Advanced Ambient, Spot & Distant Lights [Commercial]

sioc · October 2013

Perhaps brokered artists have different versions of DS to us mere mortals.

Just activate Show Hidden Properties

Spit · October 2013

I have them both on mine and I'm nobody special, used DIM, and no metadata went in the CMS.

Jabba · October 2013

sioc said:
Perhaps brokered artists have different versions of DS to us mere mortals.

Just activate Show Hidden Properties
Thank you, thank you, thank you, that went clean out of my mind... I blame it on being Sunday morning - coffee now on the go, hehehe

Spit · October 2013

sioc said:
Perhaps brokered artists have different versions of DS to us mere mortals.

Just activate Show Hidden Properties

Bingo

When did 'Show Hidden Properties' move to the menu? in 4.6? 'Show Hidden Sub Items' has taken its place now--whatever it is.

sioc · October 2013

@Spit: re-import just the Advanced Ambient Light one manually And for ‘Show Hidden Properties’ move to the menu, hummm I'd say since DS v4 ;)

Jabba · October 2013

So far, so good. I thought it might be useful to also show the process i used rather than just post the final image...

in case too big for forum, here's links to on dA - the process http://fav.me/d6pepwy and final image http://fav.me/d6peqob

kyoto kid · October 2013

...cool. never thought of doing that. My one concern is if you have a character in the scene, do you render them with the fog camera or the volume camera layer?

Lissa_xyz · October 2013

Very nice Jabba, and thanks for the mini-tut. Where's the spotlight positioned? Is it inside the back room facing out of the door, or is it in the front room facing into the back room? I'm assuming it's in the backroom with the warm ambient, but hey, you never know.

Age of Armour · October 2013

Doh! I should have been a bit more clear about those screen shots. They were meant to address two different issues. The renderizer and Shadow type settings are meant to be hidden, Changing the renderizer probably wont cause any issues but setting the shadows (using that menu) will cause the light to just render black. I tried removing that setting but DS wouldn't let me hehe.

The screen shot showing just the light color and light intensity was to illustrate what it looks like if the paramater, definition and attribute files are not installed or are installed to an incorrect location as a few people have reported.

Sorry about that. I probably should have made those two different posts since the issues are unrelated.

And everyone please say thank you to Josh and Carl at DAZ for coming into work on their day off and getting the downloads to show up :)

Renpatsu · October 2013

Age of Armour said:
Hi everyone,
I've contacted another person at DAZ who has a habit of working long hours and weekends to see if he could get the download to show up for non-DIM users. He is not on regularly scheduled to work weekend though so I am not sure if he will be able to address it until Monday.

I received a few notices about install issues. If you only see 2 parameters on the light then it did not install correctly. I don't yet know why the installer is working most of the time but not installing properly in a few cases but there is a manual fix.

There are 4 files which do all the work of the light. Because of how DS reads shader scripts, these files must be in the Admin User's AppData folder, not the Content or My Library folder.

Under C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Roaming\DAZ 3D\Studio4\scripts\support\AgeOfArmour\Light
there needs to be:
AoA_AOLightAttribs.dsa
AoA_AOLightDef.dsa
AoA_AOLightParams.dsa

Under C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Roaming\DAZ 3D\Studio4\shaders\AgeOfArmour\Light
there needs to be a file named AoA_AOLight.sdl

Those are for Windows users. I'm not sure what the equivalent of AppData is for a Mac. Any Mac users want to chime in? ...

Support folder on Mac:

/Applications/DAZ 3D/DAZStudio4 64-bit/scripts/support/AgeOfArmour/Light

Shader folder on Mac:

/Applications/DAZ 3D/DAZStudio4 64-bit/shaders/AgeOfArmour/Light

Note: The directory structure may vary, depending on where you installed DAZ Studio, e.g. I got the DAZ Studio application (and Carrara for that matter) in a "DAZ 3D" subfolder within "Applications".

Age of Armour · October 2013

Thanks Renpatsu,

I appreciate you posting that. Hopefully, because of the less broken up structure of the Mac folders, there will not be any install issues for Mac users.

Age of Armour · October 2013

That's a really cool image Jabba101.

You may have used it on your render already but I thought I would point out that a scene like yours is a prime candidate for using Primitive hitmode on the lights. I don't think there would be any difference at all in the final image but it would probably render significantly faster than shader hitmode... Something like 40 or 50% faster when using volumes.

Jabba · October 2013

Vaskania said:
Very nice Jabba, and thanks for the mini-tut. Where's the spotlight positioned? Is it inside the back room facing out of the door, or is it in the front room facing into the back room? I'm assuming it's in the backroom with the warm ambient, but hey, you never know.Ah, never made that clear, oops... spot is in the back room quite near the ceiling, pointing down out the doorway into the foreground.
...cool. never thought of doing that. My one concern is if you have a character in the scene, do you render them with the fog camera or the volume camera layer?

Rendering with fog or normal camera essential, but with both if you want the volume to interact with the character (will often create godrays as charcter shadow interacts with volume in lightbeam) - but might be worth switching hair off to save a bit of render time with volume cam.

Jabba · October 2013

Age of Armour said:
That's a really cool image Jabba101.
You may have used it on your render already but I thought I would point out that a scene like yours is a prime candidate for using Primitive hitmode on the lights. I don't think there would be any difference at all in the final image but it would probably render significantly faster than shader hitmode... Something like 40 or 50% faster when using volumes.

