Basic 3Delight Light Functions in DS

[Seliah (Childe of Fyre)]

This is just a basic overview of distant light and spotlight functions for 3Delight in DS 4.8.

1.) Click on the LIGHTS tab. If your Lights tab is displaying the "PRESETS," then please click on "EDITOR" right next to that. On my screenshot here, you'll see the "Presets" and "Editor" right up above the top red circle.
3.) Now click the box directly underneath where "Presets" and "Editor" are shown (displayed in the red circle!).
4.) This will then open a drop-down box. At the bottom of this box is another box, labeled, "Add a light." Click on that.
5.) Yup. This will open another drop-down box. Now, from here you can choose to add a distant light, a point light, a spotlight, or a linear point light.

6.) These are your basic, default DazStudio light types. For a good "fill" light to start with, select the "Distant" light. This will now open another, floating box for you :

In this new box, the default name will be "DistantLight." If you already have a distant light in the scene, DS will put the number 2 at the end of the name, or 3, 4, in sequence as you add more of them to the scene. For now, just add ONE distant light to the scene.

You'll notice you can choose to change the name of the light at this point - I've chosen "Scene Fill Light" because we're going to use this as just the filler light. The next thing is you can choose to apply the default settings, or the active viewport transforms. For distant lights, I always apply the default settings. For spotlights, I will SOMETIMES apply the active viewport transforms, but normally I apply default here as well and just move the lights myself.

So. Type in a name for your new distant light. Then make sure "Apply Default Settings" is selected. Now click "Accept."

7.) Once you click the accept button, you should now have this in your Lights tab :

Familiarize yourself with the settings here. I'll go over each setting one at a time here.

Illumination :
This is where you can decide if you want the light on, off, casting specular only, or diffuse only. By default, the light will be "On" when you first load it. Click the word "On" and it'll open a fly-down menu/list :

Color :
This is where you can choose the color that your light casts onto the scene. To use it, just click anywhere in the color swatch, and it will pop up your color palette to choose from.

Intensity :
This is where you set the strength of the light. You can turn it up or down to where you like it. A lot of this part is just playing around until you have what you like. For a basic, scene filler light, I usually set the Intensity down to about 45%, and usually with either the defaut white, or a light/medium grey in color. So go ahead and do that now.

Intensity Scale :
This is similar to Intensity, and basically allows you to further fine-tune and adjust how intense or how dark the lighting will be on the light. It might seem a little bit redundant, but you can play around with it on some primitives and see the effects by doing simple renders with it. It basically just allows for a little more control over the intensity of the light.

Shadow Type :
This is where you decide whether the light casts a shadow using raytracing or depth mapping. If you want to turn OFF the shadow for your light, you do it in this option as well. By default, the lights always load with shadows OFF when you add a new light to the scene. Clicking in the box under "Shadow Type" will open the fly-down list for you to choose your shadow options on the light.

I want to issue a word of caution about the shadow types in DS. Deep Shadow Map takes less time to render, while Raytraced takes more time. However.... when using Deep Shadow Map as your shadow type, the program is VERY prone to rendering unwanted artifacts in your scene. Oddly colored pixels, and things of this nature. I only, ONLY render with "Raytraced" shadow types. It takes a little longer, but it looks better overall, and I don't get the graphic/pixel artifacts mucking up my renders. (And sometimes those pixelized artifacts can DESTROY a render!)

You don't have to do it this way, but I would strongly suggest to always render with Raytraced shadows.

Shadow Color :
Just like your "Color" box at the top, this is where you can set the color of your shadows. I normally leave my shadow color flat black (color 0, 0, 0). Sometimes you might want a lighter color, or maybe if you have strong colored lights, you might want the shadows to be a darker shade of the light color being cast on the scene. This is where you set the shadow's color.

Shadow Intensity :
Just like your Light Intensity, this is where you set how dark or how opaque your shadows are. For most renders, I will adjust my shadow intensity down to about 85%. If I'm rendering a scene that I want very dark, then I might use 90% to 100% here.

Shadow Softness :
This is where you set how much blur your shadows have. Again, this is something you have to play around with. If you have a scene where you want crisp, sharp shadows, then leave the Softness set to somewhere around 0-20%. If you have softer lighting in mind, and the shadows would be a bit more blurry than that, then you can increase the softness as much as you like.

The higher the value on this setting, the more blur your shadows will have. The higher the value on this setting, the longer it will take to render. It does increase render time a little bit as you add more blur, but it's usually not too bad on my machine. Also, a quick note, the more blurry your shadows are, the more likely they are to be a little bit grainy. If you do a spot render and find that the shadows are coming out really grainy, try turning the blur value down a bit.

