simple: we want to keep the sun light on the floor but also see the inside of the crypt. Therefore we need more light. So, we need to add lights to illuminate the areas of the crypt that are in darkness. Lastly, we need to do that in a subtle way so that it looks natural, as if the sun light is providing the bounced illumination. To achieve this we need to avoid casting unnatural shadows from the additional lights. This rules out spots and point lights. Point lights are especially hard to control, and spot lights cast a light that is harsh with visible shadows. So, we need a couple of large mesh lights.

A couple because that distributes evenly the light, and we need them large because the harshness of light depends on the size of the light source. The presence of shadows does not depend on the brightness of the light, it depends on the size of the light. That’s how it works in the real world and thats’ how it works in Lux.

So, here is the new setup:

Notice the position of the lights, behind the camera.
Since we had a good exposure in Lux for the initial scene, with only the sun light, I copy the exposure settings to Reality to make sure that we keep the right exposure throughout our tests. This step is crucial. We want to change the contrast ratio, not the exposure.

Next, I assign a custom group to each mesh light so that I can adjust their intensity in Lux independently. By having this level of control we can effectively paint with light.

Now if we render the scene again we obtain this:

After just twenty two minutes of rendering, instead of almost three hours, the scene looks nice, with a good fill that shows the inside of the crypt, the splash of sun light still perfectly exposed and not much render noise at all. Just letting it render for a few more minutes will take care of all the remaining noise.

So, the lesson here is simple:

• Light for the camera, not your eye
• Be sure to expose correctly every part of the scene
• Don’t be afraid to add lights to compensate for the camera’s limitations
• Take advantage of Lux’s live light adjustment by using Custom Light Groups. See the Reality User’s Guide for how to create those.

Here is the final render, created with a couple of more “tweaks”:

• I changed the Sensitivity to 64
• The Film Response is set to “Agfacolor optimaII 200 CD”
• The gamma has been set to 2.80 to stretch the ability of the camera to see more dark tones.

The sun spot is almost on the verge of being overexposed but that is perfectly fine. A bit of overexposure can add to the realism, when you have it under control.

And as a bonus I also tried adding the bloom effect in the Lux’s “Lens effects” panel:

I hope this was useful, have fun with Reality.

This change has been necessary to serve you better and to provide a long life to the product. I am committed to providing Reality at a very reasonable price while making sure that the product provides revenues for its continued development.

I tried for months to find a solution that allowed Reality to be sold at the DAZ store at a low price while providing enough profit to justify its presence there. Alas, as they say, “it takes two to tango” and no agreement has been possible to satisfy the market requirements. Nevertheless I am determined to protect the interests of my customers and to give them all the options possible to purchase Reality with ease. For this reason I selected Renderosity as the additional reseller for Reality.

The move to the Renderosity MarketPlace allows me to keep a low price, $59.95 with a current sale of $49.95, while maintaining a reasonable profit margin. Renderosity has cooperated with Pret-a–3D on many levels and it’s providing a great market presence for Reality. I plan on moving the majority of the Reality-related products, including “Make Your Own Reality” and “RealGels” to Renderosity in the near future.

In addition, Reality is available through the Pret-a–3D online store , which gives you multiple choices for your purchase.

Happy rendering!

Join the forum discussion on this post

This video shows you the answer to that question and it reveals that it is actually pretty simple to start rendering with LuxRender and Reality. In fact it can be  a lot easier than using the standard Studio renderer.

This marks the beginning of a new collaboration between Pret-a-3D and Renderosity, the premier provider of content for Studio and Poser. Renderosity is Pret-a-3D’s preferred MarketPlace and we are honored to be featured in such environment. Renderosity has been chosen for several reasons. The company has been improving their website in the past few months dramatically. The layout is pleasing, the products are presented in great detail and the site provides all the usability features that you expect, including support for Web 2.0 and touch devices like the iPad. Renderosity’s staff has been very helpful in supporting Reality, down to the creation of new categories and extending their vendor control room to support larger files. I am very impressed by the level of professionalism demonstrated by Renderosity and you can expect more Pret-a-3D products to be featured there.

