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@dragon
When fiddling with lights, keep it simple to start. Make a simple scene, add one light, then do a low resolution render to see what happens. Iray lighting works much like real life...aside from the numbers not really acting the way they do in real life. It's a handy exercise to turn down the lights in a large room, turn on a small light of some kind and move it around to see what happens. Play with a spotlight, bare lightbulb, and a large diffuse light (bulb in a translucent lampshade. Add one, two, then three lights with something sitting in the middle of the floor (girlfriend?). Move the lights further then closer and note the difference between the hard light from a bare bulb and a diffuse light (lampshade). There are lots of photography lighting guides on the net, read anything that's aimed at beginners.Glad to help @dragon.
@norbertz if you give the body a little turn it will help the head come around. That post taught me alot. just need to remember it.
Thats as good as its going to get and its natural. I looked at over the shoulder poses and either the pic is taken from the side, or the models body is twisted.
@Ethiopia I can't seem to figure out the way the lighting actually works in DS. It works sometimes when placing my own lights, and not others. That makes it a pain.I honestly can't say I've had a problem lighting a scene once I figured out you just have to crank the numbers up. I pretty much only use spotlights (and emissive textures) though for main lighting ... I'll sometimes use a point light for a bit of ambience if I want to control the shadows a bit more.
A lot of the time I just use an HDRI for scenes, actual lights I mostly use for product or portrait type stuff.
I think DAZs distant light is a bit stupid though if you do just want general lighting for a big outdoor scene it has its uses.
Seriously, 3 point lighting, learn to love it 😀 The only time you should be using a ton of different smaller lights is if you have a scene that actually has real light sources in it (like a modern house) and even then, physically accurate probably won't look right, and an HDRI of a similar scene will "look" better.
I'm lighting that crappy Lingerie store I blew 38 bucks (Canadian) on and am cranking up the emissivity of the existing ceiling lights and chandelier bulbs. Everything is in the thousands of Kcdm/2. I loaded one wall at a time, expanded and selected all surfaces and applied the Iray Uber shader. The carpet texture (for example) displays an obvious repeating pattern and will need a new shader applied. It's like he's still making items for Poser 4. The basics are all there but it's gonna take a lot of work.
Yeah I tend to just make my own scenes, but the couple times I've tried to use an apartment set or whatever having to redo all the textures because they're all crap, or not iray is ridiculous. I think all Daz cares about is how the screenshots look.
@ethiopia thats for the upload at least.
Maybe reup the new improved version later.
Maybe start a complaint with them over misleading images?
Lighting can be fun if you just do whatever you want, mess around, you sometimes end up with something you really like.
I was doing a scene with moonlight behind and off the the left of the character. I wanted a front light just to see a hint. Dramatic effect. I used a point light AND a spot light and cranked BOTH up to 400K right next to the figure and NOTHING. I'm like seriously? LOL
Yes, the lighting figures in Daz are weird.
IRL if you have even lighting in an inspection room at 1000Lux, everything can be seen in detail very easily.
In DS that is virtually pitch black!
:0/
I _think_ what happens with the DAZ lights is it distributes all its energy around the lightsource, so instead of being a lumen level like we'd expect from a lightbulb (like setting a light using IES values to 40w and expecting it to act like a real 40w bulb) it's spraying light rays in all directions each of which takes the average of the lumen value. This means the larger your light source, the more lumens you need to add (and with emissive objects I think it raycasts from the entire object even if you have an emission map in the slot)
Most raytracers I've used in the past separate the light value from the amount of rays the light is casting so you'd say I want 1000lumens, and I want you to cast 30,000 rays for the lighting solution.... pretty sure DAZ is combining these into one huge number.
That's totally guesswork but it _looks_ to me like that's what's going on.
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@dragon - sounds weird... i had similar before I figured out how to do it right... There can be odd texture issues, or sometimes you just need to reload DAZ. And sometimes it does what it wants 😀 I think having the light too close can cause issues as well (odd clipping planes or somesuch)
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