Shadow Bias :
This is what tells the render engine how close to the objects in the scene the shadows should be cast. I usually set my lights to have a shadow bias of about 0.20. Again, play around with some primitive shapes and different values here to see what it does. By default, DS will apply a Shadow Bias value of 1.000 when you first add the new light to the scene.

8.) So those are the basic settings and what they do on a Distant Light. So for a scene fill light, you can set up a distant light with a white or light/medium grey color, intensity about 45-60%, shadow color black or a dark grey. I'd turn the shadows OFF for a fill light, as you aren't interested in shadow casting with this light, just providing ambient color to the scene.

If you DO want the light to cast shadows, then I'd suggest starting with a Shadow Intensity of around 85%, and a Shadow Bias of 0.20, and a Shadow Softness of somewhere between 0% and 20%, and set the Shadow Type to Raytracing.

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That's the basics of a DS standard (default) distant light. I'll do a quick overview of the standard (default) DS spotlight in the next post.

 

[Seliah (Childe of Fyre)]

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 be enough to get a beginner started at least with some basic lights and and making their own light rigs for 3Delight renders.

 

[Seliah (Childe of Fyre)]

Here's an example of a very basic 3-point type of light rig that I often start with when I start with a new scene and decide to use the native DS lights (I usually do switch out to AOA or UE2 lights later on, but this is a good start for scene building) :

1 Distant Light (used as a "fill" light)
-- Light color white or light/medium grey
-- Light intensity about 45% - 65%
-- Shadows OFF

1 Spotlight (used as the casting "front" light)
-- Light color light/medium grey
-- Light intensity about 50% - 60%
-- Shadows ON, set to RAYTRACE
-- Shadow Bias set to 0.20
-- Shadow color black
-- Shadow Softness set to 10%
-- Decay set to zero (this is something I adjust later in the setup, as I decide what kind of shadows I want)
-- Spread Angle left at the default 60.00 (again, this is something I'll change later on in the setup as the scene takes shape)
-- I usually aim this to about 3/4 frontal on the subject of the scene I'm using. Again, I'll adjust the actual aim of it later on in the setup as the picture is forming up into something closer to final.

1 Spotlight (used as a backlight)
-- Light color true white
-- Light intensity about 85% to 90%; sometimes I'll just leave it set at 100%
-- Shadows OFF
-- Spread Angle, again I'll usually leave this at the defaut.
-- I don't fuss with any of the other settings

That's a pretty basic 3-point light rig at least for setting up a scene. If need be, you can add two more spotlights to the sides of the figure, again with shadows off, just for setting up purposes. Remember, you can always delete or turn off the lights later.

One last note on the distant lights :
Scale and translations dials really don't do a whole lot. The Y Rotate, and X Rotate, however, WILL allow you to aim your lights north/south or east/west respectively. If you're having difficulty figuring out where you're "sourcing" your light from, what you can do is add a SPHERE primitive (top of the window click on CREATE --> New Primitive and choose the sphere and set a size).

Then once you have the sphere in your scene, go to the SCENE tab. Left click and HOLD on the distant light, and drag it down to the SPHERE and then release the mouse button. This parents the distant light to your sphere. From there, you can just select your sphere primitive and do all of your aiming/rotations with the sphere. The light direction will folllow, and when you're happy with it, turn the sphere's visibility OFF in the SCENE tab (the little "eye" icon next to the sphere's item list in the tab will do this in one click).

 

[sanbie]

Wow what a brilliant tutorial Seliah

 

[Pendraia]

Fantastic tutorial Seliah...I haven't used lights via the light tab before. I normally just click on the icon along the top of the screen for whichever light I want and then edit it in the parameter tab. Are there things that the light tab can do that the icons and parameter tab can't?

 

[Seliah (Childe of Fyre)]

Fantastic tutorial Seliah...I haven't used lights via the light tab before. I normally just click on the icon along the top of the screen for whichever light I want and then edit it in the parameter tab. Are there things that the light tab can do that the icons and parameter tab can't?

Not really, Pen. For the way my brain works, it's just easiest for me to kind of compartmentalize this part of things, thus I use the Lights tab instead of the main Parameters dial. All the options are there in both places.

The other reason I did this by way of the Lights tab is because the tut was aimed at beginners to DS, or at least at folks who might be newly migrating over and are learning the interface. Again, for folks like that, I think it's easier to start with the Lights tab so they don't get confuzzled with everything else that's in Parameters. They can always switch to just using the Parameters tab later if they find it more fitting with their own workflow.

Clicking the light icons at the top of the window is definitely a little bit quicker way to get new lights added, yes. I just wanted to simplify this one in the sense of keeping nonessential information out of view so to speak. So I did it inside of the Lights tab, where the ONLY settings they're presented with in there has to do with the lights.

