Age of Armour lights? Interjection? PW effects, oh my!
Wonderland
Posts: 7,137
I keep seeing products saying Age of Armour lights are a requirement. What are they? Do they work in Iray? I have only tried a few 3Delight renders and never know which lights to use, is this a product needed for 3Delight? What exactly do they do?
And what is Interjection and PW effects? I bought them on sale quickly before the time was up, not really understanding them, and don't know if I'll have to return them because I'm not sure what they do. Do they work in Iray? Do they make 3Delight look better? My 3Delight renders have usually sucked. Do I need any of these products, do they improve 3Delight and if so, in what scenarios?
Still on the fence about getting Age of Armour Advanced lights. Will it help me as a DS newbie? Why do other products need them? I use almost exclusively Iray but I would like to try 3Delight for less realistic (but well lit) characters and toons that hopefully render faster but don't have to e perfect, I bring everything into Photoshop after.
Thanks,
Still tumbling through the rabbit hole...
Wonderland
Thanks.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2026 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
AoA lights do not work in Iray but they are excellant for 3Delight.
PW effects does not work in Iray; its a shader set that can produce some very useful effects such as transparacies for ghost and glow like effects, it was one of the first sets of shaders created for DS, along with the other PW ones.
The interjection products are again shaders presets, settings and mats for skin for 3delight but they only work as far as I can remmeber on some Genesis 1 UV sets. Actually there is a set for G2F in the PC called Reinterject.
None of those work in Iray...AoA lights, Interjection and PW are all 3Delight. And yes, the can make 3DL renders 'better'.
Hmmm, thanks. I really like Iray and would have no use for 3DL if the Iray renders didn't take so damn long and often I'm just going to take it into Photoshop anyway to make more arty. Have to try out what I bought and figure out if I want to keep it or bother to invest in Age of Armour lights...
If you do stuff with 3DL, I can't recommend AoA lights highly enough. I don't bother to use anything else.
An AoA distant or spot light + AoA ambient light is all the lighting you need in nearly every case, and it's the fastest you can get while making pretty realistic looking images.
This, for example, is an AoA spotlight + AoA ambient light: http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/KnitWitch-635592995
Also: http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Wolf-in-the-Badlands-3DL-632315103
I love Iray, but you can make some REALLY nice-looking images with 3DL.
If you want more arty stuff and do a lot of postwork, frankly, I don't see much reason NOT to experiment with 3DL.
Yeah, the AoA lights are easily one of the greatest single products ever made for 3DL, especially the Advanced Ambient light, and they're ridiculously cheap as well. If you're going to work in 3DL, as you need to do with the various DS toon shaders and the new LineRender9000 system that's coming up this month, they make 3DL lighting a breeze and they render like the wind.
Newbies like us coming into Daz really could use something on the product pages that indicate whether something is 3Delight only. I've come across quite a few things that don't work in Iray and something to indicate that on the product page would be really helpful.
...another person who swears by the AoA lights. I rarely used UE as I can get very similar quality. For render speed there is nothing better.
I did a parallel test of the same scene in both Iray and 3DL with the AoA lights using the same light anlge for the "sun". In Iray it took just over two hours. In 3DL with the AoA lights, 14 min.
wasnt it broken with 4.6 ?
some people say so about the tagging/flagging
hey Diva
can you pls revert your avatar ?
i liked the other so much more and you were easy to identify
I only use DS for realism really with Iray. I use Poser for everything else, because it's so much easier than DS for me. But now I'm liking the Genesis characters which are a pain to use in Poser...
There are specific flagging options that broke with AoA lights and show no signs Daz will ever fix them. I think it relates to SSS? I don't remember.
But, selfishly, those are options I never find it necessary to use, so... enh. And even for those who would like it to work properly, the rest of the product works so well it's still worth it, I think.
i've had trouble using aoa lights in ds4.8 3dl, doesnt work for me.
anyone figureed out how to get them to work?
it not just the flagging, skin rendering inked out
I don't recall having a problem... what are you attempting?
to render a 3de Leo7 with his 3de shaders with an adv ambient light ds4.8
Its not really up to Daz its up to the vendor, and I think I recollect him saying he had some health problems at some point and I don't think he has been seen around for a while.
Daz changed the app breaking products that they claim no responsibility to fix but that they sell on their store.
Yeah.
Yep always been that way, in my experience they do what they can. In the case of the PW products they bought them, out all bar the PWSketch for some reason, but if they can't contact the vendor then there's nothing much they can do. Yes an upgrade brock some things it happens, perhaps they shouldn't bother to make any advances in DS keep it how it was in version 1.
Yeah, he had to quit his regular job of making armor due to health concerns. The last time he posted here was around Xmas.
If I recall what AoA said, the flagging issue started after DAZ changed the properties of one of the shader bricks in DS 4.7. He considered the best solution was that DAZ change the brick back, but they have not done so in DS 4.8 or DS 4.9. Given that newer products could be broken if they did change it back now, I think we can sort of assume that they will not do it. This means AoA would need to try and work around the new shader brick properties, or simply leave it broken. Given that iRay not 3DL seems to be the main priority of DAZ and the PA's now, I think it is likely this problem will not be fixed in the future, but we will see.
I've encountered changing brick behavior. Very annoying.
I've had success using the flags with diffuse, not so much with ambient. I used AoA's Advanced Spotlights in my Mandala Mermaids 3DL render; one spotlight to each mermaid. I set the flags to illuminate only one mermaid. I just set each flag to 99.1, 99.2, etc. to work with multiple diffuse surfaces.
Ummm Really? Am I supposed to use the same avatar forever? lol I've had the same one for six months or so, as long as I've been on the forum. SIX months is actually a long time for me to use the same avatar. I like switching things up every once in a while. :) I'm sorry you don't like it - others have told me that they like it. I guess you can't please everyone - so I suppose I'll just try and please myself. lol :)
I'm glad you liked my old avatar though - that's a drawing a did of one of my favorite OCs. :) I might end up using it again sometime, but for now I want something a bit different.
This is why I love AoA's Advanced Spotlight, and the Diffuse Flag still works (renders stopped early 'cause I'm impatient):
Spotlight without any flag settings.
Spotlight with flag settings to not illuminate the structure.
Would you mind posting a render so we can see what the problem is?
AoA ambient pretty much saved my interest in 3DL, because UE2 just... no. And setting up a half dozen pseudo lights with separate diffuse, specular, etc, just seemed insane to me. Half the reason I moved to Iray was for easier light set up (granted, it turns out while the initial set up is way easier, there's a lot of fiddly skill you need to do lights _well_)
But with AoA ambient, I could get realistic enough effect without taking amounts of time comparable to Iray.