Can anyone recommend a good lights product?
I am getting increasingly frustrated at my inability to light scenes well. Just adding distant lights/spots always looks rubbish. I have tried adding in some UE2 for fill, but that isn't really working for me either. I realise lighting is a tricky business, so I have decided it might just be better to buy an 'out of the box' lighting solution with a few choices of setup that will just give me what I need right away. Usually, I am looking to produce interior lighting with sunlight coming through the windows (I have tried just shining a distant light through windows, but it never bounces around the room to fill indirectly lit areas)
Suggestions please..?
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One of the most important things are enabling shadows for the lights, and setting some shadow softness. Another importnat thing is to set the ShadingRate to below 0.4, I always render at 0.1.
And for UE, you need to set the quality to high to get the desired effect.
When it comes to light sets, it really depends on what you are rendering. Some sets are great for portraits and closeups, others are better for lighting up the environment around.
For closeups Lathios have some good sets, and I use FW Serenre Scene and Simply Lit alot, at least as a starter when I built lights.
It's also possible to create an indirect lighting setup using a shader camera. Open up the Shader Mixer and create a new Shader camera (New Shader -> Camera) the look under Root->Lighting->Indirect Lighting (Camera) and add that brick for a (very basic) IDL camera.
Whenever you render using that IDL camera you will get indirect lighting from the final gather. Be warned though, it's pretty render time intensive. It's nowhere near as powerful as something like Luxrender, but it can be quite a useful method.
Thanks for this.
I did once try the bounce GI setting of UE2, but it only produces a totally black sillhouette of your figure! Anyone know what this is used for?
Posting one or two renders, with details of the lights used or even a link to a lights preset, might help people to offer advice. You could also look for general lighting advice, not limiting it to DS or even to 3D rendering.
We also run this: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/21482/, you might get help there as well.
Ok, thanks for this. I shall try posting in WIP then
If you want realism in Daz Studio then you have to think about faking every part of real world lighting.
Take an outdoor scene for example it has a sun, light coming for the sky, bounce light and then add some ambient occlusion for the added realism but this is only half the story the other hafl being good surfaces. You need to learn both to a fairly high level before you will get close to realsim IMHO. Something to strive for though...I do. :)
I have a thread that covers lighting and textures in combination, but it doesn't step you through the process like a tutorial would. For that you might want to look into the Dreamlight membership for a bit. You can sometimes get a very good deal on it and he does cover exactly what you are talking about quite detailed.
As for light sets, many are good. Inane Glory's are nice as well for instance. The thing about light sets are that you can learn from then as well as use them as is. Many of the people who you see have great lighting in their scenes and do it themselves bought light sets initially and learned from them. Heck, that's why I buy much of what I buy.
If you look at the examples in my thread however you will see quite a bit of difference in the before/after in 3DLight renders using lights that come in the basic install of DS. If you see anything in the thread that you want to know more about how I achieved a particular effect you can always ask. And ofc wip's are usually the best thing for troubleshooting a particular problem.
[Edit] I would like to emphasize what Szark said. Much of what you see in the my thread is due to texture tweaks. Some of the examples clearly show the difference the textures make, along with how a good lighting then brings that out. So if nothing else, I would take a look there to get some good visual examples of what Szark mentioned. And, if it's a background and you don't want to put a lot of work into it, remember... DOF is your friend.
[Second Edit] I just remembered, the May competition is on lighting. That would be a great place to work out some issues you are having with lighting.
Almost forgot, one last thing. There are a lot of great resources on creative lighting in photography which focus on general lighting concepts for effect rather then the technical aspects of metering etc... that all directly apply to 3D art as well, including things like how to avoid a 'flat' look, how to emphasize various aspects of the image. Both mediums are carving their image out of light after all.
Well, as you will see form my other thread, i have been trying to follow your lead on surfaces too, by adding SSS.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/19526/P45/#316612
I have a thread that covers lighting and textures in combination, but it doesn't step you through the process like a tutorial would. For that you might want to look into the Dreamlight membership for a bit. You can sometimes get a very good deal on it and he does cover exactly what you are talking about quite detailed.
As for light sets, many are good. Inane Glory's are nice as well for instance. The thing about light sets are that you can learn from then as well as use them as is. Many of the people who you see have great lighting in their scenes and do it themselves bought light sets initially and learned from them. Heck, that's why I buy much of what I buy.
If you look at the examples in my thread however you will see quite a bit of difference in the before/after in 3DLight renders using lights that come in the basic install of DS. If you see anything in the thread that you want to know more about how I achieved a particular effect you can always ask. And ofc wip's are usually the best thing for troubleshooting a particular problem.
Almost forgot, one last thing. There are a lot of great resources on creative lighting in photography which focus on general lighting concepts for effect rather then the technical aspects of metering etc... that all directly apply to 3D art as well, including things like how to avoid a 'flat' look, how to emphasize various aspects of the image. Both mediums are carving their image out of light after all.
Thanks very much for this. I shall take a look at your thread. Be prepared to be pestered with newbie questions!
Proper bounce light would be provided by proper surface settings ideally. However, in 3D we have two problems with that. One, we don't have the amount of objects in a scene that one would irl. For that, we use HDRI (do lots of research here.) The second is that the surface settings are only approximations of real life and fall short at times, so we need to augment them with other lights that would fill in the gap for what the scene isn't providing naturally. Both of these are tied to a particular render engine, as materials and lighting both are a function of the render engine itself. That is to say, when we set up either, we set them up with paramaters for that render engine, and if we send the image to another render image, something is going to try to translate them to the new engine, but that is a poor best guess usually. This is because different render engines treat light and surfaces fundamentally differently and each will often have some features others lack.
Ambient Occlusion is provided by the light, and sometimes by the surface material. UberEnvironment provides ambient occlusion to the whole scene, so if you use that as a base, your scene will get ambient occlusion. If you want to adjust it, you would do so in the parameters of the UberEnvironment light. Some shaders, such as pwSurface also come with an Ambient Occlusion setting which applies it to a particular surface. *We don't want ambient occlusion defined by the environment and on a particular object as it would be defined 2x and is actually worse then a 2x hit on the render engine trying to figure out the lighting. They basically multiply against each other (the environment version and the item version) and will cause render times to skyrocket without any appreciable gain, or worse, a declination in the quality of the final image.
Note, for HDRI there are specific HDRI packs one can get from the store, one can make their own, and sometimes they come with a light kit. I believe there are even products in the store that have some HDRI. This is a whole area of learning on it's own, which is why I mentioned 'do research.' There is a good book The HDRI Handbook if you are looking for material to study on the topic.
I misspoke here, while I started the thread, it's an open forum. Anyone is welcome to contribute to it or correct/clarify anything :)
Jeremy Birn's book on Digital Lighting and Rendering is a general discussion of lighting, texturing, and related techniques. Unlike many books, it is not particular to any piece of software, and it is an excellent and informative survey of principles and techniques. I keep coming back to it, and think it is well worth the investment.
I think,,, there are many good tutorialls,,
I recommend ThyranqDS video tutoriall ,at start with UE2.
step by step,, and he taught me many with simple set-up.
there is many usage infomation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrSY0zenyrs
THANKS ThyranqDS,, I really love this tutoriall @@b