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SKYLAB CHAT
- Thread starter skylab
- Start date
Me either. I don't participate in deep religious discussions, unless someone of another faith asks me about a religious practice of my faith for informational purposes. I've always felt religion is a very personal thing, and I couldn't care less whether someone else's beliefs are different than mine. Diversity is the way of life, and I feel sorry for those who can't see that.Oh, I understand. Believe me, I am the last person in the world to criticize anyone of any faith just for having that faith. No worries there, I'm not picking any faith-based fights. That's not who or what I am.
Terre
Renowned
I do remember placing a distant light (I think it was an infinite one) far enough away from the window so that the light source wouldn't show up in the render, and then fiddling with the placement of the light until the area I wanted it to illuminate was lit by it. I had the advantage of the window being stage right. You are looking at center stage. I think you'll need to fiddle with both the position of the light source and the camera angle for the render unless you want to postwork a sun or have an appropriate dome you can use for the sky.
Terre
Renowned
I think you'll also need to have a light source/s behind the camera to in order to light up the characters faces so they can be seen clearly. I don't think that 13 point lights would be a good idea though. Poser tends to choke on large numbers of lights. I'd go ask in the Poser section here for suggestions on how to do that so it looks good and is doable.
From what a friend who used to use Carrarra mostly says it can handle lots of lights. Poser not being able to keeps throwing him for a loop.
From what a friend who used to use Carrarra mostly says it can handle lots of lights. Poser not being able to keeps throwing him for a loop.
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skylab
Esteemed
Thanks Terre...you're right, the more lights, the more likely Poser will crash...so they have to be as few as possible, but strategically placed. Usually I remove the ceiling in such situations so lighting isn't such an issue, but this time the beam work in the model is an important part of the scene...so I guess we'll figure out something, so it's not The Last Silhouette...haha.
Point lights are good for illuminating small areas that need it - if done with cast shadows turned off, they wouldn't add anything to render times. BVH (anyone remember him? LOL), at one point gave out a freebie light set for Poser. It was the set he liked to use for setting up his mats and his promos on his products. It had like 15 lights in it, total global illumination around the whole sphere, but of those lights only 2 of them actually did any casting of shadows, and on my very first pc running Poser 4 with a grand total of 32mbs of memory, that light rig used to render up in no time at all for me.
I'm awake now. Have been handling a sick teenager today, and being awake a little over 50 hours, I finally zonked once she had fully settled down to sleep herself. Sky, I'll get the through-the-window lighting tut finished up tonight for you hopefully. It really isn't hard to do; just involves placing spotlights outside of the "box" of the room and pointing in through the windows. I usually use one spotlight in each window. If your system has trouble with multiple shadow-casting lights, then you can cheat a little bit and set only one of the spotlights to cast shadows and just give it a wider cone.
Hopefully later tonight I will have the write-up finished. Bear is home and he's now on duty for pushing fluids on the pup whenever she goes vertical, even for just a little while. She definitely has a G.I. bug, so will need the fluids. Thankfully at 17, she's smart enough to know that now, and she doesn't really argue with us when we tell her to make sure she drinks.
I'm awake now. Have been handling a sick teenager today, and being awake a little over 50 hours, I finally zonked once she had fully settled down to sleep herself. Sky, I'll get the through-the-window lighting tut finished up tonight for you hopefully. It really isn't hard to do; just involves placing spotlights outside of the "box" of the room and pointing in through the windows. I usually use one spotlight in each window. If your system has trouble with multiple shadow-casting lights, then you can cheat a little bit and set only one of the spotlights to cast shadows and just give it a wider cone.
Hopefully later tonight I will have the write-up finished. Bear is home and he's now on duty for pushing fluids on the pup whenever she goes vertical, even for just a little while. She definitely has a G.I. bug, so will need the fluids. Thankfully at 17, she's smart enough to know that now, and she doesn't really argue with us when we tell her to make sure she drinks.
