Now Available - The Ring of Light - Environment Lighting for Poser and Daz Studio
InaneGlory
Posts: 294
The Ring of Light is a quick, simple and easy-to-use Environment Lighting solution for both DAZ Studio and Poser. Using Poser's Indirect Lighting and DAZ Studio's Area Light Shader, the Ring of Light was designed to give you high quality results in either program.
Some of the presets for the Poser version of this product required Semidieu's Advanced Shaders 1.5 available at RuntimeDNA.
http://www.runtimedna.com/Advanced-Shaders.html
Ring of Light User Guide
http://db.tt/PIUeNyvC
or
http://docs.daz3d.com/lib/exe/fetch.php/public/read_me/index/15836/15836_ring-of-light-userguide.pdf
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Comments
I love these lights and the results they produce.
Here are a couple of renders I've done.
Very Pretty!
I'm working on making an expansion that will (by using Luxus) bring the Ring of Light and all of it's options (light Intensity settings, colors etc) into LuxRender.
Good to hear about the expansion - I bought Luxus but haven't had a chance to download it or anything yet.
I forgot to mention the clown render above uses both the ROL and a light set from the Photo Studio 3 with the intensity reduced a bit.
This one uses the ROL on low intensity and one large spot light from Photo Studio set 3.
Looks very interesting, but I'm a bit puzzled with the products' additional info
"The Poser version of this product required Semidieu's Advanced Shaders 1.5"
Do you mean by 'required' (as in past sentece) you used those python scripts for development, or are those scripts required to get this to work in poser (as I get errors while running Semidieu's scripts in ppro2012)
I bought this today. Was a little skeptical of what render times would be, since it is 36 UberArea lights. This is my first experiment. All default settings except I used the 5X quality setting. Rendered 1200x800 took 2 hr 40 min, Considering there are 36 UberArea lights with samples set to 64, that is not bad.
I'll try to clarify this as much as I can. The Ring of Light itself requires nothing else for it to work in Poser, just make sure you turn on Indirect Lighting. It's the Intensity and Color material presets that require that you have Semidieu's Advanced Shaders 1.5 installed for them to work correctly. You can adjust everything manually instead of using the presets. Basically the issue is with Poser not supporting partial materials anymore. What I needed was something that would allow me to adjust only the Ambient Strength across 36 different material zones, with each having its own unique value. The presets allow you to lighten or darken all of these at once, with each zone being adjusted relative to default value. Ultimately the only way I could find that would do what I needed was to use Semidieu's Advanced Shaders. I tried to get around it, I even talked with Semidieu about creating unique python scripts just for this product but ultimately it was only the advanced shaders that would let me do what I needed. I'm sorry if this is a deal breaker for you. You could always return them if you try them and the scripts don't work on your system.
Glad you like it. The quality setting only affect the quality of the gradient in the shadows. All of my promos where done at 3x (2x is default) so I'm sure you could save yourself some time by rendering at a lower setting while still getting very good results.
Ok. so at worst I'll have to do adjustments manually instead of using the presets (in poser)
Not really a deal breaker, as I use both DS and Poser (and Vue), and as I'm mostly interested in the methods used... (still learning , even after all this years using the various programs...)
Dang Scorpio! Your clown picture is the reason why I don't like clowns. Creepy.
I love the yellow brick road picture. It definately tells a story.
Today's tip from me: using the ambient only settings on the Ring of Light is the perfect answer to light the background of your scene when you wish to add other lights. Any of the photo studio lights are perfect for this purpose.
Keep the renders coming guys. We love seeing them.
cheers!
I was working on a scene using UE2 and discarded that to try Ring of Light. The RoL render, in a smaller image size for testing, took quite a bit longer (ivy, hair, and tail) but wasn't as flat and looks much better. I'm not sure I added as much light as I should have but that will come with experimenting.
Please tell me if it's too dark or too flat--my gamma is off again. Long story.
Went right into my Wishlist for now, but I'll be getting these eventually. They look really nice. ;-)
Just after I got your Photostudio 3:)
The expansion for Luxus sounds great.