–
Paolo

As you know I actively tried to start a port of my Reality plug-in for Carrara. In fact the development of Reality 2 for Studio included several changes and improvements that were meant directly to support Reality on Carrara.

Carrara has suffered a weird fate. On one side it is a great application that includes support for DAZ/Poser content and on the other side it’s a 3D modeler that makes many complex 3D concepts fairly easy to use. You would think that Carrara would enjoy popular success but the reality is that it’s not so. Why this happened is anybody’s guess. I have my own ideas, some of which have been expressed before but it’s mostly guesswork. The fact is that Carrara’s market is much, much smaller than Studio’s.

For this reason it’s vital for a plug-in developer to have the support of DAZ for the promotion and distribution of the plug-in. I have contacted DAZ and tried to develop an agreement with them that would make sense commercially. What this means is the ability to make a profit out of developing a plug-in for Carrara. I write software for a living and so it is important that the product for which I spend months in developing is able to return the invested time and then sustain a profit in the future.

To my surprise and regret it has been impossible to find the conditions, in DAZ, necessary to support the development of plug-ins for Carrara. The brokering system created by DAZ simply doesn’t support the reselling of software at a price point that is attractive for the target audience while at the same time providing enough revenues for the developer. While the market has settled on a split of 70%-30% (70% to the developer), DAZ applies a 50%-50% split unconditionally and adds other restrictions that make selling software through their store simply impractical.

After months of trying to convince them to see the reality of the market I am forced to abandon this project and move to other tasks. 

As a Carrara user I am disappointed. As a software developer I regret not being able to take advantage of this opportunity. This situation, though, made it clear to me why the plug-in market for Carrara is virtually inexistent and has produced no new products in ages. At this point writing plug-ins for Carrara is something viable only as a hobby or as an Open Source project in which multiple developers contribute in their spare time. A commercial operation, with the constant commitment of time and support that it requires, is simply not viable.

While this explanation is not going to take away the bitter taste in our mouths I hope that it helps to understand the reasons.  

Nothing changes for the development of Reality for Studio. In fact the Reality platform is evolving and expanding. Please make sure to check this website or to follow us on Twitter ( http://twitter.com/preta3d ), Facebook ( http://www.facebook.com/RealityPlugIn ) and Google+ ( https://plus.google.com/106625816153304163119 ) 

All the best.

LuxRender is one of the most radiant examples of what Open Source Software can do. This is a program that is driven by nothing else but the desire to create to most beautiful rendering program possible. LuxRender comes with an integrity of approach that is hard to find anywhere else in the industry. Here is a program that absolutely, without compromise, tries to emulate the physical model in your scenes. Even the best competitors, applications licensed for thousands of dollars, struggle to compete with the level of realism that LuxRender provides. To have this happening “for the love of the art” is simply astonishing.

This release is not complete yet. The RC1 suffix means that this is a “Release Candidate”, not the final, official release. Nevertheless this is a very good milestone. A few more adjustments and the full version 1.0 will be available soon. Version 1.0 replaces what we have known for the past few months as 0.9. Version 0.9 is no more, long live 1.0!

In my testing I found that the GPU acceleration has  improved dramatically and the same happened to a few other features, like subdivision.

You can find the official announcement at the LuxRender news page.

Download the new build, point Reality to it and take it for a spin. If you find any problem please report it to the LuxRender BTS so that it can be fixed before the final 1.0 release.

Happy rendering!

Weekly builds are not official builds of LuxRender, they are snapshots of the current state of the development. Sometimes they are great, sometimes are buggy. These are definitely of the “use at you own risk” kind and there is no official support of those from Prêt-à-3D. Nevertheless they are often good and they include improvements.

You can have as many builds of Lux installed on your machine as you want. There is no need to overwrite anything. If you have the official build provided with Reality 2 you can simply install a weekly build in a different directory and then set the path in the Output tab of Reality to any build that you want. If the weekly build shows weird behavior you can simply point Reality to another, reliable, installation of Lux:

To access the weekly builds you need to be a registered user of the LuxRender forums. After you log-in you can get the Mac OS version and the Windows version.

Thanks again to the Lux developers for their continued effort.

Have fun!

