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I've only just started playing with this product, but based on my results so far, I'll tentatively say that it can be a good solution--and quite possibly an ideal solution--for that type of situation.
You may not like the answer because it is probably going to add a good about of rendertime but setting the volume camera to a higher setting should remove the transmap darkness. Try around 90 or 95% quality on the volume camera if you have the time. Some cases it may not add that much but, in some scenes, that volume quality can really slow things down.
Unfortunately, that didn't fix it. I tried it a couple of times at different settings and let it run overnight, but even at 99% (and an 11+ hour render) the transmaps were still just as visible. Needless to say, the render twice with/without the hair, fix in photoshop option works fine, but I'll still be interested if anyone comes up with a viable solution.
Stupid Question, I hope.
Installed Ambient Light, it appears on the light preset, when clicked it loads.
Can be moved etc,
Only two settings appear in Parameters, Light Intensity, Light color. None of the settings described here
If I select a color it appears in the viewport.
No other settings and the light does not render at all
Should I be worried?
Hi Spyro,
That is a really cool render. I love the sense of action with the motion blur.
Did the Garibaldi shader have A SpecularHitmode, A DiffuseHitmode and A TransmissionHitmode set to Primitive? Also was the hair shader's own occlusion turned off (O Shader Intensity - 0%) ? If not, then any of those settings could account for a big slowdown.
What was the reason for the two passes? I ask because, it is often faster to do it in one pass with both lights on... just flagged so one only illuminates surfaces which the other doesn't. This is because some shader functions run even if no light is hitting them like reflections.
Also, the occlusion that something casts onto other objects (but not itself) is calculated even if the surface is flagged to not be illuminated. This was intentional so that shadow results were correct when using Don't Illuminate and Only Illuminate or when doing two passes. This ensures that a non-Illuminated surface like hair would still cast shadows onto the face. Although this unfortunately makes each pass take longer, without that feature the shadowing would never look quite right when two passes were composited.
The AoA_Subsurface shader can sometimes slow things down in a separate pass even when no light is directly illuminating it. I haven't narrowed down exactly why it is doing that yet though.
So to summarize, most of the time one pass using two lights renders faster than two passes with one light each. Though there are times when two passes are simply needed to achieve a certain effect or workaround a limitation.
I hope that helps.
Hi there. Not a stupid question at all.
Some people have been experiencing that. It is due to the install not working quite right. I'm not sure why the install is not working correctly all the time but I suspect it has to do with Windows User Account Control.
You can try running the installer again and, if that doesn't fix things, there is a manual solution posted in the User Guide found here...
http://www.ageofarmour.com/3d/tutorials/AoA_advanced_ambient_light_help.html#Known_Issues
Let me know if that doesn't get it working.
Reinstalled, working now, now I can be as confused as everyone else.:-)
Many thanks.
Incase no one noticed during the sale last month, all my full colour promos for my new car were done with the Advanced Ambient Light
I am new at using this thing too.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by the photograph of a museum display effect. Like a photo taken using a flash? If that is the case it might be the specular. Maybe turning it off would help for your situation.
Could you post a render that shows the effect? I'd like to better understand and help.
No one seems to understand what I mean. :) It's kinda the difference between "on location" filming and "studio" shows... back in the 80's and early 90's. By now, cameras have improved to the point where the difference isn't seen any more, so I can't use "Film" vs "Video" either (I tried to use that in a thread a few years ago, and was basically treated like I was hallucinating.) The lighting seems to emphasize the artificiality of the scene, making it feel like a studio set or a museum display. It may be something best dealt with using shaders, camera parameters, or postwork as opposed to the lighting. Or it may be a subjective Uncanny Valley thing, where it's in the valley for me, but not for others.
The picture below was after some fiddling with additional lighting (there's one general Ambient, a second at a very low strength with fall off about 3 yards in front of the figure, a distant light Diffuse only and one Specular only for the Sunlight which is coming towards the figure.) It still has some of the effect, though.
thanks Spit, it still rendered really fast only a few minutes, I didn't change any render settings tho..is that required also? Also I don't know what's going on with the floor in the lower corner, it looks all funky like someone spilled something, not sure why that's happening
I'm not sure what's going on with the floor.If I were doing this I'd check the texture file, I'd try changing the ambient light to Diffuse only to turn off specular. Just a couple things to try.
