Studio Light PRO DS 4.6 Edition (commercial)

Dreamlight

Awesome, implementing that as we speak... Also, still waiting for reply regarding upgrade pricing, whether possible to include or not. Just send another email...

Fobok1 said:

Dreamlight said:

Thank you, I hope you'll have tons of fun with it!

Does that mean there will, indeed, be an upgrade option? :)

I’m thinking of including LDP-R functionality to SLP DS 4.6 edition. Let me know what you think about that!

Also, if you already have LDP-R, you can use SLP and simply parent the lights into the custom LDP-R folders…

I absolutely love LDP-R, so that's cool. :)

Dreamlight

I'm sorry to inform, there will not be an upgrade route. I'll see what can be done further down the road...

HeavyRay said:

So.... is their an upgrade route/price from the prior SLP product??

Dreamlight said:

The DS 4.6 Edition is a revamp of the "older" DAZ Studio 2 version. It has 800+ lights, presets and variations. That is, for instance if you open up a light type, it can be made of several quality versions, various colors and then various positions. Just the Soft Box alone, has 5 quality settings, 5 colors each and 16 positions each, which quals 400 variations on that light alone (5 x 5 x 16).

If we count Soft Box, Super Spot, Area Light And Magic Sphere alone (that is only 4 of the 11 light types and without the presets, we're hitting 736 variations.

I never make any claims I cannot backup. SLP DS 4.6 has easily over 800 vairations, that is, icons that preload a ready to render light or preset at various quality settings, colors and positions. (It's actually 823, but I didn't count that close)

Peter Wade said:

Legionair said:

Peter Wade said:

The product page doesn't mention needing Photoshop or any other software but I am beginning to wonder how accurate it is. In the description it says:

"Choose from hundreds of presets and lights that will change the way you light your DAZ Studio renders forvever..."

But when you look at the "what is included and features" tab it says you get fifteen presets and eleven lights. What happened to the hundreds?

The examples look good but I think I'll wait and see how other people get on with it before deciding.

Unfortunately Dreamlight's hyperbole often get in the way of a good product.

That's not to say I don't like them, I've almost always loved them. But the grandiose claims can really leave the wrong impressions.

They do get a bit carried away at times.

My main reservation about Dreamlight is continued support of their products. I bought Light Dome Pro 2 and Mood Master for Daz Studio 3 and they were excellent products but when Daz Studio went up to version 4 both of these were abandoned, no upgrades paid or otherwise.

With the current state of Daz Studio I expect another upgrade like the 3 to 4 one is unlikely in the near future, but if it was Daz would never tell us until it was about to happen.

Pschelfh

Dreamlight said:

I'm thinking of including LDP-R functionality to SLP DS 4.6 edition. Let me know what you think about that!

Also, if you already have LDP-R, you can use SLP and simply parent the lights into the custom LDP-R folders...

Could you explain this in more detail please? I'm very interested in doing multi layered render passes! :)
Can I just replace the light in LDP-R with these ones and have multi layered renders?

Thanks,
Peter.

Fobok

Hm, the portrait-high preset gives me a pretty odd result. Of course, I haven't read the manual or anything, I just loaded the preset into a scene I'd already setup for a portrait (after taking out the old lights). I probably should have used a different preset for this portrait, but I'll have to dig into the manual to figure things out.

Peter Wade

Fobok1 said:

Hm, the portrait-high preset gives me a pretty odd result. Of course, I haven't read the manual or anything, I just loaded the preset into a scene I'd already setup for a portrait (after taking out the old lights). I probably should have used a different preset for this portrait, but I'll have to dig into the manual to figure things out.

Is your figure standing at the origin (X, Y and Z co-ords all zero) or have you rotated her from the default load position? If you have moved or rotated her you will have to move and rotate the light set to match. The lights load in surrounding a figure at the origin.

Fobok

Peter Wade said:

Is your figure standing at the origin (X, Y and Z co-ords all zero) or have you rotated her from the default load position? If you have moved or rotated her you will have to move and rotate the light set to match. The lights load in surrounding a figure at the origin.

Nope, I just double-checked. However, I did leave the 'Main Target' set at normal height, and I'm rendering a teen-morphed G2F. That may be the issue. I'm going to try rendering again with the target lowered, see if that helps. (The floor will likely still be an issue, but I imagine this pre-set is meant to be used at a closer zoom level. I could probably fix that with surface adjustments, but this is just a test run of the lights, I actually already have rendered the version of this portrait I wanted to use, which I'll be posting in the art studio forum shortly, with my manual lighting, so not going to bother.)

Fobok

Nope, no difference at all. I think it's the light intensities. The back lights are at 100%, flooding the floor, but the key lights are only at 15%, (and the fill at 30%), making the front look not very well lit.

Still, it's a starting point and I can always tweak to get a better result, if I was using it for more than a quick test.

Peter Wade

Fobok1 said:

Nope, no difference at all. I think it's the light intensities. The back lights are at 100%, flooding the floor, but the key lights are only at 15%, (and the fill at 30%), making the front look not very well lit.

Still, it's a starting point and I can always tweak to get a better result, if I was using it for more than a quick test.

