Better Way to Use Lights?
One of the great things about Daz is lighting a scene. I find, however, that Preview reflects a well-lit scene, but the rendered image is far from it. In preview I'm blasting a set with Distant Light, but the render is black. Is there a better way to make preview reflect the final render?
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I'm afraid not - the preview is OpenGL and the render is 3Delight, and they are very different. To get a good-looking scene you usually need some UberEnvironment and/or Advanced Ambient lighting in addition to the regular distant light that you use for casting shadows.
I'm not sure what's causing a black render if you have a Distant Light on, though. Is it a fully enclosed set (such as a building with full walls and roof)? Sometimes this can block the light out.
Thanks. It is a roofed set, but with lots of windows. I get a nice effect from one angle (supplemented with interior spotlights) but nothing from another angle. I just probably have a wall or roof in the way. Are Uber Environments something different from regular content I'm buying?
UberEnvironment lights come free with DS and are found under Light Presets/omnifreaker/UberEnvironment2. After you load !Uberenvironment2Base you can load quality settings etc. I use 4xHi. These add a nice solid feel to your scene, but do not do hard cast shadows or specularity, so you still need at least one distant or spot that is set to "on" and shadows raytraced (you can try deep shadow maps but I do NOT recommend it, they're very slow on most machines compared to raytraced now).
Advanced Ambient and Advanced Spotlights are not free, but they're worth a look here in the store if you can afford them. They render faster than Uber lights and look really great for similar applications (for optimum results I use both in a scene), plus they have some great effects with being able to limit their radius and/or effect on a material.
These still won't light properly inside a closed box. Take the roof off if you can, hide whatever wall isn't visible off if you can't.
I had a tutorial here at one point but it degenerated into an argument between people advocating opposite things. Here's a quickie version:
http://sickleyield.deviantart.com/art/Why-Doesn-t-My-Render-Look-Like-The-Promo-327793546
There's the problem. You're seeing the preview as "well-lit" because the preview can't generate the shadows cast by objects blocking the lights you've put in the scene. When you render, the shadows are calculated properly — which means, if you have objects blocking the lights, the camera view isn't getting any light at all.
One thing that might help, try looking through one of your lights as if it were a camera. Pull down the camera selection menu, at the top of the Viewport, and select one of the lights. It's a bit more of an art than a science, but this view will help you figure out which objects will cast shadows on which other objects. Don't forget to switch back to one of your cameras before rendering.
Have you got a SkyDome in the scene as well? Could that also block the distant light?
Don't forget that you can select lights as 'cameras' in the viewport, to see just what areas a light will illuminate (if you can't see it, and if the light casts shadows, the light won't touch it). It may be my favorite Studio feature.
Hi,
I think the general problem is, that in real world you have a lot of scattered and reflected light everywhere.
DAZ is not able to create that.
So for my first tries I coupled a "distant light" with my camera as a child-object. The intensity only at 30%. That way I ever have some light to illuminate the shadowed areas. If you try to send weak distant lights from different directions at the same time, the render result looks terrible.
In the attached example the "photo" is shot quite against the direction of the light (sun). Imagine a beach and the sun is high on the sky. ;)
Thank's to the 30% light coming dirctly from my camera (like a little helping flash) you can see all details of the person.
Perhaps somebody has different better suggestions?
Andy
Au contraire, if you send very weak distant lights from all directions with the shadows turned off you can get some decent fill/bounce (although spotlights are usually better for this use in my experience). The trick is to only have shadows turned on for your primary shadowcaster(s), because in real life we don't usually perceive shadows from the photons firing all over our world in every direction, just from more powerful light sources.
You have also discovered the fact that distant-only renders look terrible with skin textures. Partly this is because in real life, this sort of light IS hard on the look of skin, but that's not usually the look we want in 3d renders. This is why I stressed earlier the use of Uber or AA lights - you really need some decent simulation of global lighting to get skin looking its best.
It's best to think of it as like setting up a photograph in a studio, where light and shadow doesn't "happen" until you make it happen. This is the most important difference between 3delight and engines like Luxrender and Octane. Never make the mistake of thinking you can set something up as a sun or a room light and good results will just happen.
Welcome to the world of 3D lighting. As you are now seeing it is one of if not the hardest things to do. Your in good hands so I'll move on. Do as I did at my start and Read every thread you can find on lighting and get tutorials for reference as you go.
Would you recommend "3D Light Master: Conquer Lighting Now" http://www.daz3d.com/3d-light-master
if the budget allows (which, right now, it does not, LOL) ??
I'd recommend getting as far as you can with free tutorials first before paying anyone for anything.
got it and TY :-)
Hi,
encouraged by the previous posts I tried these Überenvironment and ÜberAreaLight.
Very quick I succeded with the environment lighting (description in the discussion by SickleYield). And the result is almost similar to my first posted scene.
Next I tried the ÜberAreaLight. My impression now is, it doesn't matter what light source or geometry is used to light the plane. It ever produces diffuse light strating in the center of the plane.
But I'm really worried about a different effect:
If your object/character gets to near to the lightplane, it turns to dark.
For the info: I set the "falloff" (decrease of intensity with further distance) as follows:
start directly with the plane (1mm) and end up to 10m.
In the first picture (top) the middle character is 1m from the lightplane. In the middle picture he is now 0.5m. In the last picture at the bottom he is 0.2m in front of the ÜberAreaLight. There wasn't any difference wheather I had the opacity to 0 or 100%, nor what source I chose to illuminate the plane.
As a second effect you see in the top picture that is seems as if the character at the right receives more shadow and is darker as the character on the left who is more far away and this should be darker due to the "falloff".
Any ideas?
Andy
My tutorial might help you. It's for an older version of DS, but not too much has changed.
http://digilander.libero.it/maclean/DStutorial.htm
mac
Lighting is really the fun part for me. It makes the difference between wooden models and pretty cool images. It's dissappointing that there isn't a more accurate preview of lighting, but you have the spot-render camera icon and can always render stills before rendering the video (if you're doing video like me).
I'm a big fan on backlighting with hotter lights toward the camera and softer fills. I'm also a big fan of rendering in layers, foreground, middle ground elements and background. Then I can adjust brightness in After Effects, and blur out a background to simulate depth of field. Fun stuff to play with.