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
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
I am not sure if I am doing something wrong (likely) with night combine, but I open all of the rendered layers, and it runs through combining everything, but then it looks for additional layers. I get a message "The object "previous document" is not currently available", and if I tell it to stop, it looks like there is a lot more script left to run. The blue is where it stops when I get the error message, I tried to show how much it has left to go. I have not run into this at all with the regular combine, only the night combine.
It sounds as if you are not opening ALL 12 images that are rendered?
You have to open them all, starting with 0_Custom1.bmp and ending with 7_Mix.bmp
12 images...ah, yes, there, see, I knew I must be doing something wrong. And that was opening an August folder, when it was still rendering 8 images. *To self* September is a 9, dear...:red: Well, that was an easy fix, thank you, Vanguard. MUST clean out my folders when I am finished...
Sharing another couple of LDP-R renders.
great lighthouse shots Vanguard
Finally had a chance to play around with the new version and test it out... Also wanted to test the quality settings. I am, self admittedly, notorious for hiking up the render settings. I wanted to see if doing that was actually gaining me anything.
It took a lot of self control, but I pulled them all back.
The scene includes one Uber Point Light, parented to Custom Lights 1.
Shading Rate was set to 1 (under render settings).
LDP Settings: Sky Light Resolution Low, Shadow Quality Raytraced.
Resolution: 1920x1080
Total render time: 14 Minutes
One thing to point out, I am rendering on a Dell Inspiron Laptop, i7 CPU, 8G RAM, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 560
Second thing to point out, normally this laptop will overheat when rendering anything intensive. So I generally don't render on it at all.
Wow, that looks simply stunning... Well done!
Very cool atmosphere, and awesome rendering time too!
Totally amazing colors!
Yes, the new version uses 12 layers, and will therefore produce some errors while stacking / combining the layers in PS if you load only 8. However, it should still work. (It will just point out some missing layers).
Here my latest render, the water is still very much a wip. This took forever to render. LDP-R lights and one Caustic Gel Light. LDP-R is still buggy. I have found sometimes while the layers are either closing or saving they won't close or save properly causing the next layer in line to either not load or freeze.
When I first got LDP-R I it worked well and I liked using it, but I often used custom lights, which were a pain to use with it, so it limited when I could use LDP-R. With the custom lights update, I gave it another shot, and -Wow- I LOVE it! Awesome update to a great product. Even on high quality it outputs extremely fast. I like tweaking my lights so working in Photoshop is great for me. The 'night combine' action is very useful as well, and the 'cold filter' gives interesting bloom effects.
Here's a shot I did using the Night Combine action and the Cold Filter. I use 3 custom lights, parented to different folders so I can adjust each separately in Photoshop. This also makes postwork incredibly easy to transition to, since the lighting is in layers.
Quick question: will any skydome picture work with the LDPR skydome, or are there certain requirements? I'd like some forest scenes, and lately I've been using DT's excellent HDR-pro set: Yosemite. Can I apply this to LDP-R somehow?
Also I ran into some trouble when I first installed the update through DIM. It didn't erase the old action, probably because as Vanguard pointed out, it's installing to a separate folder in Presets. So when I went to run the action, it was the old action, rather than the new one. (You don't want to see what came out.) I had to completely delete the old action, then re-install.
Then I had a problem where if the pictures aren't loaded in the correct sequential order to PS, the output is a mess, too. I had simply selected all in the output folder and right clicked 'Open". Once I got them in the right order it combined nicely, but it was trial and error at first. You might want to point that out in the instruction manual.
Does anyone know of a tool that works in DS4.6 that lets me see where exactly the sunlight is going to shine in through. I know that we can use the sun light camera angle but I need something a little more visible. I know Dream light has the Pointer Pack but I have no idea if it still works in DS4.6
I don't know of any tool, but what I do is turn off all the other lights that LDP-R adds, the "preview" ones, and then I can see where the sunlight is shining on the scene. It isn't perfect but it's works close enough for me.
That could work as well, thanks
I was having trouble with positioning the sun, as well, in a scene I'm doing. The preview lights weren't a great indicator, because the SSS on the skin was washing out the preview. What I did was set the view to skylight, add a camera based on that view (Distant Light1), switch to the new camera view, and pan out to where I was comfortable. Now it wasn't parented to the skylight, so I had to create a new one every time I wanted to check an angle, but it was critical to do this, because I had to check to see if foliage was blocking the light, in addition to checking where the light falls on the subject.
Here is one I did just experimenting.
Is this the one you were having the trouble lining up the light? Is the sun light getting through the ceiling? It seems to have a lot of bounce light, but that's probably better for indoors scenes, if you can get some sun through the top. I remember a tutorial shot for LDPR that had an indoor sci-fi set with some of the ceiling tiles removed, and it had very nice ambience.