Terre
Renowned
13 point lights might work then.
Now that you mention this I think the friend was talking about 30+ lights or something like that. Easy to do in Carrara but the number he was quoting was an amount my husband said would cause Poser to have major fits.
skylab
Esteemed
Hey Seliah...hope your daughter's feeling better soon. And don't feel pressured to have to work on things tonight if she needs your attention. Mark has not emailed yet with any more information...generally he likes to do a little back and forth to get my thoughts on how a project is coming along before he releases. So I'm thinking we may have a little bit of time on it...he's working it around his other projects. Plus he's in New Zealand, so he'd be on what we consider night shift.
For some reason I had trouble getting to sleep during my "nap" time...I rested, but still need to get a little sleep, so I may go off now while things are quiet, and check back later to see if he needs my input this evening. So chill out if you need to...and I may come back on after midnight or maybe a little later.
I piddled with the sheltie dance video during my dinner. I don't like Poser's animation "help". That's why I do a lot of looping videos, because if you're trying to get something to walk a distance between two points, Poser tries to "help" calculate the movements by default. That's fine for something like a bouncing ball, but not so great for something in which you want natural hesitations. In the first pony video I fought with that feature all the way through the thing. This time I let the auto feature have it's way, and of course it rushed the steps, but at least he makes it from one side of the screen to the other. If I ever find out how to cut off that default feature, I'll yank it out by the roots...haha. I reduced this video to 8 frames so it's a little choppy, but you get the idea.
For some reason I had trouble getting to sleep during my "nap" time...I rested, but still need to get a little sleep, so I may go off now while things are quiet, and check back later to see if he needs my input this evening. So chill out if you need to...and I may come back on after midnight or maybe a little later.
I piddled with the sheltie dance video during my dinner. I don't like Poser's animation "help". That's why I do a lot of looping videos, because if you're trying to get something to walk a distance between two points, Poser tries to "help" calculate the movements by default. That's fine for something like a bouncing ball, but not so great for something in which you want natural hesitations. In the first pony video I fought with that feature all the way through the thing. This time I let the auto feature have it's way, and of course it rushed the steps, but at least he makes it from one side of the screen to the other. If I ever find out how to cut off that default feature, I'll yank it out by the roots...haha. I reduced this video to 8 frames so it's a little choppy, but you get the idea.
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Yes, 30 lights would make Poser laugh at you and then efficiently guide you right back to your dekstop.
It sounds like it's a really annoying "feature," Sky. But even the 8-frame animation here is cute. You even got the horse grin on the Sheltie!
skylab
Esteemed
I'm back Got an email from Mark...he's still working on the furniture and stuff for the table. And he's cool with the idea of using his render in the Poser and DS section to announce the Last Supper scene announcement for the benefit of those who have already downloaded the pose sets. I'm going to chill out by the laptop in case he completes anything tonight. I'm having one of my need to put my feet up and take it easy nights
I'll check back in later...
Got an email from Mark...he's still working on the furniture and stuff for the table. And he's cool with the idea of using his render in the Poser and DS section to announce the Last Supper scene announcement for the benefit of those who have already downloaded the pose sets. I'm going to chill out by the laptop in case he completes anything tonight. I'm having one of my need to put my feet up and take it easy nights I'll check back in later...
Okay... I want to warn you right up front at the start - this is a LONG read. So take it in small doses or whatever if you have to.
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Lights through the windows are actually pretty simple. They mainly just require a lot of fiddling, trial and error until you get what you want for a scene. I can step-by-step you through my own process for setting up these lights inside of DS. You might find something that's more efficient than what I use, and if so, great. So just bear in mind that this is simply how I, personally, do it. It's my own workflow...
-----------------------------------------
1.) Open your Lights tab.
2.) Click on where it says "Select an Item."
3.) Now click "Add a Light" at the bottom of that drop-down.
4.) Choose "New Spotlight."