This is quite a milestone. 3D World is a magazine dedicated to the high-end of the software spectrum. To be featured there means to share pages with the likes of Maya, Modo, V-Ray and others. The level of realism, the quality of the renders provided by the combination of Reality and LuxRender makes it worth of being featured and reviewed. To pass the review with a strong suggestion to purchase the product is really, really cool!

The review appears in the May issue of 3D World, available now via digital edition on your iPad or other e-readers.

Reality 2: the end of the “high-end envy”

Of importance is the refining of the materials conversion from Studio to Reality/Lux. The specular and bump map channels have been improved so that it’s easier now to have great renders with little or no adjustment. The following render was obtained by loading Victoria 4, and adding the “Charlie-Neve” texture. No adjustments to the skin materials have ben done whatsoever. This is a render “straight out of the box”. The image is un-retouched, click it for full size:

Of course the materials can be improved using Reality’s built-in material editor, the above image is just a demonstration of the program’s defaults.
Following there is the detailed list of changes:

• Fixed Depth Of Field (DOF) calculation. It is now accurate and produces a very nice blur for objects out of focus.
• Extended f/stop range for DOF up to f/256.
• Now Reality reads all the DOF information from Studio and converts them. If you enable DOF in Studio then the DOF will be enabled in Reality as well. The Studio f/stop is read and converted to Reality’s setting. Please note that Studio’s f/stop is not realistic. The value is a continuos slider that can produce values that are not found on any camera lens. Reality keeps f/stop values that are in credible increments as commonly found on camera lenses. This increases your ability to produce realistic renders because the f/stop values match the ones that the eye experiences normally. This means that a Studio f/stop value of 16.23, for example, which doesn’t exist in real life, will be converted to Reality’s f16.0. Something like f5.67 will be converted to f5.6 and so on.
• Fixed bug that stopped Reality from showing some ACSEL shaders as available to be shared. Those shaders where the ones saved as “default” (instead of “customization”). Also fixed some other internal bugs in the handling of the local ACSEL database.
• Now ACSEL shaders created with DS3 can also be used with DS4. Some ACSEL shaders created with DS3, and shared via ACSEL Share, where not triggered when using the corresponding model/figure in DS4. This now works. Shaders created and shared with DS4 also work with DS3.
• Fixed ACSEL for metal. Previously a metal preset or the flag for “Custom metal” would not be restored correctly from the ACSEL shader.
• Enabled use of Alpha (transparency) and Bump maps for triggering ACSEL. This means that if a Studio material doesn’t have a diffuse texture, just the diffuse color, it can still set an automatic ACSEL shader if the material has either an alpha map or a bump map.
• Adjusted default value for Specular color from being pure white, which is excessively high, to be a medium-dark grey. This is particularly useful when converting from one material type to another, like when converting from Metal to Glossy. When using that kind of conversion the source material didn’t have a specular color Reality was setting that value to white, which reflected 100% of light away from the object. This new default will lead to better results.
• Improved calculation of specular color. Specular colors for Lux needs often to be set at a much lower brightness than what Studio uses. For this reason Reality generally clips the brightness of the specular color at one third of the level used in Studio. This has changed in 2.2. Now that adjustment is done only if a specular map is not present. In addition Reality checks if the specular color gets set to pure black (RGB 0,0,0) because of the adjustments. If that happens then specular color is then set to 5,5,5 to provide a minimum of reflection.
• Adjusted default Bump mapvalues to be:
  • Negative at –0.001 instead of –0.0001
  • Positive at 0.001 instead of 0.0001
    This makes for a more visible bump map while not being excessive.
• Fixed bugs that cause bump map values from ACSEL shaders to not be used.
• Removed spurious Reality data from the Diffuser prop. Previously, when adding the diffuser to the scene it would overwrite some file path with wrong values.
• Improved Mac OS installer to report clearly the error condition when trying to install Reality into a directory that doesn’t contain DAZ Studio.
• Fixed ACSEL Share retrieval of product description. Now the product name is shown for the products in the “Sharable” list.

To obtain the update simply restart DAZ Studio from a computer connected to the Internet. Alternatively you can download any current version of Reality from the download page.

Here is an example of the new DOF effect: