Digital Art Zone

I have a couple questions about Uber lighting.

1) What is the difference between UberEnvironment2 vs the Soft Light Kit

2) What is the difference between UberSpot/UberPoint vs Muusa Ethereal Lighting?

3) Is anyone using these products and have comments on them?

ty

1) Quite a bit.
UberEnvironment is an IBL lighting solution based on an enviroment dome that supports HDR tifs and adds light-based ambient occlusion. It’s free/built-in to DS.
UberSoft is an IBL-like lighting solution based on individual types of lights, like distant lights, area lights, spots lights, etc.  Most importantly UberSoft uses a single shadow pass for all lights.  This cuts down on rendering times substantially.

2) UberSpots/UberPoints are the original IBL spot/point solution for DAZ Studio.  They are build at the RSL level (renderman shader language), support gels and falloff.
Muusa Ethereal Lighting uses ShaderMixer built lights, don’t support falloff (to my knowledge), but are otherwise quite similar (except come with different gels).  Once bonus is that these contain a distant light gel solution (you have to have UberSoft to get that from the omnifreaker products).

3) I own all the Uber* products.  Each has it’s own uses.  I didn’t buy into the Muusa’s because I already owned all the Uber products.

Ty Adam

This brings up another question, does the UberSoft lights support gells, and if not can the UberSpot/Point be used with the UberSoft so that the UberSoft controls them also?

Actually, no, UberSoft does not support Gels.  But you can absolute use all the other Omnifreaker products with them.  I do not believe you can combine then with ahEnvironment lighting though.  Also I do not know for certain if you can mix the Muusa lights with them.

Well I was thinking one could use the gells and copy over any color settings probably from Muusa’s. There are a good number of gels in the set, so it might be worth it especially at the sale price. It probably would take a little of work to convert over though.

As long as the gels in Muusa are in the correct aspect ratio.  All the Uber* products use a 2w x 1h ration (e.g., 1000 x 500) etc.

To add another question here: Do the UberSoft Lights work in DS4.5 ? I thought only plugins need to be updated, but there’s a note ‘This Product has been updated to support DAZ Studio 4!’ on item page - so I’m not sure about DS4.5 ?

bad4u - 13 September 2012 12:57 PM

To add another question here: Do the UberSoft Lights work in DS4.5 ? I thought only plugins need to be updated, but there’s a note ‘This Product has been updated to support DAZ Studio 4!’ on item page - so I’m not sure about DS4.5 ?

Sorry for the slow response, been tied up all day… They work in in 4.5 though you will see this message:

.  The reason for this is that they were compiled in the “recompilable” state in 4.0.  This means they’ll auto-recompile for future versions.  It’s not really harmful (or significantly slower) (took my system about 2 seconds to recompile the shader).

Thanks Adam, that’s helpful to know.

What’s the difference between UberAreaLight and UberEnvironment? I see under Categories that they are both under Light.

Area light makes a selected surface cast light - useful for things like televisions or fires. Environment is an environment light, it lights from all directions according to the brightness of a control image (among other things).

Hijacking the thread a little bit, I know that ubersoft is meant to be for soft shadows predominantly but how do I get any kind of directional shadows? I was working on an indoor scene and thought that I’d give ubersoft a try with 1 ubersoft distant light shining through the window. I wanted to get at least some sense of the shape of the window, or at least some directional shadows from that. But instead, I get extremely even lighting and almost no shadows, it’s almost as if the distant light isn’t taking the walls into consideration (sort of like when you don’t turn shadows on for a distant light) and that all I’m getting is some very weak ambient occlusion, even when I slid directional shadows all the way to 100%.

Any advice? I liked the idea of the single shadow pass but since I couldn’t seem to get the shadows going at all I might have to go back to using UE in either GI mode or IDL with directional shadows to get more what I’m looking for.

Adam, thanks for the info about recompiling, I was worried about that.

Adacey, I think the way to go is using an UberSpot in front of that window, isnt? I guess if from some distance the shadow lines will be paralel, or almost. (I´m new to DS/Uber, so maybe there is a better solution)

Then a question: what if in this problem Adacey told about he uses a DS Distant Light?

2Fatbear - 17 November 2012 09:45 AM

Adacey, I think the way to go is using an UberSpot in front of that window, isnt? I guess if from some distance the shadow lines will be paralel, or almost. (I´m new to DS/Uber, so maybe there is a better solution)

Then a question: what if in this problem Adacey told about he uses a DS Distant Light?

Thanks for the response. In the end I did exactly what you suggested; a DS Distant Light instead of the US Distant. As far as I can tell, at least part of the problem is that it appears that the US lights don’t work with transparency so the US distant was never shining through the window. I had the same issue in the same scene with trying to use a US Point LIght in a lantern and no light shone through the glass in the lantern, switched it to an Uber Point Light and it was fine.