Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
AoA, thank you for telling me about setting cast shadows off, I havenot used that before and it did work! I will post my pic when it is done rendering :)
your transparency is 100% better than mine turned out, did you have to adjust any settings on the light or material, and if so which ones? I am still trying to achieve that look. Thanks for posting your render :)
I had 3 Advanced Spotlights and one AAL. All 3 spots had 1000% soft shadows. The cloth was the default texture for Teddy 4 with the diffuse turned red.
To be honest, I never leave any surface or light unadjusted. Everythign gets tweaked to my liking.
Wow! Nice renders Cosmo and Matty!
Yeah. I'm pretty sure that is why the veil appeared more transparent. It's sorta like how it is hard to see in through a screen door during the day when the sun is bright and the inside of the building is in shadow. Alternatively, it is easy to see inside in the evening when both the sky and interior light are about the same intensity.
Yeah. I'm pretty sure that is why the veil appeared more transparent. It's sorta like how it is hard to see in through a screen door during the day when the sun is bright and the inside of the building is in shadow. Alternatively, it is easy to see inside in the evening when both the sky and interior light are about the same intensity.
thank you, these are my latest :)
recapture lasts over 90 minutes rendertime because of raytraced shadow with bias at 0.1 and general shading rate at 0.5 and because of the bushes left and right :)
GRRRR, more AWOL notifications!
Ah well, at least this time I didn't miss anything vital. Thought I'd better post anyway just so future notifications might actually come in.
CHEERS!
After having bought the lights a few months ago I got so busy with work that I forgot I had bought them. Pulled them out a few weeks ago and so far they are the best things I have bought for daz. I have been able to complete several renders that I had not been able to before.
I could use some help on my latest project. I am trying to get either an advanced ambient light or advanced spot light to shine through an object but in stead all I can get it to do is light up the object.
What can I do to make it shine through the object but not the object its self?
you mean a glass or something like that?
Hi AoA,
Is it possible to load HDRI texture for the Advanced Ambient Light? If it's not, can you add that in an update.
Thanks.
This is a modified version of my main promo for my latest pose set.
Camera angle was tweaked and the lights were completely redone. The image was also colour corrected in Nikon Capture NX2
All lights in the scene are the Advacned Spotlight and Advanced Ambient Light
Image is 1920x1080
Title: The Renegade
Wow that is a lovely image, brilliant lighting and love the framing of it. I'm hoping to get some time over the weekend to finally have a go at these lights especially after checking out Jabba's very helpful YouTube videos
One question though, if you're using the Ambient light to fill an area is there any preference to where its placed (is eye level or in front or behind the camera?). I've been looking at AoA's fantastic Roman Bath image and wondered where he placed the Ambient Lights.
Thanks to anyone who can help
EDIT - Just found Scott-Livenstone's tutorial which seems to have answered my question!
Cheers
Jay
the full size looks spectacular. you use NX2 much?
the full size looks spectacular. you use NX2 much?
Not that often as I prefer not to edit my renders. I use it instead of GIMP or PSP cause I use to work for Nikon and I had to learn the software. Besdies, I figure what better to edit a render then photo editing software (plus I have access to the Nik Colour Effects)
Great renders again Matty and Cosmo! Sorry for the slow reply. Been a busy week.
You do not want an object to cast shadows but you do want it to be illuminated correct? To do that just select the object, look under the parameter settings and set "Cast Shadows" to Off. Does that give you the effect you were after?
I had someone ask me about the settings used for the interior scene in on of the promos. The scene used 1 advanced ambient and one advanced spotlight. I'll post some renders showing what the scene looked like with each of the lights and some screen grabs of the settings.
Nice to hear that. Would be nice to have something to simulate indirect specular.
Question, any one know if these are compatible with the pw shaders? I grabbed the shaders in the new years sales, and only got around to trying them the other day... I tried them with the pwCatch set to 'catch shadows' but the plane ended up not rendering. Not sure if I'm doing something wrong or if there's just a compatability between the lights and the shaders.
I would have assumed that PW catch would have worked but I haven't tried it. As far as PWsurface, I did not specifically code the light to read the PWsurface parameters for flagging. I simply hadn't thought of it at the time. With that said, the lights should still work fine with PWSurface though flagging may not work.
I'm working on an update for the spotlight and there have been a few requests for PWsurface support so I am looking into it. I can't promise I can get it to work but, in theory, it should not be too much trouble to incorporate.
The update will probably be a few weeks from now. I have an update for the volume cameras I need to finish testing and get out first.