5.) In the Create New Spotlight dialogue, select "Apply Default Settings."
You can give the light a more descriptive name if you wish.
6.) Click the "Accept" button.
At this point, your scene will be probably be almost completely black. Don't worry, that's normal.
Ignore the camera outline showing in the middle of the screen here; this is a render I've been working on, so I already have a couple of cameras set up.
7.) In your setup/preview window, look up at the upper right corner. Click on the box that says "Perspective View."
(In my case, if you look at the above screen shot, it shows "Camera 1," but that's the box you want to click.)
8.) In that dropdown, you should see your spotlight listed. Click on your spotlight. (In my case it's "SpotLight 1.")
Now, once you switch to your Spotlight's view, you're probably going to end up staring at the floor at about the same vantage point as a mouse that's trying to avoid getting eaten by the local kitty kat. This is, again, perfectly normal. Click on your Lights tab again, if you don't still have it open.
9.) Set your Shadow Type to "Raytraced," set the Shadow Intensity to about 80-85% to start with, set the Shadow Softness to 10% - 15%, and set the Shadow Bias to 0.20. Leave the Shadow Color set to black.
10.) Now, look for your Shadow Color, and set it to a very pale yellowy/white-ish. I usually go with a yellow that's so pale it's ALMOST white, when I set up the first spotlight for the windows on a day-time render.
11.) Next, click on the triangle next to the General sub-heading in the left side of the Lights pane. This will expand the General category. Do the same thing on the Transforms sub-category.
12.) This is where you begin the process of actually pointing and aiming your spotlight to where you want it. I'm using a different room from what you will be using, but the process here is basically the same. With the Transforms category expanded, click on Translate.
13.) Now, in the Translations parameters, the first thing I normally do myself is get the silly light up off of the floor. So adjust your Y-Trans up a bit. If you have any figures or props currently in the scene at World 0,0,0 position, the light will probably have you looking inside of the mesh. Again, this is normal for where the spotlight loads in by default. Adjust your Z-Trans back a little ways, until you can see the whole room through the spotlight.
Like this :
The above is with my spotlight Y-Trans set at 90, and my Z-Trans set to 190.
14.) Now that you can actually see what you're looking at, you start fiddling with the translation and rotation dials on the light. Just move the spotlight around the same way you would for a normal prop. The only difference is that instead of the prop moving on the screen, you'll see the screen move instead.
Translation dials get used to move the spotlight along the x/y/z axis. Rotation dials are used to turn the spotlight around. You may have to spin the y-rotate once or twice as you move behind the wall. The best thing I can tell you, as far as keeping track of the orientation of the spotlight, is to just think of it as walking around the corner of a building. And you move and rotate the spotlight accordingly.
This is what my particular scene looks like through the SpotLight 1 view once I've "walked" the light around to the outside of the wall :
You'll note that the smaller (center) circle is pointing in through the windows, but tilted slightly downward. I've also reduced the spread angle of the light in this case. I may have to raise the spotlight a little higher on the Y-trans, and-or increase the spread angle of the light to get the exact effect I'm looking for, but I won't know that until I switch back to my render angle and do a test render.
This is the part of things where it turns into just a lot of trial and error. You position the light, do a test render, reposition, do another test until you have what you want out of the shadows and light source.
In this case, I'm using my spotlights as if they were a sunlight, so I'm going to bear in mind that the "sun" would be at my "back" and if I want shadows to cast across the floor inside of the room, I have to raise the "sun" up high enough that it can see the floor inside of the room through the windows.
15.) Once the spotlight is adjusted to what you think is the correct position, height, and angle looking into the room, you need to go back to your render angle. So, where it says "SpotLight 1" in the preview window, click that button and select your render angle again.
16.) This is about where I add in two more lights. The first, is going to be a distant light, and the second one, since this is a more modern scene in a room that would have a light source on the ceiling, will be another spotlight. The only purpose of the distant light here is to add a sort of fill light to the room. That is to achieve a slight, ambient lighting in the room, such as you would get in real life.
