Advanced Ambient, Spot & Distant Lights [Commercial]

Cross22

Thanks Richard. That solved it.

Jay Jay_1264499

Age of Armour said:

Vaskania said:

When I render in DS, these suckers are still my go-to lights, but there's something I haven't even thought about until now.

If I set an AA light to diffuse only, or specular only, am I still getting the ambient effects, or does a light have to be fully set to 'on' for ambient to take effect?

Also, what about multiple AA lights in a scene (say like an AAL for a global fill and a Adv Spot for a color splash).. am I getting more ambient than is needed?

You will still get ambient light and occlusion when using Diffuse Only. Actually, you will with secular only also but the Occlusion is not exactly noticeable unless you have a very dull surface.

You can indeed have multiple advanced lights in a scene. As you mentioned, having a spotlight for your key light and an ambient for the fill usually gives very good looking results.

The light intensities do add to each other though. That is not a bad thing but just keep it in mind and adjust accordingly. If you have 2 ambient lights, illuminating the same area, and each is at 100% strength, then you have the equivalent of 1 advanced light at 200% strength.

But using more than one can be handy. Let's say you have a dusk scene, where one ambient light is blue/purple and covers the whole scene to simulate the dusk skylight. And in your scene you have a building with a bright red neon sign... Near the sign you may want to put another ambient light but this time set it to red red and give it a short radius so it only casts a red glow on things near the neon sign.

This image was done using many advanced ambient lights, of various strengths and colors, in the scene.

Thanks for the explanation. Always liked that promo image of the smuggler, in fact that image along with the Roman villa sold me the light sets! Out of interest did you use ambient lights on the flames also? If so is it just a case of selecting the flame surface and adding an advanced light to it? I've used Uberlighting on flames in the past which works great but does give a lengthy render

Cheers

Jay

katfeete

Hey -- having a bit of an issue with the AoA lights all the sudden. They were working fine, but now it appears surface flagging is no longer working on surfaces that have the Subsurface Shader applied. I've attached a screenshot of my settings with some renders -- the only difference between the two is switching from DAZ default shader to Subsurface (and yes, ambient is still set to 99% on the subsurface render -- I checked. :P)

I am running Daz version 4.7.0.12 on Mac OSX 10.8.5. It does seem the problem showed up when I updated Daz, but I should note I recently trashed my boot drive and now it doesn't like the external I have my runtime on very much (the obscure permissions error chase never ends... *sigh*). Lights were still working after I got the boot drive up, but I'm not ruling that out as a source of the issue.

I've tried reinstalling both the Subsurface Shader and the lights (from DIM) but to no avail.

All help appreciated. I use both Subsurface and the flags constantly so this is very upsetting for me. :(

Havos

Have you tried flagging the defuse at 99% instead of the ambient?

katfeete

Havos said:

Have you tried flagging the defuse at 99% instead of the ambient?

Yes -- same result, I'm afraid. I haven't tried the IoR or hair shader settings (don't usually use those).

Mattymanx

I have made this mistake... your flagging option is set to "Do not illuminate"

grinch2901

I'm sorry if this question has been asked previously, it's a long thread.

I love these lights, they produce great results. However they do produce one odd artifact that is a sort of inverse ambient occlusion. What I mean by that is where a mesh has sharp edges like an inside corner rather than there being extra shadowing due to Ao, it actually gets brighter. See the bottom of the steps in the attached render for an example. Note the white Ao-like affect in the corners wherever the floor meets the walls or the steps.

I gather from prior discussions that this has something to do with the mesh, where you have single poly depth meshes it happens so you can resolve it by making things more dimensional (for example, rather than using a plane, use a very thin cube so it has that extra dimension). I've done this, it works. However some props don't enable me to add extra thickness. Architectural items, for example, are not easily modified in this way.

Are there setting we can use to reduce this effect?

katfeete

Mattymanx said:

I have made this mistake... your flagging option is set to "Do not illuminate"

I know... that's the problem. Despite being set to "do not illuminate", a surface with Subsurface applied is still being illuminated. :(

My big issue is that my standard light set is set to use shader hitmode on surfaces with Ambient 99%, and this no longer works, meaning primitive shaders for all (no go, far too weird on the shadows) or shader hitmode for all (render times are terrible. :()

Mattymanx

grinch2901 said:

I'm sorry if this question has been asked previously, it's a long thread.

I love these lights, they produce great results. However they do produce one odd artifact that is a sort of inverse ambient occlusion. What I mean by that is where a mesh has sharp edges like an inside corner rather than there being extra shadowing due to Ao, it actually gets brighter. See the bottom of the steps in the attached render for an example. Note the white Ao-like affect in the corners wherever the floor meets the walls or the steps.

