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hi Age of Armour
I was playing around with the shadowcatcher from Yosemite environment and
ADL is ok with shadows but ASL does none
are you able to produce a shadowcatcher that works with all your lights ?
...or change ASL so it casts shadows on it ?
the shadow on the board is from the spotlight
the shadow on the tree from the distant light
I raised the shadowcatcher question a while ago and once the issue was figured out AoA said it would be in the next update. The ADL came out after that so I assume that's why it has the fix and works, where as the spotlight hasn't had an update since yet, but I'd assume it's in the works.
In what ways did flagging help with your renders? I ask just out of simple curiosity. Also, it may help others by providing examples of how the feature can be used.ok Take the Bird Pic, I had a lot of Transmapped leaves and DOF so I thought what is the point of having high AO. So all the background have a diffuse strength of 99% so I have one Ambient and Distant light Flagged for Diffuse of 99%. I then had one set of lights flagged for the foreground at Diffuse of 100% and then one set Flagged for Garibaldi. By doing so I saved many Hours on the render getting the same results.
The other pic was basically the same one set for Diffuse 100%, One set for the Plants as I had Uber Surface Translucency engaged and again they don't need much AO if any at all. Just doing that saved so much time in rendering it wasn't funny. If I was to leave it I think it would have taken a couple of days to render instead of 6 hours. I then had one set of lights set to Garibaldi again and lastly one set for the figure as the Diffuse strength is at 80% due to Uber Surface SSS being applied.
Thanks for posting the flagging info Szark, and I'm glad to hear it was able to have that significant saving on render time.
I raised the shadowcatcher question a while ago and once the issue was figured out AoA said it would be in the next update. The ADL came out after that so I assume that's why it has the fix and works, where as the spotlight hasn't had an update since yet, but I'd assume it's in the works.
Yes. Temporal.Ranger is correct. The distant is updated but the other two lights are not. I have the update done but was delayed submitting them as I had another idea on how to handle the shadow catching. However, after thinking about it more I now feel the first way is the best haha. I'll try to get that update out soon.
My please and I forgot on the bird image I needed a backlight so with Flagging I was able to exclude the background and just backlight the foreground.
Now I am playing with the EZ Cam foglight category lights. UE2 was a staple light for me and I will still use it but not as much now.
The Driver 3
You do a great job with car renders, but then you would, wouldn't you? :)
Hello,
I've got a single problems with these lights (which are awesome indeed !), it's that it's casting unwanted shadows on hair's skullcaps, giving the result you can see on the small picture i've attached.
The only fixes I've found so far are 1) to disable cast shadows for the hair, but it doesn't look great overall on the lower parts of the hair (front tails, etc), and/or 2) set opacity to 0% for the skullcap in surfaces tab, but it doesn't work well on all hairs.
can somebody help with this ? i'm 100% sure there are more smart fixes for that problem than the two I've been using, but I couldn't figure it out yet.
Thanks :)
If the lights are spots or distant lights then turn down the shadows strength...well that is what I do. ;)
might be primitive hitmode casting a shadow (if using primitive hitmode) - if so then try shader hitmode for the skin as it works for transmaps when primitive doesn't
Thank you both for the help :) , I was trying to use flags on the skullcap, but it doesn't work. I've tried with shadows reduced to 20 %, but it's still giving the same result for me, that's strange ?
Hitmode for the spotlight is already set to shader it seems, so I have really no clue.
Well, I've been making tests with different characters textures in the meantime, it seems this problems only happens with V4 textures. No problem with G2F textures, so it seems related to UV/textures.
Still no idea with it does it, but slowly progressing :)
Try selecting the hair.
Go into Surfaces pane. See if there is a separate surface for the skullcap. Set the Opacity slider to zero.
Hope this helps.
Thanks Tjohn, that's what I was doing before but like I said, it doesn't work well on all hairs (like the one I used here in the small picture).
It seems there is something with the Victoria 4 UV, about that issue, but I have no idea about what to do.
One portrait snapped with the same lights on a V6 Uv set, while i'm at it :) :
I've never seen that happen, yet.
She looks happier with the V6 UV though. :)
Yes hehe, that's why I made her smile :) ,
So I'd be the only one with that problem, too bad :red: . I guess I'll do with the no shadows/opacity zero trick, until I've found what's going on with the V4 textures.
The hit mode applies to the surface the shadow is falling on, not to the surface that is casting the shadow. It's the face that needs Shader Hit mode.
Yes hehe, that's why I made her smile :) ,
So I'd be the only one with that problem, too bad :red: . I guess I'll do with the no shadows/opacity zero trick, until I've found what's going on with the V4 textures.
...have you tried applying the base SS shader to the V4 map. I believe that the V6 maps may already include SSS (some of the gen 5 ones are set up for SSS as well).