So, once again, still working in your Lights tab, create your distant light. What I find helpful when setting up a distant light for a purpose like this, is to select "Apply Active Viewport Transforms" on the dialogue, and then click accept. Once that's done, you'll now have a scene that's lit too brightly for just an ambient fill light.
Now, set your Light Intensity down to about 20-30%. You can go higher if you want a brighter ambient lighting in the room.
Leave your Shadow Type set to "OFF." You do NOT want this light to cast any shadows; it's just to fill the room with a little bit of ambient illumination.
Now, because in my case, I'm aiming for a bit of a sunset/twilight period with this scene, I'm going to set the Light Color to, again, a very, very pale yellowish-white.
Your fill light is now set up. You might need to adjust the light intensity or light color later on if you don't like it, but the basic setup is done on the distant light :
17.) Now, add a third light to the scene. This one is going to be another Spotlight.
Rooms in real life frequently have light sources on the ceiling. I know you won't have a light source on the ceiling for a Last Supper render, because well, they didn't have them then. But this is still good practice for lighting a more modern scene. So, we'll be adding an extra light inside the room itself once we've set up the window spotlights.
18.) At this point, you can get the second light into the scene in one of two ways.
Method 1 :
-- Still inside of the Lights tab, click on the drop-down box, and select your Spotlight.
-- Then go up to the top of your DS window, and click on Edit --> Duplicate --> Duplicate Node(s)
-- Then click on the dropdown box in your Lights tab again, and select the new spotlight. It will read as Spotlight 1 (2)
-- Next, go to the dropdown box in your scene setup area, and select the Spotlight 1 (2) view :
Once you've done that, you'll now be looking at the same thing that your first spotlight was seeing. But this time, the spotlight will already be positioned and set up with the same parameters as the first one. It's a bit of a shortcut that I use frequently if I'm adding multiple spotlights for windows. The only thing you need to do from here, is pan the spotlight along the X-Trans to one side or the other. So move this second spotlight to whichever side the other window is on, and once again, aim that center, smaller circle to be pointing through the window.
Set up your second spotlight's parameters now :
Shadows On : Raytraced.
Shadow Bias : 0.20.
Shadow Intensity : 80-85%.
Shadow Softness : You want, for this kind of lighting, probably in the neighborhood of about 50-60%.
Pick the color you want for the light.
Now repeat that method one more time for the third window. Be careful to make SURE that each time you duplicate the spotlight, you select the NEW spotlight from the dropdown box in your Scene Setup/preview window before moving it along the X-axis! Otherwise you'll end up moving the new spotlight and you won't actually be looking through the correct view, or have any idea just where the new spotlight is aiming.
Method Two :
This involves creating a new spotlight with all default settings, at which point you would have to once again move and rotate and aim the light, set up all the parameters and the light color for the new spotlight all over again.
I vastly prefer to use the first method when all I need is to move a second or third spotlight along the X-axis for additional windows. It saves a lot of time, and a lot of clicking, and I can just edit the parameters of the new spotlights later on if I need to change anything.
19.) Now, return once more to your render angle. Go into your Lights tab again, and because this is a more modern scene, we're going to create a third, new spotlight. This time, make sure you select "Apply Default Settings." Because more modern rooms usually have at least one light source on the ceiling, we don't want to copy the camera view for the light, and we do NOT want to copy the lights that are aiming through the window!
So, you've clicked on the dropdown box in the Lights tab, selected "Add a New Light" and chosen to apply the default settings. You now have a third spotlight in the scene.
20.) Click on the view dropdown box, and select this third spotlight's view. You'll once again be playing the part of the mouse and staring at the floor of the scene.
-- Raise the spotlight up on the Y-Translation dial a wee bit so that you're at least off of the floor.
-- Now, go to your X-Rotate dial, and rotate it downward. You want the spotlight to point right down at the floor! I usually set my X-Rotate to a value of -90.00
-- At this point, you might need to move the light so that it's actually illuminating the scene. Pan the light along the X and Z axis until you have it aiming at roughly the center of the floor in the room. Now, pan the light up along the Y-axis; turn your Y-Trans until you can see the majority of the room through the light's view. Don't worry about trying to get the ENTIRE box/mesh of the room into view; light fades out at the edges, after all. You just want to get the majority of it in view of this last light.
This is the sort of thing you should now be looking at, on this new spotlight :
-- From here, you need to set up the parameters of your ceiling spotlight. This is what I have set mine to for this scene :
Light Intensity : 45%
Shadow Type : Raytraced
Shadow Softness : 65%
Shadow Intensity : 80%
Shadow Bias : 0.20
Shadow Color : Again, here, I chose a pale yellowy/white-ish type of color for the ceiling light.
21.) Now, just go back to the dropdown box in your scene preview/setup area, and select your render angle. Then do a test render, and see what you've got for results.
I know this seems like a huge long series of steps to take, but that's because I'm just trying to lay out every single thing I do, so you can get an idea of the whole process. In reality, doing a setup like this, for the initial setup, only takes about five minutes to do once you're familiar with the parameters and all of that.
Once your test render is done, take a look at it, and see if you like what you have. (I usually do these test renders at rather a low pixel size - you only need to see if the shadows are casting where you want them.)
If you don't like the results, then you just have to go back to the lights and fiddle with their parameters; adjust things like light intensity, shadow intensity, for the window spotlights, you might need to adjust the angle that they're pointing into the room or maybe the spread angle might need to be increased or decreased in size.
Once you have the initial light rig in place, the rest is just playing around with the settings and doing test renders with each change, until you have what you're happy with for the scene. For this reason, I normally set up my light rigs either before I add my figures to the scene, or very early on before I've added too many figures. You want the interface nice and fast on this part of the process so that setting up the lights isn't such a hard PITA to do.
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This was my final result with the light rig up above. I ended up increasing the shadow softness on all of the spotlights to 60%, and increasing the Shadow Intensity on the "ceiling light" to about 90%. I also had to change the light colors a couple of times, and made some additional adjustments to the window spotlights in terms of reducing their spread angle and raising them up a bit higher on the window.
I think I went through about three different test renders before I had shadows and lighting that I was happy with for this one. Normally, I would be using AOA's Advanced Ambient lights, but those take a long while to learn (and have to be purchased from Daz's store), and I wanted to show you what can be pulled off with just the DS-native spotlights for this exercise.
So, this was the final result after additional tweaking of the various spotlights :
I would probably end up going in adjusting the shadows a bit more for a full, formal render. The ones under Blake's feet are just a bit too crisp for an indoor lighting situation, and the lighting overall could use a little touch of gamma correction in postwork.
This isn't half bad for a quickie light rig in 3Delight, though. I have no idea how Iray works, but Iray is capable of producing quite literally photorealistic quality images. I have in the past gotten very close to photoreal with 3Delight, but it requires some more advanced types of lighting and a LOT of time for rendering (though not as much time as Iray takes on my laptop lol).
Hope all of this helps somehow. I know it's a lengthy piece and it will take time to get through all of it.
-----------------------------------------
Lights through the windows are actually pretty simple. They mainly just require a lot of fiddling, trial and error until you get what you want for a scene. I can step-by-step you through my own process for setting up these lights inside of DS. You might find something that's more efficient than what I use, and if so, great.
So just bear in mind that this is simply how I, personally, do it. It's my own workflow...-----------------------------------------
1.) Open your Lights tab.
2.) Click on where it says "Select an Item."
3.) Now click "Add a Light" at the bottom of that drop-down.
4.) Choose "New Spotlight."
5.) In the Create New Spotlight dialogue, select "Apply Default Settings."
You can give the light a more descriptive name if you wish.
