Advanced Light Presets for AoA's Lights question
jakiblue
Posts: 7,281
If there's a commercial link to this one, apologies as I couldn't find it. But link me if it's easier. :D
I've been looking at these and am curious as to people's thoughts who have bought them.
Are they working and looking good out of the box? Or do they need playing with?
I have to admit, I STILL don't know how to use the advanced spotlight/ambient/distant products properly, so was wondering if these would be of help to me.
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There is no Thread which you meant. I need help myself.
LOL thanks Jaderail. I was sure DT would have had a commercial thread for them.
I'm just really curious about how they are working and what they look like
They are working very well and I like them very much. They are ready made light setups, that saves a lot of time.
Almost like having "Make an art" button :)
ah excellent, Artini, thank you! :D
Below is an example DS 4.6 Pro render of Stephanie 6 with one of many light setups available - DTAL-ThreePoint
Rendering Time: 9 minutes 54 seconds
Another render. This time with DTAL-DistantP preset.
Rendering Time: 1 minute 28 seconds
u must have a really fast processor. WOW.
Age of Armour's Advanced Lights are faster.
They should be working well out of box without any tweaking, but if you want to take full advantage of the speed increases the lights produce you will have to mess with them. Each of the presets imports in what could be considered "compatibility mode", meaning the lights use shader hitmode etc by default which is the slow option but also the option that will produce results people expect. Even with shader hitmode they will render faster than equivalent presets using DAZ's built in lights with UberEnvironment and they render with the same quality. If you have used either set of DAZ Dimension Lights the results are comparable, though there is a bit more creativity going on with these presets both with color and with light placement. All of my lights should be calibrated brightness wise to work with whatever environments or characters you throw at them within reason, provided the shaders of said environments and characters are more or less calibrated for brightness as well (most are).
Advanced Light Presets for AoA's Lights are just the settings/positions for Age of Armour advanced lights,
but there are quite a lot of them. They are useful for fast preparing the scene for rendering.
thanks for all the information everyone! I'ts a great help. :D :D
Both images were rendered on i7 processor 2.8 GHz with 8GB of RAM.
Greetings,
I have to admit, I don't understand these lights.
When I add them to a scene, they show up...somewhere in the air.
I haven't really made sense out of them at all. If I look through the lights in the Camera view, they're also upside down.
They work okay if I render without an interior surrounding them, but as soon as I put an interior around my characters...the lights pretty much disappear. Then if I zoom out with the Perspective view, I can see the lights way up in the sky, move them down into the room, but...I don't know if I should be pointing them at my characters, or at the walls to act as bounce lights.
As for 'Primitive' hitmode, unfortunately it fails terribly on shadowed faces, as it treats the entire eyelash as a solid thing for the purposes of casting shadows. This makes a big black splotch under the eye. With 'Shader', it's a softened splotch, at least. :) It's faster, I'll grant, but the side effects are problematic.
I'm working my way through this, but I'm not having the luck with trying to use these lights on interiors.
-- Morgan
When I mentioned them working with any scene "within reason" I was basically referring to interior scenes or those which produce a high volume of shadows (something like Enchanted Forest with lots of canopy). Any sort of interior setting is going to restrict lighting a great degree as it would in real life, for example even in the middle of the day my house is dark inside unless I turn on extra lights (these sort of interior lights have to be made specifically for the interior setting). The small scale spotlight presets should function relatively well indoors provided they are not blocked by walls, they are intended as portrait type and are setup in a way that would be possible in a physical photo studio. These may need to be moved around to fit your interior but be weary of the three point setups as rim lights risk over blowing backgrounds, the large scale spotlight and distant presets are not intended to be moved around at all. If you are going for renders reflecting the idea of outside sunlight lighting up an interior through open windows you would have to take advantage of indirect lighting, which isn't hard just render intensive.
This is the reasoning for the flagging settings. The intention is that you are able to flag certain surfaces to use shader hit mode while the rest use primitive. You're able to set the light to use primitive by default, then flag the shaders for your face, neck and hair etc to use shader mode. That will give you the primitive speed increase over your whole scene while only using the more render intensive shader mode on problematic surfaces with transparency (or those receiving shadows from transparent surfaces).
I am getting results that I am happy with if I use Gamma Correction ON and Gamma 2.2. The shadows are less dense when using Gamma Correction, and I prefer that. Some images using the distant light presets still seem a little underlit to me. I can either increase the light settings before rendering or adjust brightness and contrast of the render in an image editor later.
