Advanced Ambient, Spot & Distant Lights [Commercial]
Age of Armour
Posts: 437
Advanced Lights for DAZ studio.
I figured it best to discus all 3 lights in the same thread since they are intended to work together.
Discussion of the ambient light begins here at page one.
Discussion of the spotlight begins on page 32 - http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/459757/
Discussion of the distant light begins on page 78 - http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/564097/
The Advanced Ambient Light is new type of light for DAZ Studio. It is a bit of a mix between an environment light and a point light but with much more control than either.
The light is not intended to be a total replacement for other lights but rather a complementary light. I also want to point out that it is intended for advanced lighting control and situations. Although it gives fairly good results right out of the box, it is not intended to be a one click, load and render solution.
The main strength of the light is that it allows you to use different settings on different surfaces in the scene. Want high quality AO in your scene but the hair simply renders too slow? You can set it so that the ambient light uses faster settings for the hair or have the light ignore the hair completely.
You are welcome to read the user guide if you would like to learn how all the features work.
Jabba101 did a great video tutorial showing some concepts of the Advanced Ambient light. You can watch it at http://youtu.be/zOBX7wcvGpQ and a second video at http://youtu.be/OgDmM-YFPmY
Scott-Livingston has been working on a tutorial thread for the lights you can find it at http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/31426
In my original post I asked if people could identify the diffuse color of the surfaces in a render of a croquet scene. Below is the answer and how it was done. Using the lights to
Selectively coloring things in the scene is not the most efficient workflow but I thought it illustrated the level of control this new light offers.
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Comments
Black
*edit* - Pendraia posted a whole 5 mins before me? never saw it when i entered thread - spooky
*edit* - Pendraia posted a whole 5 mins before me? never saw it when i entered thread - spookyThat's me...spooky!
AoA any hints? I take it that they are shadermixer shaders?
I'm going to go for it being a diffuse map so not just a simple colour, and that map would be based on the skin tetures from the Millennium Cow :)
White
I was thinking black, white or grey...
Purple with black polka dots
Well clearly I'm going to be100% wrong with red, yellow and blue so I'll have to wait for your to reveal the right answer. I can't wait to see what you've got lined up for us though!
I will guess white, with the other colors in ambient channel and ambient turned up a lot :)
green!
Ding Ding Ding! That was one of the 2 possible answers I though acceptable. You all were thinking about it along the correct lines.
The diffuse colors, diffuse maps, and specular colors are all pale grey. All have an ambient color of black.
Here is a render of the scene showing the true color. The only thing different about this render and the one above are the lights.
Interesting stuff AOA.
Yes, it does have that "colourised" look about it - as though someone has gone over a black-and-white photo with a fluorescent marker pen.
So you can select different material zones in the scene and choose whether or not the custom light affects them? That's interesting... I was recently thinking about making a "blacklight" (ultraviolet) simulation kit, with some surface materials, a light, and/or a camera. Seems like this would do it! :)
Yes,
The light looks for certain settings in shaders like diffuse strength, ambient strength, index of refraction or if it uses the Garibaldi Hair shader. The light can then be set to do different things if I sees a surface which has one or all of those settings.
If you are making a custom surface shader it would be best to add a special illuminance loop with a category string. Although there are currently no surfaces shaders with __category checking illuminance, that I know of, I decided to include it into the light for future compatibility.
Ding Ding Ding! That was one of the 2 possible answers I though acceptable. You all were thinking about it along the correct lines.
The diffuse colors, diffuse maps, and specular colors are all pale grey. All have an ambient color of black.
Here is a render of the scene showing the true color. The only thing different about this render and the one above are the lights.
Thought it might be coming from outside of the objects just didn't think of lights I was thinking of reflected colours but couldn't understand how it was so even...lights make sense.
My head is still tilting ... ;)
So, was I wrong about the Cow?
Cows are never wrong hehe.
OK AoA, this looks really interesting but I have a big question, or at least it's big for me. What version of DS are you making this for? I ask because I'm still using DS 3 Advanced and DS 4.0 Pro. Is this going to be DS 4.5 or higher in DUF format only?
Here is a render done with AoA's new light. Im still learning how to use it.
No surfaces were flagged and I did not try to do anything to save time. Three spotlights are also in the scene but most of the light comes from the Ambient light.
The loader is in DUF format so DS4.5 or higher. I haven't tried the light in DS3 but I suspect it would not work properly in DS3, sorry.
this is absolutely fascinating!
One question comes to mind does it simulate IDL? Light bouncing and so on.
Love the idea of altering its sittings based on surface, as someone who uses Garibaldi Hair allot, this is right up my alley :)
Yeah. Something to simulate bounce lighting was one of the first needs that got me to start working on the light.
I was lighting Studio Paris and it went pretty easy in Carrara but in DS and Poser I just couldn't get the look exactly the way I wanted without using full indirect lighting which was too slow. I wanted the light shining in from the sun then bouncing off the wood floor to give a diffused glow around the room.
A standard point light with squared falloff was hard to get the back of the room softly lit without way over-driving the floor around where the sun shown in. A spot light would have been good but didn't have any falloff and made everything too universally bright. I eventually got something I was happy using several lights (including 2 simple but custom lights I made in Shader Mixer) but it sure would have been easier with this one.
Here is an example using 2 ambient lights and a distant light. One ambient has a 10 or so meter falloff to give the look of sunlight bouncing and another that floods the scene with a pale blue simulating skylight.
Thanks Pendraia :)
Here is a promo image that shows a bit of what I mean about falloff and how it can be used like a point light.
Neat. Your last two posts there, AoA, sold me on the whole concept.
The Backstreets + UrbanSprawl 2
The only surface tweaking I did was the windows so that they would reflect like glass should. Other then that, all surfaces are as is when loaded into DAZ Studio
The is one distant light for a sun set to 150% and coloured a whitish yellow.
There are two AALs in the scene. Both have the Light Intensity set to 25%. One is a whitish blue to mimic the sky and has no AO active. The other is pure white and has AO active. Because of the size of the scene, I went beyond the set limits for Light Radius and set it to 25,000 m which is 25km.
Render settings for DS are the same as the other image I posted. DOF was also active
Agreed... - SOLD -
While I'm guessing it best to use on its own, I'm curious how combining with other lights would work e.g. if a scene has a lot of point lights simulating candle/torchlight, could this add contollable ambience instead of the less controllable UE2? (or am I missing the part where it uses UE2?)