Digital Art Zone

Hello Everyone,

I am having an issue I purchased the ballroom from daz3d love the set but how do i Get the stained glass to show as transparent and have a light shine through it? I guess I could do this in postwork in photoshop but I really do love to get the lighting correct in daz3d to better guide me in psd…. any suggestions?

Are you talking about Light Rays in the air coming through the colored glass? That is called God Rays and can be done. As for the transparancy, select that Glass/Window section in your Surfaces Tab and change the Opacity Setting. The lower the clearer your object will be.

If you want a colourd shadow from the window, you need to apply an inverted copy of the Diffuse texture to the Opacity.

Cool trick Richard!

Okay how do you create God Rays? and how do you do an inverted copy of diffuse texture?

I don’t know about the “God rays” but to invert the colors of a texture map is easy. Take the texture map Jpg into Adobe Photoshop and hit Command I (Control I on PC). It will produce a negative image. Save that as a new texture file and load the new texture into your window’s Opacity setting.

Or if you don’t want to use keyboard shortcuts you can use edit invert image from the tool bar.

For God rays (light beams) I use this product Atmospheric Effects Cameras for DAZ Studio I have an example of what these cameras can do in my render thread http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/2765/P60/#52609

Nice tip Richard I will have to try that out.

One thing |I should add - if your stained glass window already uses an opacity map to add the tracery you may need to have that layered on top of the inverted diffuse map, set to screen mode, so that the colours show through where it’s black but the white areas masking out the tracery stay pure white. Whether you have to do that will depend on the diffuse map - if it’s already black where the tracery goes the inverted map alone should do the job, but if there’s colour on the map it will not fully block the light through the tracery.

chohole - 21 July 2012 04:27 AM

Or if you don’t want to use keyboard shortcuts you can use edit invert image from the tool bar.

Actually, Invert is under Image> Adjustments, not Edit, in Photoshop.

Sorry, didn’t have it fired up when I typed that.

You can also use Uber Volume that comes with DS4 to create God Rays. But is not as easy to set up as the Cameras, but will work once set properly.