Digital Art Zone

Hi, I mustly use Kids4 and genesis as a kid with no background. I am horrible at lighting, my people are too dark or cartoon looking no matter what I try.  So, I want to buy some lighting. What do you suggest I try to get for people with no background to look realistic without being so bright they look like cartoons.  I know I will still need to tweak lighting once it loaded but I need a good starting point to work with.

Kimberly

How you set up your textures/shaders is as important if not more important than your lighting.

To me a lighting kit just put lights into a scene very quickly. I still go through each and every light (by looking through them) and adjust the light settings and placement/pointing. Then I add lights as needed. Then I put in Uber Environment 2 which makes me have to check and tweak all my light settings again. UE2 accesses the render engine and gives you more control over the final output by setting how the light/shadows look.

Setting up surface tab - Depending on how far away your camera is you will have to adjust all the Bump maps. I would suggest adding UberSurface to the skin layers (once again, more control over how the renderer calculates the surface) as well as more important surfaces in your scene.

I like the Ironman13 lighting kit. Simple setups. But you will have to add lights to the kits. Any lighting you buy will most likely require you to add lights to the setup. Did you also change the rendering setting to Toon?

For the actual lighting, you can’t go past Reality, but as David said you still need to get the materials right.

Keep in mind that the PA sale begins in September this year, so if you choose to buy a PA product it may be worth it to wait a bit. Which version of DS do you use? When I was using DS3 my go-to lighting set was AhEnvironment 2 (sold at DAZ) which unfortunately hasn’t been updated for DS4.
While waiting for the PA sale to begin I’d suggest you take a look at this video: http://vimeo.com/37500975 It’s .not my favourite technique but it gives good results. Keep in mind that area lights have been modified by 3Delight (or more accurately dna research) in DS 4.5 so things may look a little different from the video.