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@wilmap: even with hidden proprieties checked ?
PS: Thanks for you incredible clothes ;)
I installed the Advanced Ambient Light with the DIM, and I have all of the parameters that are described in the User Guide. I wonder what the difference is for people that are not getting everything?
Edit to add: I don't have hidden propertied checked, and they all show for me.
I installed mine manually and also have no issues.
I'd like to know the answer as well.
There are no other settings other than Light colour and light intensity in Parameters tab.
Hopefully Age of Armour or someone in the know will respond to this soon, but in the meantime I thought I'd post the following in case it may help:
This issue was happening to some people with the Advanced Ambient Light product. I'm not sure, but I suspect that if you're having the same issue with the Advanced Spotlight that the same applies in that situation. I don't know--and I'm not sure that anyone does--why this is affecting some people but not others.
Apparently if you encounter this problem, it means the product did not install properly.
If you used the DAZ Install Manager you may need to install it manually instead.Edit: see subsequent posts from Age of Armour for details on this...There is some information in the Advanced Ambient Light User Guide about it: http://www.ageofarmour.com/3d/tutorials/AoA_advanced_ambient_light_help.html#Known_Issues
No worries AoA. I love the ambient light and won't mind paying 10 for the spotlight. Will wait until tomorrow to see if the price thing gets resolved. If not, I'll still get the spotlight for 10. :-)
My only 'complaint' about them besides the learning curve is that I have trouble finding them every time I go looking for them. I'm too used to lights being in my smart content!
Thank you all
On the fourth installation,two by way of DAZ Installer,two by way of copy and paste content files.
Got it to work
Haven't the slightest idea why it wouldn't work, nor why it now works, nor which installer did it.
Bottom llne is that these are useful products, shame that it is heavy lifting to install.
Best of luck to vendor, you make a great product(s) hope these problems don't discourage you
Thanks again.
My only 'complaint' about them besides the learning curve is that I have trouble finding them every time I go looking for them. I'm too used to lights being in my smart content!
I think there will be an update in the DIM within a few days that will add the Smart Content. AoA's Advanced Ambient Light is in Smart Content.
I think there will be an update in the DIM within a few days that will add the Smart Content. AoA's Advanced Ambient Light is in Smart Content.
You can also find the base preset once, right-click on it, and select Create Custom Action from the menu. That will add it to the Scripts menu (and add the Scripts menu if needed). You can use Window>Workspace>Customise to add it to another menu, or toolbar. Find the preset under Custom Actions on the left, find the menu or tool bar you want in the relevant tab on the right, and drag the command to the menu/toolbar.
Greetings,
It's such a pity that you can't do this with directories/folders as well.-- Morgan
...that's one big glass of bubbly for such a little lady.
Did you use the Daz install manager or did you download the installer and run it manually?
I did a manual install and I only have intensity and colour settings. The readme says it should have put some files in appdata but they are not there and I can't find them.
The original problems with the ambient light were due to the installer not putting files in appdata and I had to copy files from the zip file to the right place. But this is an exe rather than a manual install zip file so I can't just open it and look for the files.
Did you use the Daz install manager or did you download the installer and run it manually?
I did a manual install and I only have intensity and colour settings. The readme says it should have put some files in appdata but they are not there and I can't find them.
The original problems with the ambient light were due to the installer not putting files in appdata and I had to copy files from the zip file to the right place. But this is an exe rather than a manual install zip file so I can't just open it and look for the files.
I had that exact same problem. As you already mention, it is because the .exe installer does not seem to add the shader file and script to the DAZ Studio program folder. I solved it by using the DIM to download the file as .zip which contained all needed files and then installed them by hand. Everything is working fine now and DIM has been purged again. I only use it in dire circumstances...
TD
I had that exact same problem. As you already mention, it is because the .exe installer does not seem to add the shader file and script to the DAZ Studio program folder. I solved it by using the DIM to download the file as .zip which contained all needed files and then installed them by hand. Everything is working fine now and DIM has been purged again. I only use it in dire circumstances...
TD
I've never installed the DIM. When you say "purged" do you mean you installed the DIM, ran it and then un-installed it? Or did you do something to de-activate it?
P.S. do you actually need Daz Studio installed to run the DIM? If ths is the only way to install it I was thinking of installing the DIM on another computer and copying the files from it. I bought my main PC for it's performance and I make every effort to keep it free of "helpfull" automatic programs that lurk in the background and eat into memory and CPU power.