Here is a scene I did using the skin map from Fabiana's Druscilla Goth (V4) on a Genesis character with the Base SSS applied, and some setting changes to SSS colour and depth using Dimension Theory's SS Toolbox. Lighting is one AAL, one ADL and one low intensity ASL set at 360° spread to add a bit of fill light to the face. All lights set to Shader hitmode due to transmaps in the plants,hair, and eyelashes.
...have you tried applying the base SS shader to the V4 map. I believe that the V6 maps may already include SSS (some of the gen 5 ones are set up for SSS as well).
Here is a scene I did using the skin map from Fabiana's Druscilla Goth (V4) on a Genesis character with the Base SSS applied, and some setting changes to SSS colour and depth using Dimension Theory's SS Toolbox. Lighting is one AAL, one ADL and one low intensity ASL set at 360° spread to add a bit of fill light to the face. All lights set to Shader hitmode due to transmaps in the plants,hair, and eyelashes.
That's an excellent render, KK.
...thanks.
Forgot to mention that the candles use the SSS Goop Shaders as well (gives them more of a "beeswax & honey" look). I also used the new Easy Volume camera with the ADL flagged for the effect.
The Ambient and Distant lights used the same colour settings as shown in the 7th example of AoA's "Light Setups", with the intensity for Advanced Ambient set at 80% and Advanced Distant Light at 100% to give more the look of hazy mid-morning sunlight.
Thank you for the tip, didn't realize that indeed :) , but this means I need 2 different spot lights, right ? I mean, 1 for the hair only, and one for the character and scene ?
Thank you for the tip, I tried that and got mixed results indeed. This seemed to work on 2 of the V4 textures (the skullcap trace on face disappeared), but not on a 3rd one, not sure why.
Will use this a workaround anyway :) , thanks again.
Nice picture btw :)
Thanks for posting the great renders Matty and Kyoto.
Thank you for the tip, didn't realize that indeed :) , but this means I need 2 different spot lights, right ? I mean, 1 for the hair only, and one for the character and scene ?
The hitmode on the skin is the only thing I can think of that would cause a dark area like that. It reacting differently with the two skin textures is plum weird though!
Another thing that's weird is if you set the opacity on the skull cap to 0%, as tjohn points out, it should not cast a shadow... no matter what hitmode the lights are in. So if it is still there then something is not working right.
What hair and textures are you using? Maybe I have them and can run some tests.
I love your lights!
(Full credits for the picture - as they are a bit looooong:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/40087/#594668 )
The Dark Crystal
...Very nicely done, you really captured Kira very well.
...Very nicely done, you really captured Kira very well.
Thank you! :)
The hitmode on the skin is the only thing I can think of that would cause a dark area like that. It reacting differently with the two skin textures is plum weird though!
Another thing that's weird is if you set the opacity on the skull cap to 0%, as tjohn points out, it should not cast a shadow... no matter what hitmode the lights are in. So if it is still there then something is not working right.
What hair and textures are you using? Maybe I have them and can run some tests.
Thanks for the help Age of Armour,
About the skullcap with 0% opacity, sorry I was perhaps not clear, it's actually the "fix" I was using when having this problem (one of the 2 fixes), but no, of course, I don't get the skullcap shadow issue with opacity set to 0% for the skullcap surface.
I did some tests again today, and this is really related to character textures it seems, as the spot light is always set to shader hitmode anyway (and setting it with flags matching skin settings doesn't change anything). Basically, it happens on all V4 textures saved as duf, as far as I can tell (using the Victoria 4 for gen2 by Mallenlane), and on all hairs using skullcaps (in the small pic posted above, it was Ariana Elite texture, and Sweet flower hair).
As soon as I switch to gen2/V6 UV, the problem disappears. Using your subsurface shaders does help on these V4 textures, like I reported in my previous post, after Kyoto Kid advised to try it, but it doesn't work on all textures for some reasons.
Thanks again,
Just a quick update : Same problem happens with Gen2/V6 textures, when using the "hss" versions. So the only situation where it doesn't happen is when textures are sss it seems.
Are you using the latest version of the lights? I know the last update fixed an issue with the lights sometimes using primitive hitmode instead of shader even when shader hitmode was set, which seems to be what you're getting.
Maybe try re-downloading and installing to make sure?
From memory, the workaround was to load a plain white square image (1px x 1px worked fine) into the image map loader on the opacity strength slider, which would force shader hitmode for that surface (in this case, the face). So if you are using an old version of the lights, the difference between skins might just be caused by whether the skin has a map there or not.
I may also be completely wrong, but it seems to fit?
Still love these lights and won't use anything else! Would really love something comparable to the omarealight in this range. *bats lashes*
Anyway, here's a scene I did last week using one AAL and three ASLs. Also the EZ volume cam on very low settings just to get a bit of light scattering back into the background (after a bit of testing, I found I liked that effect more than having a distant light flagged only to hit the background.