I gather from prior discussions that this has something to do with the mesh, where you have single poly depth meshes it happens so you can resolve it by making things more dimensional (for example, rather than using a plane, use a very thin cube so it has that extra dimension). I've done this, it works. However some props don't enable me to add extra thickness. Architectural items, for example, are not easily modified in this way.

Are there setting we can use to reduce this effect?

Grinch, set you shadow and AO bias to 0.1

grinch2901

Thanks Mattymanx, I'll give that a try.

As an off topic aside (only slightly, you DO use these lights, after all), I've long admired the renders you produce, they just look consistently great. Kudos!

barbult

katfeete said:

Hey -- having a bit of an issue with the AoA lights all the sudden. They were working fine, but now it appears surface flagging is no longer working on surfaces that have the Subsurface Shader applied. I've attached a screenshot of my settings with some renders -- the only difference between the two is switching from DAZ default shader to Subsurface (and yes, ambient is still set to 99% on the subsurface render -- I checked. :P)

I am running Daz version 4.7.0.12 on Mac OSX 10.8.5. It does seem the problem showed up when I updated Daz, but I should note I recently trashed my boot drive and now it doesn't like the external I have my runtime on very much (the obscure permissions error chase never ends... *sigh*). Lights were still working after I got the boot drive up, but I'm not ruling that out as a source of the issue.

I've tried reinstalling both the Subsurface Shader and the lights (from DIM) but to no avail.

All help appreciated. I use both Subsurface and the flags constantly so this is very upsetting for me. :(

I can reproduce your problem. Even the flagging on diffuse seems incorrect now for surfaces with AoA Subsurface Shader. The "Don't Illuminate" acts like "Illuminate Flagged Only" and vice versa. Time to write a bug report I think.
Edit: I tested only with Advanced Ambient Light. I didn't test the other advanced lights.

kyoto kid

...hmmm, looks like it's just not the Atmospheric and Graphic Arts cameras that were affected by the update.

...and I use both the cameras and advanced lights a lot.

Mattymanx

grinch2901 said:

Thanks Mattymanx, I'll give that a try.

As an off topic aside (only slightly, you DO use these lights, after all), I've long admired the renders you produce, they just look consistently great. Kudos!

Thank you Grinch. I use a 3 point light setup for my portraits with an ambient light. I will be honest, I tend to use the same setup which tends to stunt my learning on lighting.

kyoto kid

...well checked a recent piece I did which was rendered in 4.7, and both the Advanced Spotlight (with the Caustics GOBO) and the EZ Volume Camera seemed to work when I compared it to a test render using just the default camera. Only flagged spotlight for the Volume Camera to create an underwater effect, no surfaces.

Looks like I need to run more tests. If the application's update is is causing flagging errors, that takes away one of the best features of these lights.

katfeete

barbult said:

I can reproduce your problem. Even the flagging on diffuse seems incorrect now for surfaces with AoA Subsurface Shader. The "Don't Illuminate" acts like "Illuminate Flagged Only" and vice versa. Time to write a bug report I think.

Damn, you're right -- the desired flag properties are exactly reversed. Good to know, and a relief to know others have the same problem and it's not yet more fallout from the boot drive failure (after this thing kicks it, I don't care how much they cost, I'm buying a Mac Pro. This Hackintosh stuff is hell.)

Edit: I tested only with Advanced Ambient Light. I didn't test the other advanced lights.

I tested all three -- it acted the same across all of them.

I've filed a bug report but I seriously doubt anyone will move on it until after Thanksgiving -- fair enough, even Daz tech guys have lives. In the meantime I can probably do something useful by using backwards properties.

I'll let you guys know if the bug report provides any useful info. Thanks everyone! This was driving me crazy, so it's nice to be able to go "bug!" and forget it until a fix comes down the pipes.

Spit

katfeete said:

::snip::

I tested all three -- it acted the same across all of them.

I've filed a bug report but I seriously doubt anyone will move on it until after Thanksgiving -- fair enough, even Daz tech guys have lives. In the meantime I can probably do something useful by using backwards properties.

I'll let you guys know if the bug report provides any useful info. Thanks everyone! This was driving me crazy, so it's nice to be able to go "bug!" and forget it until a fix comes down the pipes.

Thanks for filing a report on this and please let us know if you hear anything. I have no plans to update to 4.7 until this problem is at least acknowledged. These lights are simply too important for me.

BTW, have you mentioned this in the main thread on the public release of 4.7?

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/48862/