I'm very new, and I'm having issues with Winter Castle

chaosonex

Decided to try my hand at this and I was excited to start with the stonemason winter castle, but it doesn't matter how many tutorials I try, how many things I look up, I get really bad renders from it. I don't mind if renders take hours, when I was in college it wasn't rare to set up my weekly project and check in two days later, but I can't seem to get any more quality out of this.the third is in theory what it should look like?

Upirium

did you render it in 3Delight or Iray? ?

chaosonex

Iray, all my assets say they require it, or most of them do

Upirium

chaosonex said:

Iray, all my assets say they require it, or most of them do

what kind of lighting are you using?

Gordig

The first render looks like you're using very little light, which isn't advisable. Try adding a whole lot more light then lowering the exposure in render settings.

Gordig

Low-light renders like your first are difficult to do. Try adding a lot more light and lowering your exposure in render settings.

chaosonex

I'm using 1 distant light and 1 point light on the first one, on the other one its the default lighting for daz, and I don't know it has anything to do wo with entire parts of the maps not there, the blocky/low poly render and so on. 

Unless its common for buying assets to not actually look like their promo stuff in the store, in which case I want my 20 bucks back. =/

 

Upirium

chaosonex said:

I'm using 1 distant light and 1 point light on the first one, on the other one its the default lighting for daz, and I don't know it has anything to do wo with entire parts of the maps not there, the blocky/low poly render and so on. 

Unless its common for buying assets to not actually look like their promo stuff in the store, in which case I want my 20 bucks back. =/

it's definitely your lighting. I've used that product before and while it doesn't look exactly like the promo it didn't look like that either.

Default Daz lighting is generally garbage and one distant light and one point light isn't going to be enough to light that scene well, either.

Did you set the lights up at all in their settings?

The map is missing because you didn't use an HDRI or a sky dome. HDRI would be the best to use. If it's the default HDRI it's likely set in the environment tab (in the render settings) to not render the dome. It's black because you saved it as a jpeg.

chaosonex

I'm ok with the lighting/contrast of that, the problem I have is the giant triangles appearing in the crenelations. Those aren't going to have anythign to do with the render, are they? because the same triangles can be seen in any of the view modes. all of the crenelations show these triangles, and its like I'm trying to render something from the dark basic era of programming.

Upirium

chaosonex said:

I'm ok with the lighting/contrast of that, the problem I have is the giant triangles appearing in the crenelations. Those aren't going to have anythign to do with the render, are they? because the same triangles can be seen in any of the view modes. all of the crenelations show these triangles, and its like I'm trying to render something from the dark basic era of programming.

those giant triangles are made worse by the lighting. a ton of shadow is catching it because there's not enough lighting there

the unfortunate thing is that a lot of models like that don't look so great close up depending on where you render at

 

chaosonex

Hmm, well, no, that isn't it.

 

what I bought vs what I got (Sorry, keep messing up post somehow)

chaosonex

Forum keeps eating posts and pictures 

I'm not looking for the hyper realistic, though I'd love to be able to do that, but for what it costs, I'd at least like it to look close to what I was meaning to buy.

Upirium

chaosonex said:

Hmm, well, no, that isn't it.

 

what I bought vs what I got

 

you're looking at a different part on the model, and yours is far closer up. it looks like the top of the walls aren't meant to be rendered up close.

This is a render I just got in a few seconds with different lighting, at roughly the same spot as the first pic you posted.

 

edit:

looking at the second picture, you can see that the 'triangles' here

it is cleverly using depth of field but you can still see the triangles here

edit 2:

rendered the wrong spot here's the right one roughly

NorthOf45

Try cranking up the Base Normal map and/or some of the Bump maps (it's a special 4-layer shader). It loads at a low value, better for distant shots, but not so much close up. Really adds some detail. You can also adjust the Smoothing Angle to get the right mix of sharp/smooth edges.

chaosonex

This, this is what I needed, thank you so much. 

 

FSMCDesigns

chaosonex said:

Unless its common for buying assets to not actually look like their promo stuff in the store, in which case I want my 20 bucks back. =/

 

Actually it is common. You are purchasing the content, not a scene file and very rarely does content come with lights. Promos are done to make the content look good and to give you an "idea" of how it might look

Stonemason

most of my sets include render and camera presets so you can recreate the promo images, not sure why this one didn't include them, but have attached the render preset.

This environment was designed to work with the Iray sun/sky system so you shouldn't need to add any extra lights.

 

if it still isn't what you need then I'd reccomend getting a refund