6.) Click the "Accept" button.
At this point, your scene will be probably be almost completely black. Don't worry, that's normal.
Ignore the camera outline showing in the middle of the screen here; this is a render I've been working on, so I already have a couple of cameras set up.
7.) In your setup/preview window, look up at the upper right corner. Click on the box that says "Perspective View."
(In my case, if you look at the above screen shot, it shows "Camera 1," but that's the box you want to click.)
8.) In that dropdown, you should see your spotlight listed. Click on your spotlight. (In my case it's "SpotLight 1.")
Now, once you switch to your Spotlight's view, you're probably going to end up staring at the floor at about the same vantage point as a mouse that's trying to avoid getting eaten by the local kitty kat.
This is, again, perfectly normal. Click on your Lights tab again, if you don't still have it open.9.) Set your Shadow Type to "Raytraced," set the Shadow Intensity to about 80-85% to start with, set the Shadow Softness to 10% - 15%, and set the Shadow Bias to 0.20. Leave the Shadow Color set to black.
10.) Now, look for your Shadow Color, and set it to a very pale yellowy/white-ish. I usually go with a yellow that's so pale it's ALMOST white, when I set up the first spotlight for the windows on a day-time render.
11.) Next, click on the triangle next to the General sub-heading in the left side of the Lights pane. This will expand the General category. Do the same thing on the Transforms sub-category.
12.) This is where you begin the process of actually pointing and aiming your spotlight to where you want it. I'm using a different room from what you will be using, but the process here is basically the same. With the Transforms category expanded, click on Translate.
13.) Now, in the Translations parameters, the first thing I normally do myself is get the silly light up off of the floor. So adjust your Y-Trans up a bit. If you have any figures or props currently in the scene at World 0,0,0 position, the light will probably have you looking inside of the mesh. Again, this is normal for where the spotlight loads in by default. Adjust your Z-Trans back a little ways, until you can see the whole room through the spotlight.
Like this :
The above is with my spotlight Y-Trans set at 90, and my Z-Trans set to 190.
14.) Now that you can actually see what you're looking at, you start fiddling with the translation and rotation dials on the light. Just move the spotlight around the same way you would for a normal prop. The only difference is that instead of the prop moving on the screen, you'll see the screen move instead.
Translation dials get used to move the spotlight along the x/y/z axis. Rotation dials are used to turn the spotlight around. You may have to spin the y-rotate once or twice as you move behind the wall. The best thing I can tell you, as far as keeping track of the orientation of the spotlight, is to just think of it as walking around the corner of a building. And you move and rotate the spotlight accordingly.
This is what my particular scene looks like through the SpotLight 1 view once I've "walked" the light around to the outside of the wall :
You'll note that the smaller (center) circle is pointing in through the windows, but tilted slightly downward. I've also reduced the spread angle of the light in this case. I may have to raise the spotlight a little higher on the Y-trans, and-or increase the spread angle of the light to get the exact effect I'm looking for, but I won't know that until I switch back to my render angle and do a test render.
This is the part of things where it turns into just a lot of trial and error. You position the light, do a test render, reposition, do another test until you have what you want out of the shadows and light source.
In this case, I'm using my spotlights as if they were a sunlight, so I'm going to bear in mind that the "sun" would be at my "back" and if I want shadows to cast across the floor inside of the room, I have to raise the "sun" up high enough that it can see the floor inside of the room through the windows.
15.) Once the spotlight is adjusted to what you think is the correct position, height, and angle looking into the room, you need to go back to your render angle. So, where it says "SpotLight 1" in the preview window, click that button and select your render angle again.
16.) This is about where I add in two more lights. The first, is going to be a distant light, and the second one, since this is a more modern scene in a room that would have a light source on the ceiling, will be another spotlight. The only purpose of the distant light here is to add a sort of fill light to the room. That is to achieve a slight, ambient lighting in the room, such as you would get in real life.
