tlaero wrote:Lighting is important, don't get me wrong, but it's not as important as poses, situations, characterizations, and plot.
I will strongly disagree with you m'Lady. Lighting isn't less important than the rest. Awesome poses, situations, characterizations and plots can be ruined with bad lighting. It is as important when it comes to visual medium like visual games, photography and cinema/television. It is what binds together a scene and gives it a sense of realism (or fantasy if that's the intention).
We did have such a case recently didn't we? We had the pose, the model, the characterization, but our girl was ugly due to the light and the panel was ruined.
I do not want to scare you GDS. On the contrary. I'll help the best I can.
I thought as you did in the begining. My machine sucked and I got frustrated with longs and longs renderings. Then I got a better machine.
Oddly, it's experience and learning that reduced my rendering times, not the new machine. See, I have a ratio of 1 to 6 with my new machine, meaning it renders 6X faster than my old one. A pic that would take me 30 minutes in my laptop only takes max 5 minutes in my desktop now. That's wonderfull, alright.
But today, I rendered several pics for a scene and they took me not more than 10 seconds each. That would mean 1 minute in my old computer.
The lighting I used? 2 spotlights (with shadowing) and 6 distant lights (without shadowing).
And here is where you can cut your rendering time by half or more.
See, you rendered in IRay. That means you ask your computer to render on graphic card computing only and not your processor. Either you have a powerfull graphic card or there is no point in using IRay. Sure, Iray does better pics in a way. But you gotta make the best with the equipment you got.
First, tell us what rig you have in terms of processor, graphic card and RAM.
If your graphic card isn't top, like mine, better use the 3DEngine in DAZ3D. Dreaming with Elsa was rendered in my laptop with 3DEngine but Pandora was rendered in my new machine, still with 3DEngine.
Try to change to 3DEngine and make a test, posting the results here. I bet you'll render faster than with Iray.
Don't get cocky at first. Try a simple 2 spotlights scene. A main spotlight to give the main light on the character, and a second on to fill the shadows done by the first one.
I looked for tutorials too in this forum but there aren't much. I'm considering asking the comunity if there would be any interest in us artists giving like tutorials or lessons. But I don't want to sound presumptuous and cocky, because I know I have so much and much to learn yet. But I know people could learn a few things from us.
What you guys think?