Here are some examples I did today using the Gamma Correction settings I mentioned. The only modification I made to the DT Advanced Light presets was to flag the hair for alt samples. That probably wasn't even necessary. These images are as rendered (they have no postwork.) The image of the girl uses DTAL-SimpleA. The skin uses AoA SSSS, and this image rendered in less than 5 minutes. I was very impressed with the speed. The Metro Hotel uses DTAL-DistantC.
I think DT did a good job on the icons for the presets. As I get familiar with them, I am learning how to better estimate the kind of contrast, light, and shadows the preset will create. In some cases, I don't like the strong color cast in the light. It is easy to adjust the light color to taste.
I learned some things from these presets, too. I had not thought of using a spotlight as a bright distant point light before. That was interesting to learn.
Greetings,
Okay, that makes sense. I may just have been loading the wrong light set for my interior scene. I'll dig through them some more.This is the reasoning for the flagging settings. The intention is that you are able to flag certain surfaces to use shader hit mode while the rest use primitive. You're able to set the light to use primitive by default, then flag the shaders for your face, neck and hair etc to use shader mode. That will give you the primitive speed increase over your whole scene while only using the more render intensive shader mode on problematic surfaces with transparency (or those receiving shadows from transparent surfaces).OH! Dammit, I knew about the flagging concept, but I completely spaced and didn't put 2.5 and 2.5 together. That probably would have sped up the epic render I've got running on my work machine right now...damn.
Thank you very much for these pointers, hopefully they'll help me wrap my head around these presets!
-- Morgan
I just have a couple quick questions.
I noticed how the portrait-style lights have Simple, SpecAccent, and 3Point. Are any of these meant to be used together? Like Simple + SpecAccent, or do the SpecAccent lights already contain full illumination?
/edit
I may have just answered my own question. I noticed the SpecAccent load w/ 2 lights with illumn on, and 2 set as spec only, so they're designed to be used by themselves I think.
Also, is there an easy way to change which side the shadow is on? I saw there are no 'reverse' setups. Can I just give all the lights a negative/positive x-axis equivalent to what they load in at by default?
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Advanced Distant Light, Advanced Ambient Light - Age of Armour
Advanced Light Presets for AoA's Lights - DimensionTheory (modified)
Kerya, that is too cute :-).
Thank you! :)
Just got the Light Presets, so far so good using them.
But how do you guys get the hang of the spotlights?, getting a little Vertigo here :roll:
My livestreams are never perfect, but hopefully still helpful... http://youtu.be/8-aMSQSgEg0 (first five minutes are me wittering on about hitmodes - spotlight starts around five minutes into livestream)
My livestreams are never perfect, but hopefully still helpful... http://youtu.be/8-aMSQSgEg0 (first five minutes are me wittering on about hitmodes - spotlight starts around five minutes into livestream)
Thanks for the link.
The comment was about the Spot lights being Up Side Down with looking through them to aim, does you video talk about the preset setup?
Thanks for the link.
The comment was about the Spot lights being Up Side Down with looking through them to aim, does you video talk about the preset setup?
The spotlights in the presets are configured as point lights. There is no need to aim them. This is explained in this thread on page 1, here.
Kerya, absolutely gorgeous!
:lol:
Thank you!
Adorable Kerya, love it!
So, if I get the light presets, are they just click on them and it loads the lights it needs from the package I already have installed? I have the Advanced Lights, but I find myself not really able to position them how I want or really know what to use.
If I get the pre-sets do I just click on something and it loads like a "light set". Sorry if this sounds rambling and dumb, but I don't understand what these do. I am used to using light sets, find what you want and double click. It loads the lights. You can tweak as needed or use out of the box. Does that make sense?
I've been on a light buying spree lately, since many of them were on sale, but really what I want is a good quality light set that I can just click and add b/c I'm not good at lights at all. I do have the original Lantios Day and Night pack, but that doesn't give me the kind of light I'm looking for.
I have the Light Dome Pro-R and it's nice, but the eyes are too shiny looking in the final renders; like uber reflective and creepy at times LOL. I have the DT Cloud 9 that came out a few years ago and it has some nice light, but sometimes the shadows are weird looking and I don't know why. Some of them came out fuzzy and jagged and odd even on high quality everything.
I liked the Advanced Lights, but the shadows were too harsh and I think it was b/c I have no clue how to set up the lights to do what I want them to. Yes, I read the book and watched videos, but really when it comes to me adding lights on my own, it's always a disaster :(
Thanks!
+1
Just bought these presets and have discovered what was discussed earlier - they are not ideal for indoors. Most of my scenes are interiors and have walls. These lights generally load outside the walls and moving them is not easy. In fact it was easier to load the original AoA lights individually and configure them from scratch.