Advanced Ambient, Spot & Distant Lights [Commercial]

Cybersox

Just got back from overseas and haven't had a chance to actually use any of the new things I picked up over the last two weeks, so to get back in the swing, I pulled out the Advanced Ambient lights and did this. Straight render, Two AALs, one distant light, a glow shader from the Supersuit, a free skydome by Glasseye, Petipet's Moonscape flattened down and covered with a water shader from 3DSublime's Daz Studio Environment shaders, and Faveral's San Buenaventura with new sailcloth via Fabricator. Render time - 11 minutes.

kyoto kid

...question, is there a limit as to how many Advanced Spotlights can be in one scene. I added a fifth but it appears to have no effect after rendering. I checked all the settings to make sure something was not improperly flagged yet the light fails to illuminate the target at all.

Kinich

Kyoto Kid said:

...question, is there a limit as to how many Advanced Spotlights can be in one scene. I added a fifth but it appears to have no effect after rendering. I checked all the settings to make sure something was not improperly flagged yet the light fails to illuminate the target at all.

Not that I can see, test render below has 7 Advanced Spotlights & 7 Advanced Ambient lights. Got to go to work now, 06:40 in the UK.

kyoto kid

...interesting. I wonder why the one I loaded in the scene isn't doing a thing. I even doubled the intensity and still nothing.

[...update]

Deleted the light, loaded a new one and now it works fine.

What I originally did was load the light, then use the Copy/Paste function to move it to an existing light in the scene that it was to replace so I wouldn't have to transition it manually (due to the crashes that seem to be occurring when positioning these lights). Apparently this does something to the settings as the Spotlight takes on the setting parameters of the copied light (as if one used the "create new light and replace" option) however, it somehow also disables the Spotlight's ability to illuminate anything.

Bloody well spent a good part of the day trying to figure this out.

Hopefully the crash issue while moving and adjusting these lights gets solved soon.

Jabba

If the light copied is a standard DAZ spotlight e.g. ctrl-c then pasted to the advanced light via ctrl-v, this will also add whether light has raytrace or shadow maps for its shadow type parameter. For the advanced lights to work, simply return the shadow type back to none.

Alternatively, when pasting the copied light settings, right click inside the parameters tab and select second option of...

Paste / Paste Pose To Selected Item(s)

...this should only apply the transform data rather than the light settings too.

Spit

Age of Armour said:

I know it is inconvenient but a solution for the moment is to flag the face and head and set "If Surface is Flagged" to "Use Shader Hitmode"

Now, in your case you might already be flagging the hair, so you can either set up two lights, one that only illuminates the hair set to low samples and primitive hitmode (assuming it is Garibladi hair) and another for everything else which you can flag using diffuse ambient or IOR and set to "Use Shader Hitmode"

Another option, which is kinda weird but it works, is to leave the lights and everything just as it is but load a solid white image into the opacity strength slot of the face and scalp surfaces. It can just be a tiny white png or jpg, something like 8 x 8 pixels. In the preview window it will look like the face is transparent but it will render opaque. Adding the image forces DS to switch the surface to Shader Hitmode in the RIB file that is sent to the renderer.

I'll try to get an update out soon so such things aren't needed. I suspect it probably won't be out until next week though. I want to thoroughly test the light again on another system before I have DAZ QA go to the trouble of building installers again hehe. I'll fix the parameter file too so those additional, unused, old flag options don't show up.

Sorry about the bug :red:

Thanks for the explanation and workarounds....

What I'm confused about is how Studio decides which hitmode to use in the first place. If it only had to do with surfaces with transparency being assigned hitmode shader, why is it that (in images without any flagging even) my setting the light to hitmode primitive renders so much faster when using AAL than not using it? It seems to me that Studio assigns hitmode shader even to surfaces that don't need it? Should I assume that hitmode shader is really Studio's default?

Totte

Kyoto Kid said:

...interesting. I wonder why the one I loaded in the scene isn't doing a thing. I even doubled the intensity and still nothing.

[...update]

Deleted the light, loaded a new one and now it works fine.

What I originally did was load the light, then use the Copy/Paste function to move it to an existing light in the scene that it was to replace so I wouldn't have to transition it manually (due to the crashes that seem to be occurring when positioning these lights). Apparently this does something to the settings as the Spotlight takes on the setting parameters of the copied light (as if one used the "create new light and replace" option) however, it somehow also disables the Spotlight's ability to illuminate anything.

Bloody well spent a good part of the day trying to figure this out.

Hopefully the crash issue while moving and adjusting these lights gets solved soon.

I've experienced the same thing trying to make a reproducible case. Thanks for the hint of "moving the actual light",

Jabba

Totte said:

Kyoto Kid said:

...interesting. I wonder why the one I loaded in the scene isn't doing a thing. I even doubled the intensity and still nothing.

[...update]

Deleted the light, loaded a new one and now it works fine.

