Digital Art Zone

I set up a character and some moving lights.  The character will render, but not the lights.  The character is only illuminated by the main overall light.  The character and lights render in preview mode, but once I switch to higher res and an .mov export, the light’s won’t render.  Any thoughts on what I’m doing wrong?  I’m using Daz 4 on an iMac.

Are you sure the lights aren’t set to cast shadows, and behind an obstruction? What kind of lights are they?

The lights are linear point lights that swirl around a character.  I’m hoping they provide a bit of interactive lighting in addition to the overall distant light.  I see them clearly enough in the picture.  So why don’t they render?  Do I need to specifically point them at the character?

Point Lights are just a Light source at render time, they are not visable when rendered. Just the light they produce. They are visable in the Viewport for placement purposes only.

Yes, I’m not expecting to see little glowing light orbs.  My problem is the light they produce on the figure does not seem to render.  The figure renders, but without the illumination from these lights.  It’s like the figure is in shadow.  I know there are ways to render different parts of a scene….like the background, figure, and even the light falling on the figure…how are such elements turned on and off in the render process?  Perhaps the lights are not “turned on” though I would imagine if I can see their effect on the figure in the scene…I should see it in the render.

I suggest ramping up the Light intensity on them. If you click the little cog icon (end of the dial) you will get a option to ignore limits and could then test some higher values untill you get a better output. Hope that might help some.

I’ll give that a try.  But why would the light effects I see in the program be so different from those that render?  In my brief work with the Daz program I’ve noted a wide difference between the figure I’m manipulating and the appearance once rendered.

How many grid squares are between the lights and the figure? What are the distance settings for the lights?

Just one square.  I’ll tinker with fall off start and stop and see if that has any effect.

Okay I will explain why what you see in the Viewport and what you get in a render is so different.

Your Viewport view is rendered to the monitor by your Video Card. It ignores certian settings that the 3DeLight render engine uses at the time of a full render. Lights only look close and many times much stronger because falloff and other settings do not get rendered to the Monitor in the Viewport in OpenGL. For a quick view use your Spot Render tool to see what you will get in a final 3DeLight render.

Thanks for the explanation.  Daz should take a hard look at that, however, as wysiwyg is sort of the basic goal in this sort of thing.  I did check the fall off and sure enough the light sphere was not reaching the character.  Side note:  with lights now rendering, the one second clip took almost 8 hours to render.  That’s one high res image and three lights rotating around it.