OTOY Forums

I'm using the new daylight environment to light indoor and outdoor scenes. Sometimes the scene has both indoor and outdoor lighting (daylight coming through windows or skylights.)

ATM I mainly increase the power level of the lighting in an indoor/mixed scene. Has anyone experimented with or created presets for indoor/mixed lighting? I'm wondering what effect changing the sky and sunset colours or sun size might have on the scene and whether this might improve indoor lighting? There are also the different imager settings on the render page to consider. I've tried adjusting these settings myself but have had mixed results.

I was hoping that someone with more lighting and OctRen experience might have done some tests regarding adjusting these settings that I can learn from?

Sun size will alter the shadows, a larger sun will create lighter faint shadows while a smaller sun will make darker thick shadows (it could be the other way round), take a look at the real world, the sun is many hundreds of times larger than the earth and yet shadows appear faint and translucent.

Thanks for the advice. I haven't had time to try out some of these suggestions until this week.

linvanchene wrote: Currently one of the most requested features in the thread in the general disscussion forum is that it should be possible to add a custom image as background of the new daylight environment and to actually mix new Daylight with HDR environment.

We can actually do this right now in DAZ:
Open a DAZ scene with a skybox/dome.
Hide the skybox and render in Octane, with alpha on.
Hide everything but skybox and render in 3Dlight.
Merge in image editor.

It should be possible to use the same trick if you want to light the scene with the texture from the skybox, allowing use of a really low res version of the background (to save VRAM). Just do an extra pass without the background image to get the alpha.

This obviously doesn't work well with clear reflective surfaces in the scene.

edited by user... to save you some time.

Very beautiful scenery! Makes me want to take a vacation now!

I'll have to try merging the skydome with the rest of the scene as suggested.

I still haven't figured out how to use HDRI lighting yet though.

It's pretty easy Just go to environment, pick HDRI and select "image" instead of floattexture for the first option. You can then browse for an image.
If you go to your content library and search for "skydome" there are some that come with DAZ.