What I originally did was load the light, then use the Copy/Paste function to move it to an existing light in the scene that it was to replace so I wouldn't have to transition it manually (due to the crashes that seem to be occurring when positioning these lights). Apparently this does something to the settings as the Spotlight takes on the setting parameters of the copied light (as if one used the "create new light and replace" option) however, it somehow also disables the Spotlight's ability to illuminate anything.

Bloody well spent a good part of the day trying to figure this out.

Hopefully the crash issue while moving and adjusting these lights gets solved soon.

I've experienced the same thing trying to make a reproducible case. Thanks for the hint of "moving the actual light",

I just tried this to confirm what would happen, so I copied settings from a distant light and pasted to an advanced spotlight (ctrl-c & ctrl-v)...

...there were two advanced spotlight parameter settings that needed to be reversed for the light to work - shadow type needs to be reset to 'none', and illumination needs to be reset to 'on' (or to 'diffuse only' if not wanting secular).

Totte

Jabba: I've found out that adding a Advanced Spotlight to the scene, render, then fiddle with it or with some other slider causes pretty predictable crashes at least on Mac OS X that are very consistent. It always crash in the same place. It's bugreported so hopefully the devs can see what happens. It crashes while DS is handling the undo stack so I guess for some reason the Advanced Spotlight has some params that when put onto the undo stack corrupts it (saving a 64 bit value as as 32 bit or a string that is longer than expected, probably something simple), than causes this.

Jabba

I'm Windows 7 so maybe that's why i seem to be using it without crashing.

kyoto kid

...I also have WIn7 and do get crashes from time to time when moving the lights.

TJohn

Win8, no crashes yet. Doesn't seem to be OS specific, I dunno.

greys

Mac OSX Mavericks, no crashes here either. Tried following the steps above to try and force one, still no crash (in the latest beta, 64bit). No issues with moving lights or using the undo stack.

kyoto kid

...after readjusting the light settings as well as fining a solution to the illumination issue here is the final render of the work I posted a while back

Substituted a Jepe's SteamZ plane for the Uber Volume cone over the Elf Shooter to create the swirling fog effect I wanted and the render time dropped from about four hours to eleven minutes eighteen seconds.

Also made a few "cosmetic" and pose changes to the characters.

Ran an experiment with the scene using UE and after 15 minutes only 1% of the render was complete. Estimated time for the completed render was around 25 hours.

Yeah, I like these light a lot.

(oops, forgot to turn all the smoothing back on before rendering)

Age of Armour

Thanks for putting together the spotlight tutorial Jabba. Your videos are a great help.

One thing I would like to clarify a bit about the spotlight is that 64 samples or higher is only really recommended if you are using adaptive sampling. Adaptive sampling on the spotlight is a time saver but not as effective as it is on the ambient light. On the spotlight, you might find using lower samples and adaptive sampling - off gives faster results.

The general guideline for shadow samples is, the softer the shadow, the more samples are needed. So if you have a shadow that is only 1% softness you are probably okay with 2 to 4 samples. If you have a shadow that is 500% softness you will likely need 64 or more.

Just like real life shadow softness depends on the difference in distances between the light, the thing casting the shadows and the surface receiving the shadows. Imagine a person standing 1 foot away from a wall, and a light 20 feet away is shining at them... The shadow which the person creates on the wall will be fairly sharp. as the person walks toward the light the shadow on the wall will become softer, unless the light is a laser :) You can test this effect yourself by turning on only one light in a room then holding your hand near a wall. As you move our hand away you will see the shadow become softer.

So if you are using soft shadows and, say, Genesis is very near a spotlight but you have a wall fairly far behind them, you will see a very soft shadow on the wall. If, however you move the light further away from Genesis, the shadow should become sharper on the wall.

I think the reason you saw so much grain at the beginning of the video was simply because the light was exactly at ground level so the floor, right in front of the light, was casting shadows onto the wall.

Totte said:

Jabba: I've found out that adding a Advanced Spotlight to the scene, render, then fiddle with it or with some other slider causes pretty predictable crashes at least on Mac OS X that are very consistent. It always crash in the same place. It's bugreported so hopefully the devs can see what happens. It crashes while DS is handling the undo stack so I guess for some reason the Advanced Spotlight has some params that when put onto the undo stack corrupts it (saving a 64 bit value as as 32 bit or a string that is longer than expected, probably something simple), than causes this.

That's really interesting. Thanks for posting and reporting it. I'll send a copy of your post to make sure that DAZ sees it. Hopefully we can get this resolved soon. As you can see it is pretty inconsistent as to who is experiencing the issue so it looks we just were unlucky, in the sense that it did not occur during testing.

Jabba

Yeah, I realised the floor was intersecting the spotlight beam until I raised the spotlight but it never actually crossed my mind at the time that this could be affecting the quality of the light on the wall.

