Jay Versluis

DAZ Studio 117 - Global Illumination, Environment Lighting, IBL and HDRI explained

Added 2019-12-20 13:49:21 +0000 UTC

In this episode I'll tell you much of what I know about the Environment Lighting in DAZ Studio. This technique is also known as Global Illumination. I'll explain the meanings of such cryptic abbreviations as IBL and HDRI, and how all these pieces fall together to make your scenes look handsome.

This is a continuation of the previous episode about Mesh Lights. If you haven't already, you can watch it here.

Funny background story about this video: I still had the end stages of a cold when I made this. I felt fine for a few days, but whenever I started speaking I had to cough a lot. The more you speak, the more you cough. Rehearsing this and then recording it didn't help matters. Hence, a lot of edits were necessary to turn this into a non-annoying viewing experience.

I use Camtasia for editing screencast content like this, and while I like the effects and ease of use aspects, the programme grinds to a halt if you do anything more than a 10 minute thing with a lower third. As soon as you have a 30 minute project with 500 edits and 6 video tracks, this thing becomes unusable. It took forever to preview edits, move things around, or see something simple as audio waveforms. Camtasia has always been bad, but never as bad as this.

To cut a long story short, I hung in there and thought perhaps I can get a spontaneous YouTube Premiere going at the end of the day and celebrate. But that didn't work either, because that new "Studio Forever Beta" interface had a new option showing I thought would work great here: instead of a regular "YouTube Premiere", I tried the "Instant Premiere". A regular Premiere is scheduled, so you have a link and chat window in advance until the day the video goes live. An Instant Premiere is... undocumented as of yet.

I had assumed it starts going live with a chat window, but that didn't happen. It just went live without there being any live interaction. I guess I won't do that again, but I may write up an article with screenshots and warn other users never to try this, if the live chat window is dear to them.

I hope you enjoyed it nonetheless. Three more episodes are to come in this series before I wrap it up. Can I do it before the year is out?

Products I'm using in this video:

HDRI Platinum Pack 1+2 by DimensionTheory:

Monsters in my Cupboard by 3D Universe: