Glass Block Bathroom

[Doodle Designs]

I've spent the past few days tweaking many of the materials in my Glass Block Bathroom as well as the two accessory products. Most are subtle, but the animation I did pointed out to me that the glass blocks themselves were too smooth and didn't distort enough, so I recreated those textures from scratch.

I also worked on the lights. For me, lighting has been the biggest headache and I've spent a lot of time trying to get it right. I think I've finally gotten it to a point where I'm pretty happy with the lights but I'd like to ask for any input anyone might have on how the materials and lights look.

This first one has lights on over the vanity to light the figure's faces when facing the mirror. Are they a bit too harsh? Should I lower the setting?

I thought that the figure in the shower was darker than people would be happy with using just the ceiling lights (it's dark in my own shower too), so I added a light between the GB wall and the figure.

The water in the whirlpool is "on" in the next image.

This last one is with all the lights off except for the candles (which are off in the above images). Something bothered me about this until I realized that there appears to be too much light. Then I realized that it was due to all the materials having an ambient color of white set to 15%. I guess I can't help that - I certainly can't expect the user to reset all the materials to 0% for night scenes.

Should the candlelight be a little brighter?

Any advice would be appreciated.

 

[Gadget Girl]

I'm definitely not a lighting expert, especially in DS, so I can't tell you how to make things better, but I will say what you have looks good. Especially the candle light I would say. The scene is well lit, but it's not too bright, the hardest thing to do with low light.

I will say in the first image, the light on the figure's faces doesn't bother me, but it does look like the door is getting complete washed out. I'm not sure if that's because it's being shown in a reflection, but it does seem overlit.

I seem to recall that @Seliah (Childe of Fyre) is pretty good with lighting in DS.

 

[Doodle Designs]

The door was being overlit - I forgot to turn off the extra light I included for shower renders. Good eye! If the door still looks to bright, it's because of where the lights are located.

There are two lights in the room besides the vanity lights. They are placed where the ceiling lights are located. I placed them where I did so that all corners of the room would receive light. I knew that the two shorter sides of the wall would receive more light, but if I correct for that, then the corners are dark. But then again, that's how it can be in the real world - stand too close to a light and the lighting is too bright - stand too far away, and you're in the shadows!

You can see in this screen shot that the two short sides have a bright spot in the middle of them. What you can't see is that the brightest spot in the room is the center, where the two ceiling lights overlap. The vanity lights are off.

I was still unsure about the vanity lights so I did several renders at various intensity settings. What do you think the best setting is?

The effect can best be seen by looking at the male figure.

 

[Gadget Girl]

Personally I'd say the last one with the 35% looks the bet. Not sure what others think.

 

[Doodle Designs]

How's this look?

 

[Seliah (Childe of Fyre)]

The lighting actually isn't too bad, really. For the Vanity light, I'd say that 35% is the best choice there. It lights the figure without washing out the spec highlights, but still has some depth to the shadows as well.

Which engine are you using? Iray or 3Delight? I can help with 3DL lights, but not with Iray (my own system cannot use Iray without crashing).

Sorry for the delayed response - been hectic over here. Also, I will be leaving town this afternoon (around 4pm EST or so), so additional responses might not come until Sunday sometime. I'm not sure if I'll be in reach of cell service or not.

 

[Doodle Designs]

Thanks for the response.

I'm using 3DL.

I really understand your issue with you cell. I live in a mountainous region where cell reception is spotty, at best.

 

[Doodle Designs]

I created a video with a 360-degree view of the bathroom. It looks a bit kinky - what with the twins and the triplets all sharing the bathroom at the same time, but...

 

[Seliah (Childe of Fyre)]

I'd say that's looking not too bad at all.

Next question - which lights are you using? AOA Advanced Ambient? UberEnvironment? DS default lights?

I really understand your issue with you cell. I live in a mountainous region where cell reception is spotty, at best.

Thanks. Yes, mountains are exactly where we are headed. LOL So I may or may not have reception once we get there.

 

[Doodle Designs]

I'm using DS default lights - all linear point lights, except for the candles, which are point lights.

Speaking of the candles, I tried setting most of the material ambient strength settings to 0%, just to see the difference, and liked the more realistic lighting of the candles so much that I decided to create a material preset for my products, and a shader that could be used on any other material, to set the ambient strength to 0% - such as any figures or other items that the user might want to add to the scene.

Here's what the render looks like with the way the materials are normally set to an ambient strength of 15%.

Any ambient setting above 0% will give a self-illuminating glow in the absence of all lighting. With a high enough setting, you could "light" the scene without using any lights at all!

Here's the same scene, but with ALL lights turned off and V4 and her outfit set to an ambient strength of 80%.

Without lights to interact with the materials and figure, it looks very flat and cartoonish. I think I forgot to change the lips though.

Here's what the scene looks like with the materials set to an ambient strength of 0% and just the 3 candle point lights on.

More realistic lighting, isn't it? Even so, I can see that I forgot to change the glass block ambiance because the grout lines are kinda glowing.

Does anyone think I should change the candle lights?

You just need to be careful what materials you are setting to a 0% ambiance because it ruins the effect of metals (at least the way I created their materials) and possibly other special materials. But most materials are okay to set to 0%.

Also, you would only want to mess with the ambient strength like this only for a scene which you plan on only trying night/dark scenes with low lighting since the only way to reset the ambiance back to their original values would be to re-apply the original materials, since it's possible that the ambiance could vary, depending on how the creator set them. I use 15% because that seems to work well with the DS lights in most purchased scenes with their lighting.

What I did was save the scene with the original material settings and another version with the ambiance set to 0%. I use the original material setting scene for full lighting and the 0% ambiance scene for the candlelight renders.

BTW - I routinely change nearly all materials in the products I use to an ambient color of white and a strength of 15%. Maybe more people have wised up to the fact that the old Poser way of setting the ambient color to black and strength of 100% makes the objects grayish-looking in a Daz scene.

Here's how I usually change the mats for the figures. In this case, they are V4 with the Jamie mat and M4 with the hi-res mats. There are no lights in the scene, so the default lighting is in effect.

Original materials:

My material settings:

I haven't bought any newer figures or figure materials since V4 and M4, so I don't know how folks are doing things these days, so I hope my lights will work for the newer figures (including Dawn and Dusk) since I based my light settings on the figures with the above mat settings.

Come to think of it, I may have versions of Dawn and Dusk. I'll have to load them and see how they look in my scene with my current lighting settings.

 

[Doodle Designs]

I just loaded the versions of Dawn (SR2) and Dusk that I have and their materials vary quite a bit!

Dusk looks like he might work fine as-is in my product renders (and lighting) but not Dawn. "Fixing" her mats was much more complicated than simply setting the ambiant color and strength. Dawn uses many more mat channels than V4. SO I created a preset using Dusk's materials - selecting the values only - no maps - and applied it to Dawn. Much better!

Here's the before and after renders: (no changes to Dusk)

The clothing and hair I just used my ambient white/15% trick on.

Now I'll load these into my product scene and see how they look.

 

[Doodle Designs]

I'd say they look pretty good in there, even though the poses didn't copy quite right. I'll have to work on that. I'm including all poses that I'll be using in my promo images so I'll create poses for both HiveWire and DS figures.

What I wanted to check is if the lighting would work for them and it seems to.

Looks like Dusk is a half-head taller than M4 and Dawn is about a quarter-head taller than V4. I didn't expect that - not that it's an issue - just an observation.

Well, back to creating all the product folders!

 

[tparo]

You could use mesh lighting, its very good for interior scenes also the flame on the candle (and other lights)could be converted to an emissive using the Uberlight shader.
In your last image your characters have the banding/checkered effect when you haven't alter the scaling on the shader correctly.
alot of people no longer use ambient in DS it kinda became obsolete when people started using all the other shader bases available such as AoA SSS shader and the ubershaders.

 

[Doodle Designs]

I started developing these products years ago, before the newer lighting options were included with DS (think DS3.0). Also, I've been away from even using DS for about two years. Because of this, I am unfamiliar with the newer lights and IRay. I've already spent so much time developing this product that I really don't want to have to try learning the newer lights at this point - especially because I have a limited window of opportunity for spending time on the products. Since I can get the lighting effects I want with the oldie-but-goodie lights, I'll stick with them for now, and save learning the newer lights for future products.

As far as the banding/checker effect, since I was just interested in seeing the effects of the light, I left the shading rate at the default of 1. I have, however, included several render settings with the GB bathroom to get better results when rendering the glass block (ray trace = 3, SR = 1) and the mirror (ray trace = 4, shading rate = .5). I still need to do more testing to see if I can lower the SR even more without significantly impacting the render time. I have older computers (as, I imagine, many others out there do too) so shaving what time I can off of the render times is important. I don't want any customers to get frustrated with long render times (as I have been). As it is, even though there are eleven interior lights, I have ray tracing on for only the two lights in the middle of the room. The nine vanity lights above the mirror are too many to try to make them cast shadows too. If a customer has the render power (or the free time) to use more ray tracing lights, that's something they can do themselves.