Basically, I uninstalled, yes. However, I use Acronis True Image which come with a "Try&decide;" tool that allows one to safely install a program and then completely purge it including anything it has done anywhere on the system. That way I know that nothing is left behind.
You do not need DAZ Studio on the system that has the DIM as far as I know. You can simply use it to download and then transfer the files to where you want them. I just don't like the way it works and I would not want to re-download anything just to get upgrade notifications. I am still using the same runtimes I started with years ago. They traveled from PC to PC as i upgraded and I know what is in there.
Ciao
TD
Sorry about the install issues. The issue is that the files are sorta like plugins so there are limited places they can be read from. One of these locations is within Program Files so Windows may be blocking certain file installations for security reasons. This is why the manual download is an EXE that requires admin permission to run.
I honestly don't know how the DIM works under the hood so I can only speculate when I say it might not always have admin privileges on all systems... or something hehe.
Now I currently don't have enough info to know what the exact cause is (Windows configuration, User preferences, DIM ?) so, until it is figured out the best I can offer is to say, if the lights are showing only Light Color and Light Intensity, then search your hard drive for the following files:
Ambient light files:
AoA_AOLightAttribs.dsa
AoA_AOLightDef.dsa
AoA_AOLightParams.dsa
AoA_AOLight.sdl
Spotlight files:
AoA_AdvancedSpotlightAttribs.dsa
AoA_AdvancedSpotlightDef.dsa
AoA_AdvancedSpotlightParams.dsa
AoA_AdvancedSpotlight.sdl
If you find those then they did install but, for whatever reason, DS can't read them from their current location.
Try moving them to the computer admin user's appdata folder.
Attribs, Def and Params dsa files can go into C:\Users\AdminUserName\AppData\Roaming\DAZ 3D\Studio4\scripts\support\AgeOfArmour\Light
The .sdl files go into C:\Users\AdminUserName\AppData\Roaming\DAZ 3D\Studio4\shaders\AgeOfArmour\Light
I could use some help tracking down the issue since I haven't been able to replicate it on my computers. If you run the installer or DIM and the light shows just the Light Color and Light Intensity, could you search for the above files on your computer and send me a PM letting me know if you found them and, if so, what folder they were found under?
My deepest apologies for the trouble,
William
A combination of Advanced Ambient and Advanced Spot Lights with atmosphere effect camera...
Wow Jabba! I really love the mood of the renders you have been posting.
Awesome work again Jabba
Age of Armour: any chance you will do a Tutorial for Atmospheric Effects Cameras, Advanced Ambient Light and Advanced Spotlight ?
Your pdf are nice but short for beginners with lights and cameras :)
I confess, I want to buy this, but I never really understood the atmospheric effect volume camera- particularly the making of god rays. The tutorial was hard for me to grasp this....
How hard are these light for those not as expert at lighting to grasp? I understand the readme says there is a learning curve.
I love the results I see here, but I am concerned about the difficulty level.
Jabba or AoA, can either of you give some pointers on what good settings to use are for the sliders? I get the general gist of them but seem to be having problems balancing quality versus speed. My renders are taking forever which tells me I'm going to far over towards quality but am unsure which settings are good to lower without losing very much quality.
Oh yeah! I can't wait to try these new lights out!
You can use them right out of the box pretty much like any of the default DS lights but the real benefits come from learning some of the extra control features. A lot of the advanced features are not particularly complicated but they are different than most of us have come across with DAZ Studio.
What I have been doing is taking notes when I find a need for something and trying to incorporate those into new tools. A good example is that I literally kept saying "I need another specular highlight on the eyes for this scene. I can add a specular only spot light but then it will illuminate everything but only the eyes need it. Humm... I wish there was a way to have the light only shine on the eyes."
The other thing I have been trying to do is read a lot of movie production notes. See, 3delight (Daz Studio's renderer) is a very high end, professional renderer. DS uses the full version so all the tools are there... Just have to access them. So I see something like 'District 9', which used 3delight, and say "How do I get CGI that looks that good?"
The techniques used in movies are usually pretty complicated which is why DS doesn't openly have a lot of those features. It isn't that DAZ is trying to limit you for any upsell reason... it is just that these things can be overwhelming and DAZ wants DS to be usable without a degree from USC.