Forgot about Primitive Hitmode, I'll be sure to try that real soon, hehehe.

kyoto kid · October 2013

Jabba101 said:
Vaskania said:
Very nice Jabba, and thanks for the mini-tut. Where's the spotlight positioned? Is it inside the back room facing out of the door, or is it in the front room facing into the back room? I'm assuming it's in the backroom with the warm ambient, but hey, you never know.Ah, never made that clear, oops... spot is in the back room quite near the ceiling, pointing down out the doorway into the foreground.
...cool. never thought of doing that. My one concern is if you have a character in the scene, do you render them with the fog camera or the volume camera layer?

Rendering with fog or normal camera essential, but with both if you want the volume to interact with the character (will often create godrays as charcter shadow interacts with volume in lightbeam) - but might be worth switching hair off to save a bit of render time with volume cam.
...however then the character wouldn't also be lit by the ambient light. If you just render them with the single spotlight , wouldn't they look a bit "off" compared to the rest of the scene when the two render layers are composited together?

Lissa_xyz · October 2013

You'd render the character with both, as he said, so you'd have the character interacting with the rays. The ambient light would be in the render with the fog camera.

It would go something like this if I'm reading this right:

Render 1- 2x Ambient, spotlight, character, fog camera
Render 2- spot light, character, volume camera

I need to find something in my arsenal with a good open doorway/archway to test this on (I'm sick of messing with texture based windows).

Jabba · October 2013

Vaskania said:
It would go something like this if I'm reading this right:
Render 1- 2x Ambient, spotlight, character, fog camera
Render 2- spot light, character, volume camera

Yeah, that's it :)

Lissa_xyz · October 2013

Here's my.. err... attempt. I almost wanted to adjust tones to remove the whitewash, but I had to keep reminding myself that I purposefully rendered through a fog camera. >.<</p>

Muon Quark · October 2013

Spit said:
Muon Quark said:
Spit said:
Muon Quark said:
Two ambient lights. One set to specular only. The other left the was it was right out of the box except for ao samples and ao max error. I raised ao samples to 160 and lowered ao max error to .1. Wanted to clear up the skin a little more.

That is really really lovely. Amazing when you think about it with only one diffuse.

Thanks. :-)

They work similar to the uberenvironment2 but they are faster and have more options IMO.

I absolutely adore the mushrooms in your picture above. May I ask where you got them?

The mushrooms are new by Sveva over at the R place. There's stuff in there that only works in Poser I think and I forgot to play with the two little 'lights'. But onward anyway. Lovely shroom shapes. Lunchlady also put out a pose set for V4 that goes with it and contains poses for SQUEE!

[Hope I'm not in trouble now.]

Thanks!

Kattey · October 2013

Age of Armor, please give my thanks to the person who fixed the download!

Did it install correctly if I see this?
This is Lights tab/All (minus usual stuff like translations, render priority and such). The list ends up with "flag surface shader with" and "if surface is flagged" parameters.

Age of Armour · October 2013

Yep, that should be installed correctly :)

There have just been a few people who were using the DIM installer and, for some reason it wasn't placing all the files in the right place.

Kattey · October 2013

I was installing manually and I placed those four files into respective folders of my main DS 4.6 place, which is C:\DS45 folder, not into something\something\roaming\something. Is there a way to check if they _work_ correctly? Or if those parameters show than it is working correctly already?

It renders (and well), that is for sure, in default state.

Age of Armour · October 2013

Yeah. If you see more than just 2 parameters and the light appears to render (and has occlusion) then everything should be fine.

Kattey · October 2013

Age of Armour said:
Yeah. If you see more than just 2 parameters and the light appears to render (and has occlusion) then everything should be fine.

Yay! :)

Age of Armour · October 2013

Spit said:
Here's one. I found the light easy to use. I didn't get this render as dark as I wanted. On the other hand I prefer brighter images. Probably why I rarely do 'night' scenes and it shows. Anyway.....
Momo twiddled a bit and thinking 'deep'ly.

This was posted a while back but I wanted to say I really liked your image and point out something about brightness.

There are several ways to get the AO darker or have more contrast:

One is to increase the AO max distance. this will cause things further away to have more influence on the shadowing. By default, the light sees stuff that is 250cm away and says "Eh... That wall 3 meters away is too far off for a soft shadow to have much of an effect." That saves on calculation and works pretty well in most cases but isn't always the best when the scene has a lot of big objects or buildings which should definitely cast shadows on things farther than 250cm away. You can increase the Max AO distance or set it to 0 to override the distance cutoff (Slower).

Increasing the AO strength is a fast way to get AO with more contrast. You can also try changing the AO distribution mode though the default, Cosine, is usually more contrasty than uniform.

Lowering the cone angle creates sharper AO shadows. Lowering it can help make the darkness differences between corners and convex areas more abrupt. anything below about 65 starts looking more obviously computer generated to me but it might not in every situation.

By using a mixture of all these settings you can get some different effects and there are no rules. Just set the light to low samples so it renders fast and try adjusting these settings an see if any of them get you closer to the look you wanted.

Oh one rule maybe hehe. The cone angle and AO max distance settings don't always play well with each other if two ambient lights have those parameters set differently on each light and their illumination is overlapping. Most of the time it is not a big deal but sometimes there might be some noticeable weirdness in the render.

I hope that helps... Not that your render needed it. I thought it looked great.

Spit · October 2013

Age of Armour said:
Spit said:
Here's one. I found the light easy to use. I didn't get this render as dark as I wanted. On the other hand I prefer brighter images. Probably why I rarely do 'night' scenes and it shows. Anyway.....
Momo twiddled a bit and thinking 'deep'ly.