Thanks for the fast reply!
I just tried again and it looks like it might just be a problem at my end, it's not working with the default distant light either. Going to try re-downloading and reinstalling and see if that fixes it. But honestly, if it comes down to the lights or the shaders, I'll pick the lights and two rendering passes every time :)
And they're working with the pwEffect, as far as I can tell, so... hopefully it's just an issue with my pwCatch installation.
But while I'm here, I'd also like to say thanks for the A+ customer service you've given since these were released. It's rocketed any future items you release to insta-buys. :)
I think the point of PW catch is that it doesn't render the plane.
Okay, to be clear, it's also not rendering the shadows it SHOULD be catching on the plane, either. If I have the plane there without pwCatch, it renders and the shadows render. If I apply pwCatch and set it to 'catch shadows', both the plane AND the shadows vanish.
Ok I did some tests with PWCatch and AoA lights, one Ambient light and one DS spot light I got shadows, but if I used an AOA spot light I didn't get shadows I think this is because of the way shadows work on the lights.
Remember to turn shadows 'on' on the spot light, I used raytraced.
Yeah, shadow catchers need "normal" shadows to work... I was going to ask if the scripting thingummyjig could be used to make an Advanced-Lights-compatible shadow catcher, but never quite got around to it.
Any future plans for an Advanced Area-Light? Those things are magic not only in light/shadows but also amazing for environments. Have to say am lost when not using Adv Spot and Adv Ambiance. Especially being one who renders with Garibaldi, the render time difference between AoA lights and standard/Uber is considerably different
Doesn't the Adv Spotlight become an area light when you turn the Spread Angle to 360?
Point light I thought, like the light given off by a standard light globe, like a ball of light. That itself is very useful too, glad that was possible in AdvSpot :)
By Area light I mean like Uber Area light (standard in DS lights i think) is a shaped light like a tube or a plane etc, great for roof lights in a building or a lamp, or florescent tube light
Doesn't the Adv Spotlight become an area light when you turn the Spread Angle to 360?As Spyro mentioned, the difference is that an "Area Light" is technically a surface shader which emits light while the current Advanced Spotlight and Advanced Ambient light are light shaders. Different parts of the rendering pipeline, and different ways that they are used in scene design.
I tinkered a bit last year with creating an area light. What I had worked but was not any giant improvement over the Uber Area light which DS already comes with. The area light was just a rough draft so I'm pretty sure it could be improved to be faster but then I found out that there was another PA working on an area light set so I set my project aside.
Now with that said, I do have something in the works which will hopefully produce a similar effect. There is a lot left to be done and I keep running into little hurdles where my brain locks up hehe. It will probably be a while before I have anything worth showing about it :(
About PW Catch... It should, in theory, catch the shadows from the advanced lights. It might just be something simple that the lights need so that the shadow catcher will properly react. I hope to get a chance to test the lights with PW catch today.
Okay. I finally got some time to test using the Poseworks shaders with the advanced lights. Good news and bad news hehe.
The good news is, pwSurface appears to work perfectly with the lights. All features are working including flagging pwSurface using Diffuse Strength, Ambient Strength or Index of Refraction.
The only feature which may not be working as intended is pwSurface's "Visible in Occlusion" switch. I need to read a little more to check how it is intended to work.
So it looks like pwSurface is supported :) If anyone finds a situation where pwSurface and the advanced lights are not playing well together please post here and I'll see if I can track down the issue.
The bad news is that the advanced lights are not working properly with shadow catchers, including pwCatch. This is perplexing to me because, even though the lights use a different raytracing function for shadows than other lights, they do pass information on to surfaces which tell it that the rays are indeed shadows. I'll have to do some experimenting to see if I can find a solution. At this time I can't promise shadow catchers will be supported in the future, simply because I don't know what the cause is, but I will definitely try.
How does it do that ?
How does it do that ?
There is a bit of code in the shadow ray casting function that says:
"transmission" is the type of ray used for shadows. This is also used in the "Object Cast Shadows" switch where, if the user selects "Always Cast Shadows" it renames the shadow rays to "diffuse" which confuses the renderer into allowing shadow rays even though the object is set to not cast shadows.
So the peculiar part is that other things in 3delight are properly reading the rays as "transmission" (shadows) but the shadow catchers are not. I don't have access to the pwCatch or Shader Mixer shadow catcher source code so I can only experiment and try different codes until I find what, other than transmission rays, triggers them to work.