No one seems to understand what I mean. :) It's kinda the difference between "on location" filming and "studio" shows... back in the 80's and early 90's. By now, cameras have improved to the point where the difference isn't seen any more, so I can't use "Film" vs "Video" either (I tried to use that in a thread a few years ago, and was basically treated like I was hallucinating.) The lighting seems to emphasize the artificiality of the scene, making it feel like a studio set or a museum display. It may be something best dealt with using shaders, camera parameters, or postwork as opposed to the lighting. Or it may be a subjective Uncanny Valley thing, where it's in the valley for me, but not for others.
The picture below was after some fiddling with additional lighting (there's one general Ambient, a second at a very low strength with fall off about 3 yards in front of the figure, a distant light Diffuse only and one Specular only for the Sunlight which is coming towards the figure.) It still has some of the effect, though.
Ok, with that picture I kind of get what you mean. It looks like you took a flash picture of a diorama at a museum. The lighting is off a bit but I'm not exactly sure how. The objects themselves have a plasticy look as well. The environment is also to sterile.
Some atmosphere added, either in post or with various camera/shader tricks would help the environment.
I'm not really sure why the lighting looks off it just "feels" wrong to me for some reason. Usually when I get that I end up playing around with different lighting, changing colors and even changing shaders on various objects.
I'd say the environment is supposed to be sterile, but it's just supposed to be lifeless. :) and I agree, I couldn't say what about the lighting is wrong, other than it is. It's not the specular, it's... something else.
I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually. I just have to play with it some more, since, as I said, I'm not really trying for photo-real, just believable.
I'd say the environment is supposed to be sterile, but it's just supposed to be lifeless. :) and I agree, I couldn't say what about the lighting is wrong, other than it is. It's not the specular, it's... something else.
I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually. I just have to play with it some more, since, as I said, I'm not really trying for photo-real, just believable.
By sterile I mean it looks to clean for what it obviously is, as you say, like a museum display. You can kind of see a hint of wind blowing her hair but no dust blowing in the atmosphere.
Okay, I get what you're saying and also see why you're getting the results that you are.
The thing to remember about "real" lighting is that it's much harsher than what people consider to be acceptable for "pretty" shots of people. Real sunlight is harsh and 95% comes from a single light source, and the same is true of moonlight on a clear night. Our brain, not our eyes, compensates for the difference to smooth things out, but an image captured by a camera has only one exposure setting (let's not go into RAWs and HDR, which are workarounds to solve this problem, for the moment.) Suffice it to say, when a film crew shoots a film on location, we do everything we can to mitigate the harshness of the light as it creates unflattering shadows, accentuates wrinkles and makes actors and models squint. We put scrims over the area where the actors are to soften the beams hitting them directly, we use reflectors to bounce light back up to fill in shadows, we never shoot with the sun directly behind the camera and, in the best of all worlds, we shoot on slightly overcast or cloudy days.
However, we can get away with that manipulation of reality in live action film because it IS reality, and there are "tells" that the human mind has learned that let it understand that what it is seeing is real. When we work in an artificial world, be it CG, a miniature, a matte painting or a indoor set mimicking outdoors, the best way to sell it as "real" is to create the image so that those same tells appear to be there. The easiest tricks are to bring up the contrast, preferably by letting part of the image in a dark scene go completely black (like underexposed film) or to burn out the highlights in a bright scene, use strong directional lights casting hard shadows and to have the light sources all have consistent color casts where the shadows reflect the color of the sky. A great example of this is in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, where the snow scenes were actually filmed with light blue snow that was then overexposed to appear white... with the result that the microbead glass "snow" in the shadows seemed to be perfectly reflecting the blue overcast of the sky. Likewise, matte painters like Albert Whitlock could make you think you were seeing a building when all that was actually on their matte board was a rough blob of paint, because they know that at a certain exposure setting and distance, that's all a camera would be be able to resolve. The trick, therefore, is to know what a real light would do... and in this case, one of your ambient lights is not actually creating the light in the way a real outdoor scene would be lit.