While the lower SR and higher ray trace max's do give better results, it takes longer to render - so for test renders (gazillions) I just use the default SR and ray trace max to save time.

 

[Doodle Designs]

Now I have a new problem.

I've been working on two different computers as I develop these products - a desktop, which is faster, and a laptop, which is slower, but portable, so I can take it with me (I've been parent-sitting a lot lately for a friend who is caring for her elderly parents).

The problem is that, even though DS puts all those nice little labels on the thumbnails (like, Material, Lights, Cameras, etc.), when I transfer the files from one computer to the other, I lose all those tags! I've tried copying the files and zipping to transfer them, but I lose the labels anyway. I can get them back only by resaving ALL presets! A terrible waste of time!

Any ideas on how I can avoid losing them? How do you people avoid this problem when zipping your products for sale? What causes them to disappear?

 

[Doodle Designs]

I just tried zipping the files again, and this time the labels were kept when unzipped.

The difference was the folder level I zipped them at.

The firs time, when the labels disappeared, I had zipped the Accessories for Him and Her and Bathroom Accessories folders separately.

The second time, when the labels were kept, I zipped the same two folders but went up one level to the top Glass Block Products level.

I'm don't know why this made a difference. Any ideas?

 

[Doodle Designs]

Now I'm even more confused about these thumbnail labels.

I spent most of yesterday working on my laptop and all the labels were there. I have the content on a thumb drive.

When I got home I plugged the thumb drive into the desktop - and the labels were gone from two of the three content paths! Huh?

I swapped the thumb drive back to the laptop and the labels were all fine. Swapped back to the desktop and they were gone!

Both computers are using the exact same files yet one has the labels showing and the other doesn't! Both are running DS4.9 but the laptop is running the 32-bit version while the desktop has the 64-bit version. The laptop is running WIN XP. The desktop has WIN 7.

I don't understand how these labels are being applied to the thumbnails. They appear once you save to the content library, but are not actually part of the thumbnail image, since you can create your own, rendered thumbs, copy/paste them into the content folder, and the labels are still there. This must mean that the info is stored somewhere within content folder, doesn't it? But where? And how does DS decide whether to apply the labels and when not to?

So that you can see that I'm not totally crazy, here's how things look on both computers:

LAPTOP

DESKTOP

I've experience the labels disappearing before, when I've moved the content folders to a different path and when I've renamed the folder just above the content folders, but in this case there have been no changes (other than the drive letter) because I'm using the same thumb drive on both computers.

I'm at a loss. Anyone understand how the thumbnail labels work?

 

[Doodle Designs]

I found out on the Daz forums that it has to do with metadata. You have labels for the content that you saved on the machine in which they were saved only. I worked on the GBB content on both computers so they both had those labels on the thumbnails. I worked on both accessories products only on the laptop, so I could see those labels only on that computer. Apparently, there's a way to carry the metadata with the content when zipping - I just have to figure out where it is and how to do that.

Any input would be welcome.

 

[Seliah (Childe of Fyre)]

Sorry, DD. I can't help with the metadata tags. Honestly, I absolutely HATE them. I find them irritating and distracting, and the labels get in the way of what I can see of the thumbnail. I rely on folder structure and thumbnails to know what each file does - not the metadata tags/labels.

Sorry, I can't help with that, but I never distribute that sort of data either - I actually disable it on everything I save to the library.

Maybe someone else around here can help you with that.

 

[Pendraia]

I found out on the Daz forums that it has to do with metadata. You have labels for the content that you saved on the machine in which they were saved only. I worked on the GBB content on both computers so they both had those labels on the thumbnails. I worked on both accessories products only on the laptop, so I could see those labels only on that computer. Apparently, there's a way to carry the metadata with the content when zipping - I just have to figure out where it is and how to do that.

Any input would be welcome.

I wouldn't mind knowing how to do that properly either. When I save clothing I always categorise it but I'm not sure how it appears on others computers. If it's showing on one computer there must be a file somewhere for it that needs to be included. I wonder if looking at one Daz's zip files would help?