favorite 3dl lights/render settings?

eyet33th

does anyone have any recommendations for preferred lightsets and render settings for 3dl? my favorite lights/settings i have ever used are Fabiana's Warm'nSoul, but unfortunately Fabiana has not released anything for 3dl that i can find. i prefer bright, warmer lights with soft but distinct shadows.

JonnyRay

When I was a heavy 3Delight user, I didn't really use "light sets", so I can't help too much with that. My favorite lights (by far) were Age of Armour's Advanced Daz Studio Lights.

As for lighting of a character portrait style scene, I got to be very efficient setting up the standard "3 light" rig that photographers tend to use. I have a tutorial for how to do that linked in my signature. It would be simple to build that sort of a light set (mine uses all spot lights) and save it to reload if you don't want to set it up custom each time. I typically used a warmer light setting on the main light, cooler on the fill light, and pure white on the key light to get results that I was happiest with.

Syrus_Dante

I've setup my own universal 3dl light set that I saved as a Subset and I load it into literary every new scene even if I only need some lights for preview and lateron use Iray to render.

First I've created a distant light for every direction top, bottom, left, right, front, back with white color light and low light strength. I turn the distant lights on as needed to avoid totaly black shadows depending on the camera angle but they are never on all together. Bottom light gets 30% strength for example. Then sometimes I rotate the others to some degree. For distant lights the position dosn't matter and I don't like to have the outlined light items at the world center so I grouped them and moved them far below the floor and out of the way.

Next I've added 3 spotlights and created a Null. All spotlights "Point At" the Null that I named "Null_Spotlight-Focus". Select all lights go to the Parameter pane General>Misc select Point At:Target Item. I move this Null around in the scene frequently, sometimes I turn Parent Items in Place off just to have it snap to the thing I parent it to - so instantly all spotlights are focused on that point. The spotlight angles, spread angles, heights and strenghts I set depends on the scene also I give them some color sometimes. I never turn on all lights at once and there is a limit of how many light sources gets previwed in the viewport.

Finaly I've grouped everything up and saved as subset that is my starting point for 3dl lights. You can turn off all lights in a group at once if you hide the group so I keept the distant and spot-lights seperate.

Regarding shadow settings I turn off the shadows on the distant lights then I select the spotlights set in the Scene pane, right-click the group Select Children, open the Parameters pane, make shure Consolidate Properties is on and then I open the Aux Viewport set to IPR to get a rendered preview and fine tune spotlight positions, strenghts, color and shadow settings.

Sven Dullah

Regarding render settings...the most important thing with 3DL...set gamma correction on and gamma to 2.20!!! Otherwise you will never have correct shading. This is called a linear workflow, and for some reason this is not the default setting. And remember, for all the older stuff, like G1/G2/V4/M4 hair and other things that use opacitymaps, gamma for controlmaps often need to be manually set to 1, which is the proper setting for a linear workflow.