I'm still having problems with the photoshop action. I got the Night Combine to work by changing the order of the shots stacked in PS, but for the normal combine, I can't get the order correct. It keeps putting the wrong renders into the wrong layers. I could just cut and paste everything by hand, but that's a pain and the results wouldn't be exactly the same because of the masking.
First I tried 0(c1) 0(c2) 0(c3) 0(c4) 0(Fog) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7- then doing the combine on 7, and it gave me all the custom channels in the sun and sky.
So I figured I would try putting the sun and sky first, and I tried this order: 6 5 4 3 2 1 0(fog) 0(c1-4) and it gave me sun on the sky channel and sky bounce on the sun channel. Very weird. I guess I could try switching the order to start 5 6 4 3 2 1 0000, but WHY is it doing this?
Does anyone else have this problem, or am I doing something wrong?
If you look at the very foreground the is a bit of light coming in through the top but it overcast farther away from the center than what I want.
I don't use the all the 0000 maybe just one or two, I think some may be extra and not needed.
I thought it needed all the channels for the action to work, but apparently it's not working right anyway. I'll try it without the custom channels and maybe add them in by hand.
You could get a lot of drama by making the 2 point lights in the center cast shadows behind the figure, and let the edges of the room fall into shadow. I think if you wanted to use LDP-R on this scene as well, it could give you some bounce light fill, but you would need to scale it way back to keep the atmosphere from getting too evenly lit.
It seems to work OK if you just include the original 8 shots, without the custom lights, but then it did a curious thing and added a second fog layer called 'Custom 4'. now I actually DID have a custom light that I planned to add back in, so this was a convenient cut and paste, but I wonder how it knew to add another layer? Perhaps I should try it with only the custom shots that I use, and not the extras? More experimenting, I guess.
Here's the shot I was working on. I actually turned down or off many of the extra layers, because I wanted to preserve the darkness in the shadow area, and while the bounces were lighting it beautifully and correctly, I really had to restrain myself.
Dreamlight I think still has to work out some of the kinks in the software, but it works. IT DOES get better with each update. I Can't wait for the implementation of the corrected script.
Thanks everyone for the responses. I just now am getting back around to dealing with this problem and you guys helped me resolve it. It seems I somehow had the older version of LDP-R, so I uninstalled it and manually downloaded the new version. I had tried reloading it before but that was with the installer manager, which sometimes has problems with updates in my experience.
I'm starting to put out my first LDP renders now, this really is a brilliant product Dreamlight - and thank you for the Gimp support, I know you are a photoshop guy and you always go the extra mile for your customers.
Very nicely done. The lighting looks like it is solely coming up from the ground. Like a light in the pit or such.
There is just enough light coming from above to give the hint of the details. But not so much that it seems globally illuminated.
I have two low point lights on the touches and the light is coming from atop and from behind.
This was done with several custom point lights.
One in the Captains hand lantern on the deck, and another in the big lantern at the stern of the ship.
I used the normal combine action, not the night, as I wanted to control the light levels myself.
This one gave me a problem with the light position again, since there were tall buildings around, it was hard to see exactly where the light was falling. I thought I had checked it out with a preview render, but I apparently moved it, because when I went the renders were finished the light was in the wrong place. Worse yet, the main character was very dark. Since it was done rendering, I figured I would bring it into PS just to see what I got.
What I found was better than I had expected, a 'happy accident'. Drawing inspiration from John's indoor render, I played with the bounce settings a bit, and I liked it better than what I had been going for, originally. The ambient objects are still a little higher than what I had wanted, but even that is an interesting effect.
I didn't use the Ambient script, because I found it strips too much stuff out of the surfaces. The last time I used it, the characters skin rendered very flat and dull. Plus, there were ambients in that I wanted to keep, like the street and building lights. In the future I'll just crank them down by hand, anticipating that they will get amplified by the layers.
Cyberchase
Very cool. Great mood! You didn't find it too light to work with the regular Combine?
Not at all. in fact I usually find things too dark for my taste. I should try the Night Combine, but I have a feeling it will wash out all the color, much like real moonlight does. The trouble with that is that in this scene I wouldn't want the lantern lights to get washed out. They would retain their spectrum in real life, and pop out form the background that is bathed in moonlight. At least that is what I think they should do :p
To keep the crewmen that are in moonlight subdued I didn't give them any skin texture. They are the default grey that DAZ uses for Genesis figures. It sort of shows if you look carefully, but oh well.
The Captain did get the M5 texture and I like that his red coat sort of glows in the lantern light. It gives a nice outline to the figure.
One process I use often when I want to brighten up a scene is to make one or more copies of the sky or ambient layers. Since they are screen layers they add up the more you add. It does break down the dynamics if you go too far, but I don't render anywhere near print resolutions so for me it isn't a big deal.
Yet another LDP-R render
No custom lights used
Here is a second try at my aquatic cave ldpr render. I really hope the issue with the parent script gets fixed soon as it is entirely too much work to go back into a scene with close to 100 lights and change the parent.