So, once again, still working in your Lights tab, create your distant light. What I find helpful when setting up a distant light for a purpose like this, is to select "Apply Active Viewport Transforms" on the dialogue, and then click accept. Once that's done, you'll now have a scene that's lit too brightly for just an ambient fill light.
Now, set your Light Intensity down to about 20-30%. You can go higher if you want a brighter ambient lighting in the room.
Leave your Shadow Type set to "OFF." You do NOT want this light to cast any shadows; it's just to fill the room with a little bit of ambient illumination.
Now, because in my case, I'm aiming for a bit of a sunset/twilight period with this scene, I'm going to set the Light Color to, again, a very, very pale yellowish-white.
Your fill light is now set up. You might need to adjust the light intensity or light color later on if you don't like it, but the basic setup is done on the distant light :
17.) Now, add a third light to the scene. This one is going to be another Spotlight.
Rooms in real life frequently have light sources on the ceiling. I know you won't have a light source on the ceiling for a Last Supper render, because well, they didn't have them then. But this is still good practice for lighting a more modern scene. So, we'll be adding an extra light inside the room itself once we've set up the window spotlights.
18.) At this point, you can get the second light into the scene in one of two ways.
Method 1 :
-- Still inside of the Lights tab, click on the drop-down box, and select your Spotlight.
-- Then go up to the top of your DS window, and click on Edit --> Duplicate --> Duplicate Node(s)
-- Then click on the dropdown box in your Lights tab again, and select the new spotlight. It will read as Spotlight 1 (2)
-- Next, go to the dropdown box in your scene setup area, and select the Spotlight 1 (2) view :
Once you've done that, you'll now be looking at the same thing that your first spotlight was seeing. But this time, the spotlight will already be positioned and set up with the same parameters as the first one. It's a bit of a shortcut that I use frequently if I'm adding multiple spotlights for windows. The only thing you need to do from here, is pan the spotlight along the X-Trans to one side or the other. So move this second spotlight to whichever side the other window is on, and once again, aim that center, smaller circle to be pointing through the window.
Set up your second spotlight's parameters now :
Shadows On : Raytraced.
Shadow Bias : 0.20.
Shadow Intensity : 80-85%.
Shadow Softness : You want, for this kind of lighting, probably in the neighborhood of about 50-60%.
Pick the color you want for the light.
Now repeat that method one more time for the third window. Be careful to make SURE that each time you duplicate the spotlight, you select the NEW spotlight from the dropdown box in your Scene Setup/preview window before moving it along the X-axis! Otherwise you'll end up moving the new spotlight and you won't actually be looking through the correct view, or have any idea just where the new spotlight is aiming.
Method Two :
This involves creating a new spotlight with all default settings, at which point you would have to once again move and rotate and aim the light, set up all the parameters and the light color for the new spotlight all over again.
I vastly prefer to use the first method when all I need is to move a second or third spotlight along the X-axis for additional windows. It saves a lot of time, and a lot of clicking, and I can just edit the parameters of the new spotlights later on if I need to change anything.
19.) Now, return once more to your render angle. Go into your Lights tab again, and because this is a more modern scene, we're going to create a third, new spotlight. This time, make sure you select "Apply Default Settings." Because more modern rooms usually have at least one light source on the ceiling, we don't want to copy the camera view for the light, and we do NOT want to copy the lights that are aiming through the window!
So, you've clicked on the dropdown box in the Lights tab, selected "Add a New Light" and chosen to apply the default settings. You now have a third spotlight in the scene.
20.) Click on the view dropdown box, and select this third spotlight's view. You'll once again be playing the part of the mouse and staring at the floor of the scene.
-- Raise the spotlight up on the Y-Translation dial a wee bit so that you're at least off of the floor.