Wonderful! Simply Wonderful, Inaneglory!
Can not wait to set these up.
These definitely made my March Madness complete.
Will you be sharing you promo set-ups with us again?
I do so love when you do that :)
Glad you like it. The quality setting only affect the quality of the gradient in the shadows. All of my promos where done at 3x (2x is default) so I'm sure you could save yourself some time by rendering at a lower setting while still getting very good results.
I discovered I had the shading rate set at 0.1. Not sure how that happened. I use 0.2 for almost all my renders. So the 5x quality and the 0.1 shading rate is what made the render so slow.
Using a 0.2 shading rate and 2X quality the render took 11 minutes. With 3X quality the render took 22 minutes. Comparing the 2X render with the higher quality renders, I can see some noise in the deep shadows in the 2X render. The 3X render is very close to the 5X render.
The image below is the 3X render. I also moved her hair a little so you can see her eyes better.
I discovered I had the shading rate set at 0.1. Not sure how that happened. I use 0.2 for almost all my renders. So the 5x quality and the 0.1 shading rate is what made the render so slow.
Using a 0.2 shading rate and 2X quality the render took 11 minutes. With 3X quality the render took 22 minutes. Comparing the 2X render with the higher quality renders, I can see some noise in the deep shadows in the 2X render. The 3X render is very close to the 5X render.
The image below is the 3X render. I also moved her hair a little so you can see her eyes better.
Glad your getting good results so much faster now.
Yes I'll share. Probably later today as it's about bed time for me. I think your going to be disappointed (or maybe not) as most of them are actually the default settings except that I turned the Ring to change the direction of the light and maybe bumped up or down the Intensity a half step or two but that's about it (in both the Poser and DS Promos)
Here's a few more Promos
A couple more renders from me, I love how these lights make the detals pop out.
Yes I'll share. Probably later today as it's about bed time for me. I think your going to be disappointed (or maybe not) as most of them are actually the default settings except that I turned the Ring to change the direction of the light and maybe bumped up or down the Intensity a half step or two but that's about it (in both the Poser and DS Promos)
Definitely not disappointed at all. :)
Great renders Scorpio64dragon and Inaneglory.
Another one using just the Ring of Light
One more from me using this light set.
Wow. Absolutely stunning and a style I really love.
Post-work heavy?
Thankyou. Actually its not that postwork heavy just added the background a bit of curves and a bit of fog around the feet.
These lights work so well for both indoor and outdor scenes
Wow, Dragons and Roger Dean-ish are two of my fav themes but that stature is just flippin' amazing!:-)
I was wanting some more info around future Luxus support please.
I had decided not to get this as I just use very simple DS lighting setups... mostly just a distant light with a point or two.... so this was not something I was considering grabbing. I am interested now though since you propose to have it support Luxus.
Will this be in a standalone version for Luxus or as an update to ROL and if an update do you plan free or at a cost?
Sorry for the questions but there is no point for me to grab ROL if you think the expansion to support Luxrender would be a standalone product as I really don't think I would ever use ROL in my DS renders.... even though it does look like it produces very cool renders from what I have seen in here :)
Wow...great looking promos. I especially like the woman lying down on the slab and the one on the motorcycle.
Now if only I could get something that looks half as good lol.
All plans are somewhat tentative right now but...
It will be an add-on to the Ring of Light, not a stand alone and it won't be free. But it won't be all that expensive either, maybe 1/2 the full price of the Ring. Hopefully less. Depends on the volume of work involved to create a quality product I'm willing to put my name on.
No reason you can't :-)
I don't know about that! I can take something straight out of the box and mess it up some how lol. So far, I took a new character, added hair, and a shirt and then put the plain ring around it, used the default camera, and highest 5 setting. I did move the camera up though for a closer shot at the face. There was no background or anything like that so maybe it makes a difference or not. I flunked remedial lighting so still trying to get it straight.
The results were well ok but nothing like the promos. I'll have to play around with options. I'm going to learn this stuff yet.