Now for the spotlights in Studio...
1.) Go into your Lights tab.
2.) Click on the box at the top left of the tab where you did before to add your distant light. Click on "Add a new light" at the bottom of that box, and choose SPOTLIGHT.
3.) You can rename your spotlight if you wish. Select "Apply default settings." Once you've done that, you will now have the settings visible for the spotlight, which will look like this :
Please note, that if you add the spotlight FIRST, and do NOT have any other lights in the scene, then when you first add the new spotlight, your scene window will go completely black. This is perfectly okay, and totally normal, I promise you did NOT just screw up your scene. The light just hasn't been positioned yet is all.
Now... I'm not going to repeat the settings that I went over in the last post - the same holds true for those on a spotlight also. But I will cover the new settings that the spotlights have. For the moment, ignore the black scene window if you did this without adding a distant light first.
Here's the spotlight specific settings and what they do :
Spread Angle :
This is what allows you to choose how wide or narrow a cone of light your spotlight is going to cast on the scene. The higher the number, the wider the cone. The lower the number, the more narrow the cone. DazStudio allows you to actually look through the spotlights, so you can aim and set up your cones while seeing exactly what the spotlight sees.
Beam Distribution :
This one, I honestly have no idea what it does. I've done all sorts of renders with adjusting the value, and I can't ever see any differences, so I have no clue what the purpose of this one is. By default, DS sets a value of 2.00 to the Beam Distribution. I ignore it when setting up my lights. If I can ever figure out what it actually does, I'll look more closely at it then.
Decay :
This setting is where you can control how quickly the light will "decay" to black from the position of the spotlight. By default, this is set to a value of 0.00 when you first add a spotlight to the scene. The higher the value, the faster the light will decay, thus the darker the shadows will be.
So in other words, the decay controls how far away from the light shadows begin to take over. Things will be more brightly illuminated closest to the position of the spotlight, and the further away you get from the light, the darker the shadows/lighting will become. A Decay value of zero tells Studio to not render ANY light decay at all, so that the brightness from the spotlight is the same 3 meters away as it would be 3 centimeters away from the physical location of the spotlight.
Here's two renders to show you what I mean. Both renders have ONLY a single spotlight in the scene. The light intensity on both renders is set to 65%, true white
(255, 255, 255).
First render - Decay of zero :
Second render - Decay of 0.20 :
Again, the ONLY thing I changed on the lighting here, was the Decay value. As you can see, the decay acts very quickly in Studio on the spotlights, so you want to go very lightly on the dial, or you can quickly end up with nothing but flat black for a render.
These are really the only spotlight-specific settings for a DS native
(default) spotlight.
Now as far as USING that spotlight. Look up at the top right corner of your scene window, where you're setting up your picture. You should see a box that says "Perspective View."
If you have added cameras to the scene, there will be other cameras listed in that box. Clicking on this box will present you with a drop-down of all available cameras and views that you currently have in your scene.
Now, by default, when you start a new scene in Studio, the only things that will be in this dropdown are Perspective View, Front View, Left View, Right View, Back View, Top View, and Bottom View. I have four separate cameras added into the scene, so those also appear here.
Remember that I said DS allows you to look THROUGH your spotlights in order to aim the light and set up the cone sizes? This is where you do that. When you have a spotlight in the scene, this is what you will see in that dropdown box :
4.) So, click on that box where it says Perspective View, and then click on SPOTLIGHT 1 (or whatever you named your spotlight when you added it). Once you do that, this is what you will see :
Now, in my case, the spotlight was already set up from the previous renders showing the effect of the Decay setting. But if you look at this screenshot, you can see a thin white circle. That white circle is the boundaries that your spotlight will illuminate. Anything outside of the circle will not be lit by the spotlight. Everything INSIDE the circle WILL be lit.
You are now looking through your spotlight. You are seeing exactly what your spotlight sees. THIS is where you aim the light and adjust the light cones.
5.) Now, look back over to your Lights tab. Click on GENERAL. Use the translation and rotation dials to aim the light. Once you have the light aimed where you want it, go and click on LIGHT once more.
6.) Look for your SPREAD ANGLE option. Adjusting this slider is what will determine how wide or how narrow the spotlight's cone will be. You'll note that this thin white circle which indicates the spotlight boundaries will move with your dial turns on the spread angle. By default, the spread angle is set to 60.00 when you first add a new spotlight to the scene. Higher values widen the cone, lower values decrease the size of the cone.
This is a SPREAD ANGLE set to a value of 120 :
The cone has widened, to take in more of the scene's contents.
This is a SPREAD ANGLE of only 20.00 :
You'll note that the box is MUCH closer to the "camera" now, because the cone has narrowed to only encompass part of the box, and a tiny bit of the surrounding environment.
7.) Once you have the light aimed where you want it, and have the light cone set the way you want it, you now go back up to that box and select your PERSPECTIVE VIEW from the dropdown. DS will NOT perform a render while you are looking through the spotlight's camera. You must be in one of the default views, or an actual camera that you've set up.
So once you have the light aimed, and the cone adjusted, and you're now looking back at the Perspective View, you can render the scene, or do a spot render to see how the lighting works on the scene.
Here's two comparison renders so you can see what the Spread Angle setting really does :
This should, I hope, be enough to get you started at least enough to light your scene window so you can see what your doing when you're working, and maybe even enough to get started on the actual renderings. LOL
As far as the length of time it took to render... some of my scenes can take as long as 5-8 hours to render for a still image. Mind you I render with a lot of advanced settings, and a lot of transparency and DOF effect, all of which will increase the render times. I also render at large image dimensions/pixels. But about an hour on a frame to render... I can see that, depending on the settings you've got in use for your render settings, lights, shadows, textures/items involved in the scene, whether or not there's any SSS on the figure's skin, etc...
Again - sorry if I've overloaded you... but figured simply saying "add lights to the scene" as an answer to brightening up the scene window just... well wouldn't have been very helpful...