-- Now, go to your X-Rotate dial, and rotate it downward. You want the spotlight to point right down at the floor! I usually set my X-Rotate to a value of -90.00
-- At this point, you might need to move the light so that it's actually illuminating the scene. Pan the light along the X and Z axis until you have it aiming at roughly the center of the floor in the room. Now, pan the light up along the Y-axis; turn your Y-Trans until you can see the majority of the room through the light's view. Don't worry about trying to get the ENTIRE box/mesh of the room into view; light fades out at the edges, after all. You just want to get the majority of it in view of this last light.
This is the sort of thing you should now be looking at, on this new spotlight :
-- From here, you need to set up the parameters of your ceiling spotlight. This is what I have set mine to for this scene :
Light Intensity : 45%
Shadow Type : Raytraced
Shadow Softness : 65%
Shadow Intensity : 80%
Shadow Bias : 0.20
Shadow Color : Again, here, I chose a pale yellowy/white-ish type of color for the ceiling light.
21.) Now, just go back to the dropdown box in your scene preview/setup area, and select your render angle. Then do a test render, and see what you've got for results.
I know this seems like a huge long series of steps to take, but that's because I'm just trying to lay out every single thing I do, so you can get an idea of the whole process. In reality, doing a setup like this, for the initial setup, only takes about five minutes to do once you're familiar with the parameters and all of that.
Once your test render is done, take a look at it, and see if you like what you have. (I usually do these test renders at rather a low pixel size - you only need to see if the shadows are casting where you want them.)
If you don't like the results, then you just have to go back to the lights and fiddle with their parameters; adjust things like light intensity, shadow intensity, for the window spotlights, you might need to adjust the angle that they're pointing into the room or maybe the spread angle might need to be increased or decreased in size.
Once you have the initial light rig in place, the rest is just playing around with the settings and doing test renders with each change, until you have what you're happy with for the scene. For this reason, I normally set up my light rigs either before I add my figures to the scene, or very early on before I've added too many figures. You want the interface nice and fast on this part of the process so that setting up the lights isn't such a hard PITA to do.
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This was my final result with the light rig up above. I ended up increasing the shadow softness on all of the spotlights to 60%, and increasing the Shadow Intensity on the "ceiling light" to about 90%. I also had to change the light colors a couple of times, and made some additional adjustments to the window spotlights in terms of reducing their spread angle and raising them up a bit higher on the window.
I think I went through about three different test renders before I had shadows and lighting that I was happy with for this one. Normally, I would be using AOA's Advanced Ambient lights, but those take a long while to learn (and have to be purchased from Daz's store), and I wanted to show you what can be pulled off with just the DS-native spotlights for this exercise.
So, this was the final result after additional tweaking of the various spotlights :
I would probably end up going in adjusting the shadows a bit more for a full, formal render. The ones under Blake's feet are just a bit too crisp for an indoor lighting situation, and the lighting overall could use a little touch of gamma correction in postwork.
This isn't half bad for a quickie light rig in 3Delight, though. I have no idea how Iray works, but Iray is capable of producing quite literally photorealistic quality images. I have in the past gotten very close to photoreal with 3Delight, but it requires some more advanced types of lighting and a LOT of time for rendering (though not as much time as Iray takes on my laptop lol).
Hope all of this helps somehow. I know it's a lengthy piece and it will take time to get through all of it.
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And if I set the Shadow Softness on the spotlights back down to 15%, then this is what you get through the windows :
Notice, the lighting on the counter top now shows a bit of the shape of the window - you can see the outline of the glass panes and the dark center line where the window frame sits between the panes.
So.. yeah, a lot can be done in 3Delight with lighting; it's all a matter of where you position the lights and what settings you have on your parameters. It does take some fiddling with and experimental test renders or spot renders, though.
Notice, the lighting on the counter top now shows a bit of the shape of the window - you can see the outline of the glass panes and the dark center line where the window frame sits between the panes.
So.. yeah, a lot can be done in 3Delight with lighting; it's all a matter of where you position the lights and what settings you have on your parameters. It does take some fiddling with and experimental test renders or spot renders, though.