Sun/Sky in 3Delight without Dome?
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Does anybody know how to create a sun/sky in 3Delight render engine without the use of an actual dome?
In other words, I would like for the sunlight/sky to be infinite.
Post edited by EightiesIsEnough on
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Does anybody know how to create a sun/sky in 3Delight render engine without the use of an actual dome?
In other words, I would like for the sunlight/sky to be infinite.
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A distant light serves the purpose of the sun. Give the light a slightly yellowish tint. Then use an ambient light to create the sky light as fill. Use s lightly bluish tint for that. I usually use this set: https://www.daz3d.com/advanced-daz-studio-light-bundle
To avoid a blow-out, I usually reduce the ambient light to 25-30%.
I got the distant light set, but where do I find the ambient light to? I don't see it anywhere in the lighting icons on top of the screen.
Three ways to tweak Ambient settings in 3Delight.
The first, and easiest is to use Age of Armour's Advanced Ambient Light product from the store. This creates a controllable ambient light source which interacts with your surface diffuse settings in the way you might expect it to. You can locate it anywhere in the scene and tweak the color and strenth until you get the results you want.
The second is either of Dreamlight's Light Dome products. Light Dome Pro simulates the ambient light of the sky by adding a lot of low intensity distant lights arranged in a dome over your scene. Before HDRI and other lighting methods, this is how most systems creating realistic looking outdoor lighting. Light Dome Pro-R goes further with a lot of tweaks for your render settings, etc. Even allowing you to render seperate images for various light sources so you can tweak them as layers in tools like Photoshop or GIMP. The learning curve is a bit high to get the best results here, but it is a high quality product.
The final way is much more manual and less controllable but FREE. You can tweak your surfaces to respond to ambient light. Most 3Delight surfaces were set with the ambient strength to zero and the color to black. This makes the 3Delight engine ignore the ambient light calculations for that surface. You can tweak those settings by adding some value there. Typically you would want to make the color match the diffuse channel (including any texture maps). Don't go crazy on the strength though as it will wash out shadows and such as well.
why don't you use Omnifreaker's Uber environment 2? it's a great tool indeed, capable of creating a convincing sky light
I'm a bit surprised no-one has mentioned the https://www.daz3d.com/ibl-master-for-daz-studio by Parris. Totally new light shader for 3DL that handles transmapped stuff very well. UE2 is fine but doesn't output any specular light and rendering complex hair will take for ever.
The AoA ambient lights are very nice and render fast but IBL-master is definitely worth checking out, also https://www.daz3d.com/reflective-radiance-for-3delight is a great product.
well the request is for a sun/sky system in 3delight, so the better way is a distant light and uberenvironment 2 afaik; you may want to add a point light to simulate radiosity or fake bounce lights; never had issues or slowdowns with hair in 3delight so far
apart from fibermesh based hair, all the transmapped hair I own work fine in 3delight; howsoever it seems render is faster with iray shaders
Yes, if you have the proper hardware to use IRay. There is this bug with RSL shaders and transmapped stuff that has been around forever. Parris together with some 3DL devs solved it when developing the IBL-Master, therefore using HDRIs in 3DL as a light source with IBLM really makes a difference compared to UE2. I was literally blown away when rendering my first image with IBLM![wink wink](https://www.daz3d.com/forums/plugins/ckeditor/js/ckeditor/plugins/smiley/images/wink_smile.png)