Looking at your image, there's a perfectly clear sky and yet there are no hard, bright highlights. To the brain, this says "it's a clear sky, so there should be either stronger highlights or even blacker shadows... unless this picture was taken just before sunrise or just after sunset." However, if that were the case, then the dominant color of the light should be bluer, as the primary source of light would be the blue sky. In addition, objects that are closer to the camera should be darker, as the brightest thing in the shot would be the sky, and there's less atmospheric haze and fill in as you get closer to the camera. (That's true even in the middle on night, the sky is almost always lighter than the ground, contrary to how we learned to draw it in grade school.) Therefore, for the girl to have this much light on her in the foreground while the background is so dark tells the mind that something's just a bit off, and that there must be another source of light... but because it's an Ambient light, which is actually illuminating from all sides in a sphere focuses in, there's no visible source on camera where the brain knows there would have to be.lights to cast illumination that even without any obvious shadows. If a dusk/dawn effect is what you're going for, I'd suggest swapping some of your lights. Use an ambient set to 0 and tinted to match the sky color as a global fill in, but drop the ambient in the foreground and if you want her brighter, do it with a spot casting visible shadows and a relatively short thow/fade off so that the source of the light on her appears to be something close to the "camera." (A good basic rule on artificial light sources is that, unless it's a laser or something focused through a set of lenses, every time you double the difference from the source, you quarter the illumination.)
By sterile I mean it looks to clean for what it obviously is, as you say, like a museum display. You can kind of see a hint of wind blowing her hair but no dust blowing in the atmosphere.
Oh, I agree, it needs some dust in the background. I was just being silly about the lifeless vs sterile thing.
The Ambient Lighting just seems to draw attention to the lack of it more than my usual lighting schemes.
The sky is actually a separate render. There is no sky in that image. And it is supposed to be sunrise/set, but without the foreground ambient light, her back was darker than I wanted. The main ambient light has no fall off.
I think another part of my problem is that I don't want realistic lighting. I want believable lighting, which is not quite the same thing, though something still missing here. I've never wanted the look of any sort of photograph.
This is the image after some postwork to make it look more painterly and less photographic, with the sky added in, and it comes much closer to the image I wanted.
What I'm not seeing is light direction, which is unusual for the big outdoors... whack a distant light in there, the colour and shadow from which will indicate a time of day, and with the right angle will also add some additional shape to the scene.
There is a distant light in there, It's coming from behind the arena/big scarry four armed dude. ;) but yeah, the shadows aren't showing up. They're getting washed out by the Ambient lighting.
Edit... okay, I feel stupid. I just loaded in the scene to play with it in light of some of the comments....
I was so concentrating on the ambient lighting that I forgot to turn shadows on for the Distant light... :red:
I was about to edit my post, but I'll add here instead... drop ambient intensity 30-40% and give it a splash of colour (pale orange maybe?). Get that distant light doing it's thing, try shadow softness 0.5-3% ...more dramatic
Okay, in this version, I have
1 distant light diffuse only, 100% intensity, pale gold color.
1 distant light specular only 75% intensity, pale gold color
I find this combination, with the specular at a lower intensity than the diffuse, usually gives me the sunlight effect I want.
Both of these lights are coming from a non-obvious source, due to just tossing in a skydome rather than postworking an example. The light is comming from roughtly the same position it would be in were the silhouette in place, above and slightly to the left of the arena. They both have raytraced shadows at 5% softness
1 Advanced Ambient light, 35% intensity, pale gold color, 0 fall off.
She is significantly less visible than I want, and her shadow isn't what I was hoping for either.
Advanced Ambient won't make a bad light rig look good, but it will make a good light rig great. All you really need are three lights: sunlight, ambient light, fill light (advanced ambient light is throwing spec out there, so an additional spec-only light might be overkilling your scene). Concentrate on getting the sun to look right before starting on the ambient, then add fill-in last.
