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Thanks for the cheer :) The shaders have passed quality assurance and should be released in about a week and a half.
Are you going to give us any sneak peaks or hints?
...any news on the Install Error front? Holding off on updating until I hear it has been fixed.
You mean this?
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/27675/P1404
...missed that, lazy ebots again.
Are you going to give us any sneak peaks or hints?
He just did. He told us its a shader.
Hi Age of Armour,
I have a suggestion for the Advanced Spotlight, it would be nice if we could have tile settings for the Gobo. This would be useful in the case where one increases the spread angle to cover a large surface with Gobo Caustics. In that case, the caustic lines can be quite far apart if a large spread angle is used.
By tiling the Gobo we can cover a large surface and still have caustic lines that are close enough together by tiling.
There's another spotlight in the store (don't remember its name right now) that allows one to do this, but it has other shortcomings which make it unusable for me.
Hi Zig Zag,
I agree that can be handy. Have you tried the Gobo Scale setting? Adjusting it to values less than 100% will cause the projected image to tile.
Hi Zig Zag,
I agree that can be handy. Have you tried the Gobo Scale setting? Adjusting it to values less than 100% will cause the projected image to tile.
Cool! Easter Egg. :lol:
Hi Zig Zag,
I agree that can be handy. Have you tried the Gobo Scale setting? Adjusting it to values less than 100% will cause the projected image to tile.
Hi Age of Armour,
Well yes, you are correct, the Gobo Scale setting allows the texture to tile. Doh!
:-)
:) It's one of those things which isn't all that obvious so don't feel bad for missing it.
When I render in DS, these suckers are still my go-to lights, but there's something I haven't even thought about until now.
If I set an AA light to diffuse only, or specular only, am I still getting the ambient effects, or does a light have to be fully set to 'on' for ambient to take effect?
Also, what about multiple AA lights in a scene (say like an AAL for a global fill and a Adv Spot for a color splash).. am I getting more ambient than is needed?
You will still get ambient light and occlusion when using Diffuse Only. Actually, you will with secular only also but the Occlusion is not exactly noticeable unless you have a very dull surface.
You can indeed have multiple advanced lights in a scene. As you mentioned, having a spotlight for your key light and an ambient for the fill usually gives very good looking results.
The light intensities do add to each other though. That is not a bad thing but just keep it in mind and adjust accordingly. If you have 2 ambient lights, illuminating the same area, and each is at 100% strength, then you have the equivalent of 1 advanced light at 200% strength.
But using more than one can be handy. Let's say you have a dusk scene, where one ambient light is blue/purple and covers the whole scene to simulate the dusk skylight. And in your scene you have a building with a bright red neon sign... Near the sign you may want to put another ambient light but this time set it to red red and give it a short radius so it only casts a red glow on things near the neon sign.
This image was done using many advanced ambient lights, of various strengths and colors, in the scene.
Both of these are done with Advanced lights. The HDRI map on the second one is not used for lighting. It does use AoAs enviro dome though from Metalized Glass.
Thanks for the explanation AoA. :)
Great stuff Matty!
it's very nice that we can have shadows on shadowcatchers now
but I cant colour them (the shadows)
I tried with the Yosemite plane
The lights are sending shadow color information to catchers but the catcher may not be set up to read it. Catchers are fairly simple but can still be a little tricky in some cases. For instance it is super simple to make a shadow catcher in Shader Mixer which will receive colored shadows but it looks a bit weird when multiple lights with shadows are used.
I'll get in contact with DT and see if the two of us can put our minds together and work something out.
I'm having an issue, and I haven't been able to find an answer on it yet, so I thought I'd try asking here. When trying to flag surfaces to use shader hitmode instead of primitive hitmode, it doesn't seem to actually be, well, doing it, for the advanced spotlight and the advanced distant light. The ambient light works as expected.
I know the surfaces are flagged correctly, because settings like "don't illuminate" work just fine- but when setting the distant or spotlight to "use shader hitmode", I'm still getting shadows from transmapped surfaces like primitive hitmode is on. Not sure if I'm missing something or not.
ETA: If I set the light to use shader hitmode on -everything- it works as expected. I'm only having a problem with flagging surfaces.
ETA 2: Didn't realize the surfaces receiving shadows needed to be flagged as well. Got this figured!
...was on another thread where the topic of Irradiance and GI came up and someone mentioned that it is something which isn't a feature of the AA light like it is with Poser lighting and UE..
Is this something we might see in the future?
...BTW been enjoying working with flagging lights and surfaces.
Now I can finally create interior scenes with a backdrop that is visible through a window or other opening and only flag the backdrop to be illuminated by a Distant and Ambient light without it affecting lighting on the foreground elements of the scene.
Yes :) I have been actively working on some environmental and bounce lighting setups. Right now the indirect lighting part is faster than Uber but the environment/HDRI part is not so I want to work on it more.
...HDRI/GI seem to be memory intensive no matter what lighting system is used because of all the calculations required.
Different question:
did somebody get AprilYSH hair to look nice with Advanced Ambient lights?
Other hairs look really nice, but April's are looking like plastic.
I tried her options with hiShine, midShine and loShine - the loShine being the best of them, but they are still not looking good.
Post what your refering too cause I have several of her hairs and they render well for me with the AoA lights
OK - By the Campfire: the hair of the winged lady is Xinxue hair - I got away with using the "dull" option and because the picture is dark. Else the back of the head looked like a helmet.
None of my advanced lights are casting shadows anymore but I'm not aware of any recent updates that would cause this, unless DIM is doing stuff on the fly that is screwing with my set-up.
False alarm... just noticed that the raytrace depth in my render settings had been nudged down to zero (can't remember doing it) - I gave it a value again and everything back to normal.
"move along, nothing to see here" *cough cough* :red:
:)
As if nobody else would ever conceivably do such a thing.
I've actually been bitten by the render settings change myself. One can change in Preferences/Scene whether to save the render settings when saving the scene (and whether to ignore them when loading a scene). I chose to save them and not ignore them but never got into the habit of checking them when I load up an older scene.
Using the Advanced Distant Light I have been able to flag objects that have certain Diffuse or Ambient values.
However, when switching it to Index of Refraction the surfaces do not get flagged as expected. For example I set a surface to IOR of 1.0% and then Illuminate only when IOR=1.0% and the surface would not get illuminated.
Anything I am missing ?
IoR is a number, but the flagging value is a percentage - so IoR 1 is 100% as the flagging value in the light, or 1% as the flagging value in the light is IoR .01 on the surface.