My goal has been to open up some of the features which are used in movies but try to present them in a UI that is as intuitive as possible and try to make them work with content that is already available.
Now what is intuitive? Well, the lights use methods we haven't been using previously in DS or Poser, though maybe a bit in Carrara. So there are some aspects which take a bit of time to learn what they are for and when they will benefit you the most. You don't have to know or touch any of the advanced features to use the lights, but the more you know, the more useful the lights will be.
My thought all along with the lights was that people would use them just like regular DS lights then, as a need arises, have the tools to achieve the effect they want. I believe it is best to learn on need rather than just sitting down and trying to absorb all the knobs and features.
I figured people would use them pretty much as normal lights but then one day, a situation pops up where they say "I wish I could just.... Ohhhh! That's what that feature is for!"
Some examples....
"The stuff in the background is out of focus because of depth of field. I wish there was a way to use fewer shadow samples on those items so it rendered faster"
"This spotlight looks good on the subjects face but I don't want it to light up the castle in the background too."
"I wish I could have a light just illuminate this white T shirt but nothing else so it looked like there was a black light in the scene."
"I want to light up the back half of this room, and want soft AO shadows, but don't want to flood the whole scene with ambient light"
These are things that you can't really do in DS without the lights and the advanced features.
Okay, this sounds like a sales pitch but I honestly don't mean it that way.... but I suggest using the lights in every scene you do and use mostly default settings. Maybe tinker a little bit with some of the settings that sound like they make sense but leave the others alone. Then, because of seeing them regularly over time, the other dials will stick in your memory... Maybe not how they work but you will have a general idea of what they might do. Then, when a special need arises you might say "Oh? I bet that is what that setting is for." Then you read the guide about that particular feature and use it.
In time I think the advanced features will become second nature. You will load a light in the scene, realize that there are no foreground transmaped surfaces and automatically switch the light to Primitive hitmode and render twice as fast. Or say "I want a nice soft look for this portrait so I will use Uniform Distribution Curve because it is softer than Cosine."
So those are my thoughts and my intent when making the lights. I absolutely do not want people to buy something from me that they aren't going to use. If you don't think you are going to be lighting scenes where you might run into situations where the light would help then please don't buy it.
If you do run into situations where you wish you had more lighting control and buy the lights, but are having a hard time learning how to use them for your particular situation then just post here and I and others will do our best to help.
Man I am long winded LOL!
I use between 50 and 90% quality on the volume camera in most final renders. Start around 50% and see if it is too grainy.
The volume camera effect generally looks the best when the spotlight uses squared falloff. Because of the insane intensity differences right near the spotlight's origin in squared falloff mode you will likely see heavy grain near the source even on high volume camera quality.
Two solutions for grain are to not show the light's source but put it slightly off screen or inside a light fixture. The other thing is to set the volume camera quality to something that looks good everywhere in the scene except right near the light source then blur just the grainy spot a little in post.
When rendering with the volume camera use Primitive hitmode as much as possible on the lights. It should be fastest to set the lights to Primitive hitmode then flag just the surfaces around transmaps to use Shader hitmode.
Avoid raytraced reflections in scenes which are rendered from the volume camera. Raytraced reflections really slow things down a lot. Of course I say that yet I have that troll in the rain promo in which every single surface except the sky and rain had raytraced reflections LOL!
I'm currently working on the volume camera to see if I can't get it much faster. There is one feature already working in the draft version that will make it much much easier to control God Rays when used along with the advanced lights. There is a lot of work left to be done still so it might be a while but I am actively working on it.
some playing around with AAL and AS
That's really cool! I love all that color. I would have never thought of doing something like that.
I should have had everyone in this thread do the light promo shots for me.
@AoA after asking questions here http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/30941/
you brought the solution
i'm very pleased with that options of having light on an object or to have not
especially for backdrops
on the bad side atmosphere effect camera crashed dazstudio 4.6 several times
but cant reproduce that now
sending logfile is not working for me
win7 64
For me, when I installed both the Advanced Ambient and the advanced spotlights (via DIM ), a small pop up window showed up to ask me if I gave permission to install these items. Pretty much as it does when installing Java or their updates or updates for itunes etc. Not sure if that is any information that can be good to have, but figured I could pop in and give it anyway :)