Generally speaking, light from front needs a couple of things -
* somewhere for the shadow to fall - right now the ground is casting a shadow in the same place the character is casting shadow, so we don't see anything 'confirming' character is part of scene - so this would require either moving character or terrain so shadow will be cast on area that would otherwise receive direct sunlight if character wasn't there, or changing direction of sunlight.
* highlights on character/props that demonstrate being struck by sunlight - right now character doesn't look like being struck by sunlight, so crank up the distant light intensity. Try 200-300% strength for starters.
Next thing is shadow detail - this is where the ambient light intensity comes into play - low sunlight from the front needs almost black shadow. Turn off all lights except sunlight, get it sorted first, then add ambient in small increments starting as low as 3%, 6%,10% etc until you get enough light to get a hint of detail - look to arena type building in distance, set level by detail you want in that for ambient with no falloff (spot render is our friend for this).
Once you got that sorted, add an additional light for fill-in of foreground character - similar to the general ambient light, this needs to be subtle - strong enough to see the detail you want but not too strong to overpower the low sun vibe. Best for fill light to not cast shadows, and work up in increments until satisfactory detail. (this could also be done with another advanced ambient light instead of a standard fill light - maybe position an ambient light around the hip area, low intensity with fall-off of a couple of metres (experimentation required) - but probably easier with a point or spot to fill for this occasion unless you specifically want a different shader rate for the hair to speed up render time that can be done with advanced ambient).
OK, that's the 'standard' method that's more-or-less replacing Uber Environment with Advanced Ambient... BUT... we could do something unique to advance ambient to really help sell the whole sunlight side of things. We could also add an additional ambient light with a warm colour and falloff of maybe 70% positioned over at edge of scene in direction of sunlight - this would give bounced sunlight effect that's stronger on parts of scene position closer to the sun.
Okay...
I set this one to run before I went to bed.
Same sun set up, added an UberSpot at roughly the same angle as the sun pointing directly at her (I really can't move the sun much. It needs to be coming from behind the 4 armed dude, and the landscape is exactly the way I want) and then an additional ambient light at diffuse only 25% strength with a fall off of 3 meters positioned a meter behind (relative to her) and 2 meters above the ground.
Prior to Advanced Ambient, I would usually use 6 distant lights set low (20%) at a 45% angle in a ring as my sky ambient light, so I'm just trying to find the right way to use Advanced Ambient to replace that.
Advanced Ambient Light let me have a brighter, warmer foreground with colder extemities
Great point and illustration of it. And thank you for that little 'tute' above---very informative and it will really help my process. Starting with only the sun is a duh moment for me.
All right. I have a render I'm perfectly happy with, at this point.
However, I'm a little gunshy of posting it, because I am happy with it, but I also know that everyone else in this thread will have half a dozen suggestions of how to make it "better" (which the advice may be technically sound for, but not for what I want) ... and while I don't want to sound ungrateful for advice, ... I'm happy with what I have, and don't really want any more advice on it.
No worries DaWaterRat, art is subjective... so long as you're doing what you set out to do & you're happy with it, nobody can tell you it's wrong.
Life would be pretty boring if we all did everything the same way - I shared how I would approach the scene to offer some alternate ideas based upon my own preferences and please don't think I'm saying my way is the only way - the purpose of my direct approach when speaking in earlier posts was to maintain clarity of message, as I can quickly degenerate into a lot of verbage trying to cover all bases... might be doing that in this very post if i don't just shut up now :lol: :lol: :lol:
So post away if/when you're ready - it's only 'wrong' if you tell us it's 'wrong'.
Okay, well, as long as we're clear that this is my final version of it... I'm actually kinda proud of it, but I know it's not up to a lot of people's technical standards.
Oh, and the dead space is on purpose, since this is my cover art for this year's NaNoWriMo. (Can't write the darn thing for another 2 and half weeks, may as well make art related to it...)