Does that make sense?

 

[Lorraine]

Cool tut, Seliah, going to be very helpful to those starting out

 

[Seliah (Childe of Fyre)]

 

[Dove]

Thanks again for a great tutorial

 

[Seliah (Childe of Fyre)]

Thanks again for a great tutorial

You're very welcome.

 

[Pendraia]

Yep, it makes sense...I'm just weird and started off using the icons and the parameters tab but it's always useful to know more than one way to do something!

 

[Dakorillon (IMArts)]

I have a problem with lights turning eyes flat glossy like a statue (or glowing) when I render. I've tried all different kinds of light set ups and even presets, and have this problem alot, so I know it's something that I'm doing, but how do I stop it? And how do you light something so that the render looks like a nicer version of what you see in the preview window? Thanks! Your tutorial was excellent, which is why I thought you might be able to answer the questions.

 

[Seliah (Childe of Fyre)]

Hello, Dakorillon. Welcome to the forums. It's nice to meet you!

I have a problem with lights turning eyes flat glossy like a statue (or glowing) when I render. I've tried all different kinds of light set ups and even presets, and have this problem alot, so I know it's something that I'm doing, but how do I stop it?

Could you take a screen shot of your surfaces tab for me on the eyes? And one of a rendered image so I can see what it's doing when it's rendered?

The things I would suspect, without having seen screenshots of the above two things, would be the Specular value, first of all. In your Surfaces tab, check the eye material zones (iris, pupil, cornea) and make sure that the "Specular Strength" is NOT set to a full 100%. Many textures leave the Specular Color set to true white, and the Specular Strength to 100%. I'd suggest turning down the Specular Strength to about 23%-25%, and set the Specular Color to more of a medium or light grey color, instead of the default full white.

However, that is just a guess without having the benefit of the screenshots. It could also be related to eye reflection maps and values on the various material zones for the eyes. If you could post a screen shot of the surfaces tab, and an example rendered image that shows the problem, it would help us to help you.

Also - what version of Studio are you running? And are you trying to render with 3Delight or Iray?

IAnd how do you light something so that the render looks like a nicer version of what you see in the preview window?

I find that what you see in the preview window is mostly just a "guess-timate." Sort of like an estimate, but with a lot more guess-work. I depend on a knowledge of how light falls, and how shadows will be cast by lights in real life, when setting up my lights.

Example : If the light source is coming from BEHIND your figure, then the shadows would be casting in the FRONT of your figure. If, however, the light source is coming from the RIGHT side of the figure, then shadows would usually end up being cast to the LEFT side of the figure. The more aware you are of how light and shadows behave in a real world situation, the easier it will become to set up your lights the way you want them.

Preview/scene window lighting is an approximation, with a hefty amount of guesswork, and an understanding of real world light/shadow behavior to achieve the results you want. Or at least in my experience, that's how it works for me.

I spent a lot of time studying real-world light and shadows behavior when I first migrated to Studio... understanding how shadows will cast based upon where the light is shining from will help immensely. It will help you decide where to place your light source, and which lights you want the shadows casting from, and which lights you want shadows disabled, etc.

 

[Pendraia]

Welcome to the Hive Dakorillon

 

[Lorraine]

Welcome, Dakorillon

 

[Sarge]

One last note on the distant lights :
Scale and translations dials really don't do a whole lot. The Y Rotate, and X Rotate, however, WILL allow you to aim your lights north/south or east/west respectively. If you're having difficulty figuring out where you're "sourcing" your light from, what you can do is add a SPHERE primitive (top of the window click on CREATE --> New Primitive and choose the sphere and set a size).

Then once you have the sphere in your scene, go to the SCENE tab. Left click and HOLD on the distant light, and drag it down to the SPHERE and then release the mouse button. This parents the distant light to your sphere. From there, you can just select your sphere primitive and do all of your aiming/rotations with the sphere. The light direction will folllow, and when you're happy with it, turn the sphere's visibility OFF in the SCENE tab (the little "eye" icon next to the sphere's item list in the tab will do this in one click).

Seliah,

Great TUT.

For positioning distant lights you can also look through them like the spotlights. This way you don't have to add a sphere to adjust them.

 

[Seliah (Childe of Fyre)]

Seliah,

Great TUT.

For positioning distant lights you can also look through them like the spotlights. This way you don't have to add a sphere to adjust them.

That's a good point! I had totally forgotten about that! Thanks for mentioning it.

And welcome to the forums, Sarge!

 

[Lorraine]

Hi Sarge and welcome

 

[Sarge]

Not a total New-Bee, but this is my first post since the forums came back up. (I think)

Thanks for the Welcomes.

 

[Lorraine]

We are all in a very welcoming mood since we got back!