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AoA- LOL Now with 25% more ambience! (oh god I'm having a Borderlands moment here lol)
Rob- Thanks. :D
Yeah, I got an update as well. I don't see any changes though and my scenes seem to render the same as before.
I'm sure that is what it was. Rob would know. Thanks Rob and please pass on my thanks to whomever did the installer fix.
More fun with flagging and falloffs.
Fun! See, here I was all sad because I didn't think I had something that could be used for Halloween this year :)
You did that in two passes yeah?
Au contraire. One render, no postwork, no composite. Our new ghost product renders really well with these. They're much kinder to layered transparency than Uberenvironment lights when it comes to render time.
The scene contains two AA lights - you can see the falloff effect of the main one. The other is flagged to light only the ghost and also uses falloff to increase the fading effect of the transmaps. The scene also contains a spotlight from the side to highlight the female figure, and a distant light set to specular only.
These go so well with the upcoming Vengeful Spirit set that I included a tutorial in the User's Guide for using them with it.
...so any idea why this is happening. I went though the manual checked all the settings yet the building still renders as a black shape.
Again using one AAL without falloff and one Distant light for the sun.
You can actually see a portion of the roof. It just looks like it's very shaded, since the sunlight's not directly hitting it that side.
Did you mean you had the radius at 0 (infinite ambient like UE2) as opposed to the falloff at 0? If you want the ambient to hit everything and not a specific area, it's the radius you'd set at 0.
...yes, I had the radius set to 0.
While the sun (distant light) backlights the scene when using UE, the structure is lit. properly.
Err.. you're not using UE with the AAL, are you?
-render removed-
...no. I deleted the UE light before loading the AAL.
I would think that in ambient mode with no falloff it would work like a skylight and fill the scene like the UE light sphere does.
--Bugger system bluescreened again. Been experiencing some kind of conflict issue that started about three weeks ago. Have no idea what's causing it anymore as I updated all the drivers and windows utilities after it first occurred. Looking at the diagnostic tools in safe mode doesn't help as it's all "geek" to me.
Ok, you're right. I just looked at my scene tab and somehow the AAL got turned off in that render. LOL
What are your AAL settings?
..OK back up again. Checked the specular and ambient settings both the plane and that was it.
The plane shows 25,25,5 on the specular channel 0,0,0, on the ambient channel both at 100%
The house shows 0,0,0 on both channels with the specular channel at 100% and ambient channel at 0%
These were the same settings when I rendered the scene using the UE light sphere.
AAL settings are all default save for the radius which I set to 0 since I am not using falloff.
So, did some experimenting:
Turning the plane down to 0% on the Ambient channel causes it to render dark. so this would mean if I turned up the ambient channel on the house it should render as it did with the UE light which it does. So, apparently ambient surface settings are more important to the AAL than UE.
This is actually good as it gives more control over the lighting in scenes like this.
Here is one of the tests with the ambient channels on the planes and house,set at 55% and the treeline at 45%.
After reading that, on the Lighting Control of the AAL, do you have Set Light Strength with Surface Ambient Strength set to ON? If so, that will make surfaces obey their ambient channel. Turn it OFF to have it act like UE.
...yes it is on.
Just ran a test with it turned off and yes, it looks exactly like the UE version. To tell the truth, I think it looks more natural with the surface ambient strength control on. Means having to make more adjustments but for a better image it is worth it.
New update in the DIM. What changed? The readme hasn't been updated yet.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/27675/P375/#452271
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/27675/P375/#452271
Thanks, so I guess the consensus is that it is just an installer change, not something functional?
...yeah, but I'm one who really enjoys creating different lighting effects. Besides, some content will have ambient settings (particularly older content made for Poser) that need adjustment anyway.
In the example render I had to turn down the ambient channel more on the treeline than the planes and house as they are a billboard (Ecomantics) that has a lighting effect as part of the shader
Barbult- From what I can tell
Kyoto- Ecomantics has lighting on the prims? I bought it a long time ago but haven't actually used it yet. lol
...well not light in the real sense. However as the tree planes are billboards, the images used for the shaders have both light and shadow effects to give the trees a more 3 dimensional appearance, thus had I left them at the 100% ambient level, they would have appeared too brightly lit for the scene.
Sorry for the slow reply about the ambient setting. That one threw me for a loop once when I accidentally turned it on hehe.
From my understanding, the ambient channel of the DS default shader (and most RenderMan production shaders) is supposed to be used for controlling the strength of ambient lights rather than a surface glow. This is different than how most Poser shaders are set up and we have been using surface ambient settings for glow for so long I figured I should make the "Set light strength to surface ambient strength" optional and set it to off by default.
This feature might seem pointless at first glance because, if you want something darker you could just lower the surface's diffuse strength or darken the diffuse color. But, where this comes in handy is that you can set one light to "Set light strength to surface ambient strength" and others not. This way you can fine tune the ambient light contribution to a surface without affecting how the surface reacts to other lights in the scene.
I figured it wouldn't be used very often but it is handy when you need it :)
Just Messing around again with this cool product.. :) 2 point lights to try to replicate the lighting in the GTA 5 drawing and 1 Advanced Ambient Light. sadly it didnt really go with the BG skydome but it is 2:30am and I just could not find something GTA-ish and reby hair isnt that kind to genesis female 2 but was as close as I could get it.
steve.
What great fun and pics everyone's having!
Here's another...
Being, Predatron's Bus Stop, an 'Intriguing' pose adjusted for Being (genesis), MilCat, MilDog, both with Alien morphs. Cat ones were at PoserPros and no longer available, dog one at DAZ but I think it may be gone too....very very old. And truth be told they barely work in 4.6. And Toonimal Tree Frog. Of course the Advanced Ambient Light--Dark Blue, Samples up, Occlusion Strength up, Distance increased, shading rate on ao 4, on render .1 and oh, I dropped my gamma in Studio a bit. On distant light deep gold at about 150%. (I think)
Cute!
And render time?
1 Advanced Ambient Light and 1 Spotlight. Also used the athmospheric Cameras with fog, vignette, color tone warm, with some adjustment here and there :)
Inspired by the song Prarie Wedding by Mark Knopfler ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOwh07JSoRc )
Mary (Prarie Wedding)
Cute!
And render time?
With hitmode primitive only about ten minutes on my i5. It slowed down a bit for the glass but not too much.
Thanks for the answer!
Fabulous render, curious about what ground cover you used, lighting looks great and train in the background awesome!
Thank you Kharma and Spit :) The ground that is used is the groundplane from http://www.daz3d.com/native-cheyenne-village though I decreased it's size. Plus a little rubble from West Park Treatment Room Specimen.
And yes, the train is really great :)