Greetings,
It looks very cool, and I definitely like how the shadow ended up on the foot. That works well, and grounds the character solidly.You can iterate on images for*ever*, and sometimes for me the amount of time a render takes acts as my safety valve and stops me from futzing to 'perfection', as I'm not willing to run another 21 hours of render just to fix some breakthrough or an odd lighting outcome.
I'd totally be right there, rendering a cover for a book I'll never finish, if I had even the faintest idea what to write about this NaNo. ;)
-- Morgan
[Edit: I need to note that 'a book I'll never finish' refers to my own inability to complete anything, not a general comment on NaNo!]
Hi Spyro,
That is a really cool render. I love the sense of action with the motion blur.
Did the Garibaldi shader have A SpecularHitmode, A DiffuseHitmode and A TransmissionHitmode set to Primitive? Also was the hair shader's own occlusion turned off (O Shader Intensity - 0%) ? If not, then any of those settings could account for a big slowdown.
What was the reason for the two passes? I ask because, it is often faster to do it in one pass with both lights on... just flagged so one only illuminates surfaces which the other doesn't. This is because some shader functions run even if no light is hitting them like reflections.
Also, the occlusion that something casts onto other objects (but not itself) is calculated even if the surface is flagged to not be illuminated. This was intentional so that shadow results were correct when using Don't Illuminate and Only Illuminate or when doing two passes. This ensures that a non-Illuminated surface like hair would still cast shadows onto the face. Although this unfortunately makes each pass take longer, without that feature the shadowing would never look quite right when two passes were composited.
The AoA_Subsurface shader can sometimes slow things down in a separate pass even when no light is directly illuminating it. I haven't narrowed down exactly why it is doing that yet though.
So to summarize, most of the time one pass using two lights renders faster than two passes with one light each. Though there are times when two passes are simply needed to achieve a certain effect or workaround a limitation.
I hope that helps.
I found this info very informative, and also discovered the User guide was updated with wealth of additional info also, since I last read through it. Thanks AoA! And Ive done a few renders practicing with AAL and I am seeing a huge render time increase, I didn't know Garibaldi could render so fast haha!
An influence for 2 passes in the Forrest render was that the trees were all trans-mapped, I knew Primitive hitmode was required for the hair, but Shader hit mode was required for the trans-mapped surfaces... So I ended up creating two AAL one flagged to only illuminate the Garibaldi with primitive hit mode, and one flagged to not illuminate GH with Shader hit mode. Unfortunately it resulted in much longer render times. But it was a learning curve, and my first use of AAL. - Since playing with other scenes and new Info recently learned I am WOWed by the speeds you can achieve with such fantastic quality
Sorry for not posting yesterday. I had some broken sleep and was simply too tired to articulate any thoughts hehe.
Thanks for the clarification DaWaterRat. That makes perfect sense. The look of video used to drive me nuts but, as you said, they have gotten video to the point where it is indistinguishable now. There were a lot of factors that made video look different from film like frame rate, interlacing, less DOF, and different color and contrast responses.
Most of those things don't apply much to what we are doing in 3d since we can render stills or lower frame rates in non-interlaced formats, dial up DOF and adjust for more of a film response in post.
One other big difference between old video and film was that video was usually used for TV and flim was used for movies. Because TV shows were often on a much lower budget and shorter schedules, they often didn't have the time to devote to as much creative lighting as movies did. Also video people seemed to have a different mindset. I remember TV directors always wanting to flood scenes with lights whereas movie people always were talking about exciting shadows hehe.
I won't comment on your image since you aren't requesting any other input other than to say that it looks good :) However, just a quick comment about lighting in general for the benefit of others...
Outdoor and other large scenes can often benefit from using a higher AO Max Distance setting. It allows things like hills and buildings to calculate a larger, stronger shadow. Setting it to 0 overrides the limit, causing the shadows not to be limited (essentially) so very large items will cast very large occlusion areas.
Thanks for the great lighting tips Cybersox13. Wonderful information. For those who may have missed it you can see his post on page 23.
I like it! Very dramatic.