mouth glow
sriesch
Posts: 4,241
What is causing this mouth glow?
Although the screenshot is from a more complicated scene, I can get essentially the same effect by simply loading "Victoria 3 SAE.cr2" with mouth open slightly, a 10-meter cube primitive with a "Diffuse strength" parameter set to 10% in the Surfaces(color) pane just in front of her face and just behind the camera, and "!UberEnvironment2 Base.duf" with the "Environment Mode" parameter set to "Indirect Lighting w/Directional Shadows".
Setting "Ambient Strength" to 0% does not eliminate it.
(ignore the nasty black spotty texture which isn't a concern at the moment, that's just because I just haven't adjusted the quality settings or gotten lighting completely set up yet.)
Thanks for any advice!
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Comments
I had this too.
But as soon as I started to use Interjection- Surface Interjections for Daz Studio it stopped. So I just guessed that the mouth was reacting to the light, an the interjections dulled down the diffuse of the mouth.
I could be completely off the mark here (currently am not at a PC with Daz so I can't double check). But I remember running into this when I had distant lights that had shadows turned off. As a result, the lights tended to penetrate into the scene and light things in unexpected places (e.g. in inner cavities like mouths)
If you have such distant lights ... try switching them to diffuse-only? not sure if this would fix the problem or not. Will be interested to hear from those more knowledgeable than I. :-/
Although the screenshot comes from a scene with other lights (all point lights with a "shadow type" of "raytraced (software only)", this same thing happens in a new test scene with no lights except for the above-mentioned uber environment.
If you must use UE2 then stick to Occlusion or Bounce as IDL doesn't work, it makes your figure look like they've had a searchlight shoved up their ass.
Thanks, I'm experimenting now with "Occlusion w/Directional Shadows". It definitely eliminates the problem in a quick test, I believe you have solved my problem! It also eliminated a second problem in my scene I didn't realize was related (the glow wasn't limited to the mouth, there was some around the lower legs where they were close together) and I'm re-rending my scene now to see what happens.
Interestingly in a test scene with two V3's (one straight out of the box, one an old scene file with textures, morphs, and who knows what else applied), one had the nostril glow and one didn't, even though both had the mouth glow.
When you say "doesn't work", do you mean "doesn't work for human figures but works well for some different purpose", "somebody filled out a bug report and we're waiting for a fix", or "the users and the designers disagree on what this should do and I should pretend this option doesn't exist in my menu"?
When I said "doesn't work" I should have said "it's never worked" as it does the same thing in DS3 as it does in DS4, the problem is that I don't think it actually casts shadows, and in DS that's bad news.
DS has always been strange with it's lighting, a light without shadows doesn't stop at the surface, it keeps on going and lights up the inside of a mesh, which used to cause me all sorts of problems with the Gen 3's in DS1 & 2, they have gaps around the parts of the eyes and would end up glowing because you could see the inside of the head through the gaps. It wasn't until I started putting shadows on all of my lights that it stopped, but to stop all of the extra shadows from showing I set the shadow softness on all of those lights to 100%, which pretty much leaves you with no visible shadows.
Ok, I'm seeing another similar weird lighting thing going on. I'm not sure if it's related or a completely different issue. I'm also not sure if it's a problem or just something I'm doing wrong.
This time, there appears to be bright light in just the inside corners of this room cube.
Oddly, zooming in doesn't make it larger; it seems to remain a small line of about the same scale regardless of whether I view it from afar or zoom in close. I've deleted everything else from the scene except for a small cube for scale, and have done two spot renders in two different camera views so you can compare. I didn't see the problem with any other objects in the scene, however perhaps the colors and lighting were such that it just wasn't obvious except for here.
I'm seeing something similar in a different scene. Scene has nothing but a sphere for a skydome, a plane for a floor, and a cube. The bottom of the cube has a bright line around it where it meets the floor. Possibly the issue exists in places where the floor hits the skydome but only in places, but it's kind of hard to tell there as it is less obvious.
The corner/edge lighting is a actually a geometry problem...more properly a lack of geometry.
Walls made up of 'single thickness' planes will exhibit that 'property' under many lighting situations.
The first image is walls made of planes. UE2, occlusion, soft shadows, 64 samples.
The second is a corner constructed out of walls with 'thickness'. Same lighting. Notice the 'dark' line...it is getting occlusion and heavily self-shadowed. This can be corrected by adjusting the shadow bias.
The same thing can happen when a 'single' thickness plane intersects something with some thickness.
Also, the number of faces involved has an effect on it...more faces, less likely to happen. So a couple of large, single face planes will be very likely to do that.
As to the 'doesn't work'...it's a 'feature, not a bug'...it's something like the deep shadowmap problem that goes waaaaaaaaaaaay back into basic render code and has been around for ages. 'Watertight'/closed geometry without any intersections goes a long way to subdue it...but...
Interesting. Ok, so what is an "appropriate" UberEnvironment shadow bias to use for most scenes, if there is such a thing? I see I had just turned it up from it's default of 0.1 to 1 to eliminate a gridwork of lines on the skydome, now I sort of think I understand why that was happening.
For this reason, does it make sense to always create primitives that have lots of extra polygons, even though that sounds like something one would normally want to avoid, and to always use a squashed cube in place of a plane?
It depends...it doesn't always happen with all lights...but with 'environment' lighting it is common. Also, if you can get a primitive to touch, but not intersect a single thickness item, then it goes away (a very tiny offset...like a y value of 0.0001 works too).
Shadow bias is one of the least used but most often needed settings in DS. And there isn't a 'one size' solution...
Hi,
what do you mean, talking about "thickness"?
The problem of glowing edges isn't only for the corners of plans. I noticed it really strong for skin surfaces, too.
As soon as I use UE2, especially as IDL, I get that glowing.
In the picture you see it really strong where the skin of my characters is near to a differen surface (different objects / planes or other skin areas - as between the fingers).
So what in detail (for newbies) is the solution to cover it?
If I remember correctly, I subdivided a skydome after reading a tip somewhere on the forums and that took care of my lines. It was a lack of sufficient polygons.
I went searching for that conversation but didn't find it, I did find this one (which has a lot more details on the issue):
Lines on skydomes when using Uberenvironment: DS
I don't usually turn up shadow bias to make grid lines disappear, as that got really unwanted effects on e.g. characters and clothing. My shadow bias is usually around 0.1, sometimes lower. When a skydome shows those gridlines I only apply a shader, which allows me to turn occlusions off on the skydome.