DAZ Studio rendering with POV-Ray: Part 2

Author: Smags

Tools Needed

* DAZ Studio

* POV-Ray

* PoseRay

* HDR Shop

In this tutorial we are going to export our scene from DAZ Studio, and render it in POV-Ray with HDRI lighting. I'm going to breeze through the export process, since this was already covered in a previous tutorial. If you have not completed the first tutorial, DAZ Studio rendering with POV-Ray, I recommend that you at least read through it before attempting this tutorial. The first tutorial is more in depth about exporting to POV-Ray from DAZ Studio and covers some essential basics not found in this tutorial.

Create a Scene in DAZ Studio. No Lighting is required, since we will be generating HDRI Lights in PoseRay. Try to keep your scene simple for this tutorial. I'll be exporting the scene shown in the following image.

Export your scene as a Wavefront Object. Set-up your export options as seen here. You can export your camera settings if you like. I'm going to set-up my camera in PoseRay.

Save your DAZ Studio scene and exit the program. Start Pose-Ray and import your scene. Uncheck the option to import Lights. If you're not importing your camera, uncheck that as well, and press OK.

Preview your scene and reposition the camera until you are satisfied with the results.

Now we are ready to add our lights. In PoseRay Click on the tab labeled Light Dome. You will see this window.

Before we begin we will need a .PFM file or an HDR image file. There are plenty of HDRI files available on the internet. You can do a Google search or you can download an HDR Image from here.

http://www.debevec.org/Probes/

Choose an image that contains lighting that is appropriate for your scene. I will use this one.

Now we need to convert our HDRI file to a PFM file. You may ask, “Why not just download a PFM file?” You could just download a PFM file, but HDRI files are far more abundant than PFM files. If you know how to convert an HDRI file, you will not be limited by a small selection of readymade PFM files. To convert our image we need to download a program called HDR Shopv1. HDRShop can be found here.

http://gl.ict.usc.edu/HDRShop/

Save or copy the HDRShop.exe to a permanent location. Now we can launch HDR-Shop from PoseRay by pointing to the application. To do this, press the button labeled “Start HDR Shop..”.

If you can't get this feature to work. You can start HDR Shop by double clicking on the HDRShop.exe.

With HDRShop opened we can now convert our HDRI File to a PFM file. Click file and open your HDRI file. You HDRI should be square in proportion, and appear to be mapped on a sphere. In the view tab of HDRShop, zoom out and center your image until you can see the entire image. If it doesn't look like this download another HDRI or refer to the help found in the PoseRay documentation.

In the HDRShop menu bar, select “Image – > Panoramic Transformations”. In the window that appears. Select “Light Probe(angular map)” for the source, and for the destination select “Latitude-Longitude”. For now leave the other options at the defaults, and Click OK.

Your Image should be transformed to something like this.

HDRShop can have multiple windows open at the same time. Before you save your file make sure that you give focus to the window containing the new Image. If you don't do this, you will be saving your original image. This will cause an error in PoseRay. Now we can select File – > Save as. A window will appear and we will choose Portable Float Map and browse to a location to save our PFM file.

Close HDRShop and return to PoseRay to import our PFM. In the Light Dome tab press the “Load probe(*.PFM)..” and locate the file we had just created with HDRShop. You will see a preview of your image along with some information next to it.

Before we can add lights to our scene, we should set some options. To speed up render time, you may want to reduce the Max number of lights in your scene. If you want colorful or surreal type of lights, you can uncheck convert all lights to white level. I will uncheck this, since my image is mostly grey. You can come back and rescale your light intensity, if you discover that your render is too bright or dark. Soft shadows will produce higher quality images, but it will increase render times.

Now we can add our lights to the scene by pressing - > Extract Lights into scene. After this, open the preview tab to view the results. open the light tab in the preview window. Pressing the dropdown arrow for the Choose Light options box will show you a list of all the light you extracted to the scene.

Finally, let's render our scene. Open the POV-Ray Output tab. Then select Save and Render. Experiment with different settings, until you get the desired results for your render. Keep in mind that you can always cancel a render and come back to PoseRay to modify your settings. For this render I will use These Settings.

Here is the final result.