FMEE Earth Info

Product Update 07/19/2018: The Iray version received an update adding all Starfields as Render-Settings Presets (on top of the physical skyspheres that have already been included). The starfield textures used for the new Render-Settings Presets have been converted into a HDRI format (.exr), so the filesize goes up a bit. In most cases I`d recommend to use those new render settings over the original physical starfields.

Info Update 07/15/2018: Iray infos updated with the topics: Iray Render-Speed and Iray Renders not cleaning up / finishing too early
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Hello and thanks for your interest in, or purchase of, Easy Environments:Earth.
At it`s core it`s very easy to work with. Load a starfield, load an Earth you like, render away.
However, it also offers some nice flexibility, so I`d like to talk a bit about how the set is constructed.

If you prefer videos, a lot of what is discussed here can also be seen in this vid:
[youtube width=”800″ height=”450″]https://youtu.be/1uZz-n4c8jw[/youtube]

I`ll start with the general info, and have some version specific infos below.

The set consists of skyspheres which provide starfields covering the full scene, and pre-rendered images of earth, sun and moon.
Those textures are on 2D planes facing the center of your scene, which is roughly where you usually have your camera.
Each of those planes is child to a “center-node”. Rotating the center will make the planets move along the starfield, always facing the center of the scene. Cut short, if you want to move something, don`t use “translate” but rather “rotate” it`s center-node.

Each Earth preload loads a little parent/child hierarchy. It starts with a show-/hide-able group on Daz Studio, or with the Earth-Center on Poser.
If you want to move a part across the starfield, look for it`s center-node (named “Center … (Orbit)”).
The earth center will rotate everything: earth, moon, sun and (on Daz Studio) also the lighting.
The sun and moon centers move their respective parts individually, most likely you will use the moon-center sometimes to change it`s position relative to earth.
Note: moving the sun/lighting is usually a bad idea, since the lighting change has no effect on the earth-image. Only recommended for small tweaks.

The actual image-planes for earth, moon and sun are the objects not tagged as “Center”. They are named like e.g. “Earth01EU (Scale)”.
This is, unsurprisingly, where you go if you want to scale the object.
It`s also fun to toy with ambient colors there, e.g. to give it an orange tint. (emissive color on Iray)

As for the starfields, it also makes sense to rotate those, at least the ones which have a visible alignment like clouds or the milkyway.
Ambient/emissive color doesn`t affect black, so it can be used to color the stars (I never felt the urge to do that though…).

Each Earth preload comes with it`s own lighting. Lighting includes a sun light and ambient lights. The ambient lights are there to give a better look to objects you may add to your scenes. Basicly they give a bit of light to the shadow-parts which would otherwise be entirely black. I think that`s not realistic in space but still the better choice. It`s easier to hide/delete/tweak the ambient light if you don`t like it than having to set it up. 😉

Version specific info: —————————————————————————–

3Delight:
Currently I find this to be the most easy to use version. The preview you see in texture-shaded view gives a good impression of what you`ll see in your final render.
You can use the “load all” preload to load all starfields and planets at once, and then pick what you need by simply using show/hide.
Note that show/hide being used on a group shows/hides everything in it, lighting included. It`s a nice way to quickly go through all versions of earth.
The 3Delight version is also rendering pretty fast.

Iray:
For the most part this is the same like the 3Delight version.
However, as of now the Iray-Viewport doesn`t react properly to hiding groups. It requires a quick switch to another view and back to reflect the change.
If you want to use the “load all” preset, I would recommend to simply use the texture-shaded view for your basic scene setup.
It gives a good representation of the scene as well, and it`s faster anyway. 😉
Update: Daz are aware of the hiding-groups-Iray issue, it`s likely to be fixed sometimes.

Iray Render-Speed:
The speed can vary a lot. Sometimes it will take 5 seconds, other times 15 minutes.
Within the set itself, the only slow part is the sun. The rays/glow just take a while to clean up. If the sun isn`t visible in your frame it has no effect on speed.
The other thing are objects you might add to the scene, like e.g. a spaceship.
If the object is well lit by the sunlight, the scene will render very fast.
If the object is framed against the sunlight, Iray will be slow and can take 10-20 minutes to look clean.

Iray Renders not cleaning up / finishing too early:
In case you run into this issue the solution is to disable “Rendering Quality” and stopping the render manually when it looks fine.
The reason for this issue seems to be Iray taking into account the size and render-demand of all objects in a scene.
E.g. the planet-billboards in this set are pretty big and have very little render-demand because they emit their own light.
In comparison the object you added is likely rather small, so Iray apparently thinks it`s not worth spending much time with.
I noticed this issue first time when I scaled up a planet to fill almost the whole screenspace, – the bigger I scaled it the quicker Iray stopped rendering. Even high quality settings wouldn`t work, so disabling “Render Quality” seems to be the best way to handle those situations right now.

Note: Currently the Iray version uses physical skyspheres like the other versions. That`s a bit unconventional since most sets use the render-settings sphere. This allowed me to keep control over the lighting, and the stars looked a bit better that way.
Keep in mind the physical skyspheres block out light coming from the environment render settings.
You`ll also want to turn off Iray`s ground-plane either through render-settings or by using the included render-setting preload.
Update: The set will be updated with Render-Settings Starfields shortly.

Poser:
Oh well. 😉
Since Poser doesn`t allow to parent lighting to an object you have to load the lighting separately.
This is not new to Poser users, but here you`ll want to make sure you load the right lighting for the right earth-image.
I tried to make this as easy as possible through naming. If you load an earth named “…SA70” you`ll want to load the lighting set ending with “…SA70” as well. Loaded objects are named accordingly as well.
Note: Lighting only affects additional objects you load into the scene, it does nothing on the stars, earth, etc..
So if you don`t add any objects you can simply forget about lighting. 😉

The Poser Main camera, -like on everything environment related-, isn`t very suitable at it`s default focal length of 75mm.
If you use it I recommend to turn it down to around 35mm (which is what e.g. the Dolly cam uses as preset).