Lighting Help Needed

authorkatiepage

Hi everyone, I hope someone will be able to help.  I have purchased a pose pack for Genesis 2 female and I need to render one of the poses with lighting coming from the upper left.  The model renders with light coming from the back.  I have tried adding a point light source, I've tried adding a distant light source (though I can't seem to figure out how you tell this one what direction to come from?) but it doesn't make any difference as to what the model looks like in preview or in rendering.  I've looked up tutorials and they generally show the shiny grey looking figure, but when I load anything it's always in flesh tones.  I have no clue if this makes any kind of difference but in the tutorials you can see the light changing as you move it in Daz, but I'm not seeing any difference when I move my light source.  What am I doing wrong?

Richard Haseltine

I assume this is Daz Studio and you are rendering in Iray. By default Iray uses an HDR dome to light the scene - essentially an all-round image with a lot more information about light and dark than a regular photo, and the render takes the brightness of each point on the dome as the strength of the light from that direction. You canb use the Editor tab of the Render Settings pane to rotate the dome, which would probably do what you want, or to set the Environment Mode to Scene Only, which disables the HDR and leaves just the lights you add yourself (at which point you'd need to adjust the exposure).

The rotation of the arrow avatar controls light direction with Distant (and Spot) lights. You can also select them from the camera/view picker at top-right of the Viewport and then look through them as you adjust their angle, as with adjusting the render view.

authorkatiepage

Thank you!  I think that is what I was looking for but the program just crashed so I'll have to try again :/