I must confess that I'm a bit lazy when it comes to something like shadow samples... I usually use a general setting that looks good with soft shadow even when I'm using a fairly hard shadow because I've got a habit of chopping and changing shadow softness on a whim without worrying about needing to tweak the sample rate each time - but that's a personal preference of course - my personal trade-off between quality, speed and convenience, hehehe.

jakiblue

can someone link me to the thread that is about the AofA's Atmosphere cameras? I can't find it, and I STILL don't understand how to use those cameras, particularly when using them with the Advanced Ambient Light.

kyoto kid

...here you go. I hope this is the right one.

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/17366/

jakiblue

thank you Kyoto! :D

edit: ah wait. I thought there was a thread about the Cameras when they were first released, with lots of tips and stuff on how to use them.

kyoto kid

...No prob. Like the lights, I find I am getting a lot of use out of the cameras as well.

Jabba

I don't think there was an official Atmospheric Effects Cameras thread.

I recently posted a video on YouTube about the cameras after some requests... http://youtu.be/qF89ucO4WXA

...but this one doesn't look at the volume camera - I'll be doing a second video specifically for the volume camera (hopefully either today or tomorrow).

coqueyo

Totte said:

Jabba: I've found out that adding a Advanced Spotlight to the scene, render, then fiddle with it or with some other slider causes pretty predictable crashes at least on Mac OS X that are very consistent. It always crash in the same place. It's bugreported so hopefully the devs can see what happens. It crashes while DS is handling the undo stack so I guess for some reason the Advanced Spotlight has some params that when put onto the undo stack corrupts it (saving a 64 bit value as as 32 bit or a string that is longer than expected, probably something simple), than causes this.

Same problem here (undo stack) on Windows 7 64 bit, DAZ Studio 4.6.1.17 after changing ASL presets. Crash occurs sometimes while working on DS, sometimes on program exit. Simple scene: Genesis base, one primitive plane, one Advanced Spot light.

Ruphuss

AAL with 2 distant lights on the new ranger http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/31884/
if you dont want the shadows in the face turn them off in the hair
but they can have nice effects though

Totte

coqueyo said:

Totte said:

Jabba: I've found out that adding a Advanced Spotlight to the scene, render, then fiddle with it or with some other slider causes pretty predictable crashes at least on Mac OS X that are very consistent. It always crash in the same place. It's bugreported so hopefully the devs can see what happens. It crashes while DS is handling the undo stack so I guess for some reason the Advanced Spotlight has some params that when put onto the undo stack corrupts it (saving a 64 bit value as as 32 bit or a string that is longer than expected, probably something simple), than causes this.

Same problem here (undo stack) on Windows 7 64 bit, DAZ Studio 4.6.1.17 after changing ASL presets. Crash occurs sometimes while working on DS, sometimes on program exit. Simple scene: Genesis base, one primitive plane, one Advanced Spot light.
Thanks for confirmation ;-)

kyoto kid

...thanks. I had another theory, but that was all it was. So it dos look like a bug fix is in order.

Anyone running the 4.6.2.23 beta to see if the same happens there?

greys

Kyoto Kid said:

...thanks. I had another theory, but that was all it was. So it dos look like a bug fix is in order.

Anyone running the 4.6.2.23 beta to see if the same happens there?

I haven't run into it running the beta on Mac OSX Mavericks so far, but it seemed kind of sporadic who had issues in the first place.

Totte

temporal.ranger said:

Kyoto Kid said:

...thanks. I had another theory, but that was all it was. So it dos look like a bug fix is in order.

Anyone running the 4.6.2.23 beta to see if the same happens there?

I haven't run into it running the beta on Mac OSX Mavericks so far, but it seemed kind of sporadic who had issues in the first place.

For me it happens on 10.8.5 so it's not related to 10.9

greys

Totte said:

temporal.ranger said:

Kyoto Kid said:

...thanks. I had another theory, but that was all it was. So it dos look like a bug fix is in order.

Anyone running the 4.6.2.23 beta to see if the same happens there?

I haven't run into it running the beta on Mac OSX Mavericks so far, but it seemed kind of sporadic who had issues in the first place.

For me it happens on 10.8.5 so it's not related to 10.9

Sorry, I meant the 4.6.2.23 beta, I just mentioned 10.9 because operating system is usually relevant to bug reports, not to necessarily suggest a correlation between the two. :)

kyoto kid

ruphuss said:

AAL with 2 distant lights on the new ranger http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/31884/
if you dont want the shadows in the face turn them off in the hair
but they can have nice effects though

...nice composition. Night scenes can be tricky.

[Update: Snipped all the discussion about lighting suggestions as I recreated the basic scene setup (with the content I have) and am working out a possible scenario for lighting.]

[Update 2: I have a test render completed. if interested.]

Jabba

I’ve done a trio of videos on using AoA’s Atmospheric Effects Cameras.

Here’s a link to my dA journal that’s got the YouTube links in it… http://fav.me/d6t6sd6