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Ah, OK. Thanks!
OK, but the sun loads locked with no way to turn it on so my scene is rendering black. So I add my own lights to the scene then? Seems odd to have an environment dome loaded up with an image in the ambient channel, turned up to 200% but no light to illuminate the scene!
Load the image into the diffuse channel, make sure the diffuse is off, make sure the "use diffuse as ambient" is checked, should work!
If you select the root node ie. awe environment, and look in parameters/general, there is a light intensity setting that will only affect preview. I f you select lights there are options for rendering.
When you select the actual environment sphere and go to surface tab, there are more options, to turn the dome you can use horizontal offset.. Or you can selecct the awe environment and rotate the whole thing in parameters/general Yrotate;)
OK, loaded up one of the simple lighting props, rescaled it to about 250%, upped the intensity to 2.74% and so far it's looking pretty good. Still have no reflectivity in the eyes at all...
I made a moon using the Omnifreaker lightdisc with the awe area lightshader applied to it, so yea that works very well, just have to bump up intensity scale a fair bit (or scale up the disc) here used together with two environment spheres. Experiment (and read the manual lol, it's very detailed)!
Sure you can use the standard lights but wowie mentioned that the area light optimization is lost if you load ANY other light than area light and HDRI. So it will render a bit slower in that case.
I don't see a seeing "use diffuse as ambient is checked". I see Diffuse Strength, Opacity Strength, Ambient Active (which is on), Ambient Color which is mapped, Ambient strength which is set to 200% and then just below that is Fantom...
We are talking about the same starter scene located under the Shader Presets, Wowie > AWE Example Scene
You mean specular highlights of environmental reflections?
I'm guessing that's correct. You know in setting up the cornea to reflect stuff from the environment I'm getting nothing...
Darn sorry for the typo, I meant OR env. reflections;)
One area light and HDRI
OK, I saved out the scene with nothing but my figure with the applied AWE shaders that I tweaked. Now I'm going to reload DAZ Studio and start this over. I'm getting very confused. I wish there were some free light setups that were designed for the AWE shaders that I could just click and load. So many bits to think about. My brain hurts! lol
Your renders look amazing!
Wow thanks a lot! Yep there are indeed many options, it's taken me a couple of weeks of intense testing to get this far;) Don't worry you 'll eventually find that setting up light is very easy once you've gotten familiar with all the parameters!
Very thankful for the tips and time you've taken to try to help me!
You're very welcome
Aah I missed this one. That sounds like you're using the wrong shader. (Omnifreaker Uber area light?) But I guess you have figured that out by now
Nope, I don't have any of his stuff installed. Here is my latest attempt. Still getting a ring around the Iris though and can NOT figure that out at all!
This is what the environment shader looks like with the default ruins HDRI loaded. Note the name of the shader in the upper corner, check that you have the correct shader applied!
G2F with default skin and converted to awe using the Genesis2 base character preset, no adjustments:
RAMWolff, I'm assuming you're using the freebie shader and not the commercial pack? That would explain the difference in the shader used on the environment ball. On the freebie, the quickstart scene only has omnifreaker's omSimpleSurface on the environment sphere. With the commercial pack, that is replaced by my own shader - AWE EnvironmentSphere shader. Regardless, it should work roughly the same when you're just using ambient.
Since there's no gain/exposure/gamma settings on omSimpleSurface, you have to rely solely on ambient strength to control lights from the HDRI/environment sphere.
Eyes (iris/sclera/cornea/eye surface) setup will vary from figure to figure, mostly because of how the model is made.
Technically, you shouldn't need to apply the light shader to the sphere. Just use the EnvironmentSphere shader and enable ambient.
Gamma on both the AWE AreaPT and the AWE EnvironmentSphere don't control the render output, but mostly manipulates the textures plugged into both shaders.
Oh, I did not know that, sorry RAMWolff for confusing you, hope you got it sorted out!
No problem.
I haven't put as much effort on bump/displacement part of the shader as I'd like to.
Hmmm, where is the professional pack's starter scene located then? As a published artist I would be FINE with you putting EVERYTHING in child folders located in the Shader Presets folder as trying to find all the bits and pieces is a bit daunting esp since I have both the freebie and the pro packs. I'm assuming the starter scene is there under the Shader Presets> wowie folder, top level. Correct? That's what I'm using.
I think I may have found a bug. EVERY time I reload this work file scene of mine it renders very dark. When I select the Environment sphere I see the Visible in Render turned back off. When I reengage it the scene lights properly and renders normally. I DO save my scene out when I'm tweaking the skin settings so it's not like I'm closing out of DS without saving. So I would think the updated Visible in Render setting would be written but apparently it's not being written! Why that's set to off by default I have no idea but it's annoying!
By default, DIM installs it to [YOURLIBRARY]/Scenes/AWE Quickstart Scene.duf - unfortunately that's the DAZ thing.
The skin here looks better, but I'd dial down the bump map a tad more.
Eyes are difficult to set up. Largely because no recent base figure, DAZ or otherwise, comes with eye geometry that "just works". Since you're a texture artist, you have control over the maps at least :)
As for the ring, it's hard to say exactly where it comes from; many factors can be at play. Which figure is it?
Genesis 8 Male. Here is a render of the skin with the nails. I think I'm getting pretty happy with my results so far. I'll for sure look under the Scenes area, I had no idea there was anything under that section! NOPE, nothing under the Scenes folder for AWE or wowie! :-(
Quite an improvement;)
Hmm the starter scene shows for me both in the content library/scenes and in smart content/scenes. Maybe try to re install?
FUNNY me... AGAIN. I see the scene file looking right at me. I was looking for a folder! LOL Uh, I think Wowie should perhaps submit an update without Genesis 2 Female. I don't that installed so it was weird for the file to ask for it. LOL
I know, mate! Been there etc:) Good to know it's all properly installed!
Uh, this newer set up blows my shaders out of the water and not in a good way. I looked at the AWE light and it looks fine with it's settings but the renders are all coming out with some very strong lights. I even turned off the Emitter plane... still blown out and shiny too. My last render looks perfect, now I'm not sure what to do. Go back to the drawing board on the skin shaders or figure out how to set up the lights within the scene for more of a normalized brightness. Any suggestions?
Here is the same render done under the updated Environment sphere. I enabled Shadows for the Dome as things were even worse when that was disabled. I even turned off the Exposure, which was set to 100% which REALLY blew the entire scene out. So not sure what's going on here.... Compare this render with the one above. HUGE difference in realism. First render wins hands down...