Odd. I tried creating a simple scene and loading in the Portrait High preset and this is what I got. I think the fashion presets might be better for full-length shots but I haven't tried them yet.

Fobok

See, that looks really good. What are the key light intensities set at? I'm wondering if I got a bad version. If it is 15% in that image, it may come down to the model and the clothes, perhaps. But, to get a good result (except the floor, I agree this light preset is not made for full-body images), I had to up the key light intensities to 50%. (I also realized that I had originally left AoA ambient in, but I switched out to the SLP ambient and it only improved a tiny bit, until I upped the key light intensities.)

Peter Wade

Fobok1 said:

See, that looks really good. What are the key light intensities set at? I'm wondering if I got a bad version. If it is 15% in that image, it may come down to the model and the clothes, perhaps. But, to get a good result (except the floor, I agree this light preset is not made for full-body images), I had to up the key light intensities to 50%. (I also realized that I had originally left AoA ambient in, but I switched out to the SLP ambient and it only improved a tiny bit, until I upped the key light intensities.)

The key lights are both 15%, Fill C is 30%, Back L and Back R are both 100% and the 3 bounce lights are 5% each.

I also have a headlamp blocker set to 100%. I understand why the headlamp blocker is needed but I expected to see it set to 0%. As an experiment I tried turning it down to 0%. This made the preview go dark but the render came out the same as before. There is some clever trickery going on here that I do not understand.

HeavyRay

Dreamlight said:

I'm sorry to inform, there will not be an upgrade route. I'll see what can be done further down the road...

I don't mean to start "trouble" or anything; just trying to "understand"....
Since the product is brokered by Dreamlight alone, don't you/Dreamlight have control over pricing? I could see if Daz was co-owner on this, but why did you "have to check with Daz" on this at all? I've seen where several updated products were released for FREE right here in the store by other vendors. I don't see where anyone other than Dreamlight would "have a dog in the fight" when it comes to pricing (original OR update.) As an aside, offering update pricing would go a long way to convince skeptical customers that a product line will be around/supported for the long run... Just sayin'

Dreamlight

You simply load LDP-R to your scene, and then use the "custom" folders for the SLP lights. For instance, you can add a portrait preset, parent the entire preset to one of the LDP-R custom folders, and do a render using the LDP-R render funcion. It will then render the LDP-R layers PLUS the SLP portrait as a stand alone layer.

You can of course add individual SLP lighs to custom layers as well. We're working on extending the number of custom layers to 8 instead of 4, and also, the same layer functionality will be added to SLP (although without the specific LDP-R lights).

peter.schelfhout said:

Dreamlight said:

I'm thinking of including LDP-R functionality to SLP DS 4.6 edition. Let me know what you think about that!

Also, if you already have LDP-R, you can use SLP and simply parent the lights into the custom LDP-R folders...

Could you explain this in more detail please? I'm very interested in doing multi layered render passes! :)
Can I just replace the light in LDP-R with these ones and have multi layered renders?

Thanks,
Peter.

Dreamlight

I only have "some" control over pricing. DAZ are doing the promotions, and they tweak them as they see fit. DAZ usually override percentages, AND price points. Having that said, I highly appreciate your input, I will continue my dialogue with DAZ and we'll see how this unfolds later on...

HeavyRay said:

Dreamlight said:

I'm sorry to inform, there will not be an upgrade route. I'll see what can be done further down the road...

I don't mean to start "trouble" or anything; just trying to "understand"....
Since the product is brokered by Dreamlight alone, don't you/Dreamlight have control over pricing? I could see if Daz was co-owner on this, but why did you "have to check with Daz" on this at all? I've seen where several updated products were released for FREE right here in the store by other vendors. I don't see where anyone other than Dreamlight would "have a dog in the fight" when it comes to pricing (original OR update.) As an aside, offering update pricing would go a long way to convince skeptical customers that a product line will be around/supported for the long run... Just sayin'

Dreamlight

Although being mainly designed for the upper body, it should not wash out the floor like this. Thanks for posting and we're looking into this!

Fobok1 said:

Hm, the portrait-high preset gives me a pretty odd result. Of course, I haven't read the manual or anything, I just loaded the preset into a scene I'd already setup for a portrait (after taking out the old lights). I probably should have used a different preset for this portrait, but I'll have to dig into the manual to figure things out.

Dreamlight

We're still looking into this issue. Thanks for your patience...

Dreamlight said:

Although being mainly designed for the upper body, it should not wash out the floor like this. Thanks for posting and we're looking into this!

Fobok1 said:

Hm, the portrait-high preset gives me a pretty odd result. Of course, I haven't read the manual or anything, I just loaded the preset into a scene I'd already setup for a portrait (after taking out the old lights). I probably should have used a different preset for this portrait, but I'll have to dig into the manual to figure things out.

TY3DArt

For some reason I can not find the the render settings for DAZ can you please let me know the correct settings here. Thank you so very much.

Dreamlight

Sure! Lower Max Raytrace Depth to 1, X / Y Samples to 3, Shading Rate 1.0 (slightly lower, like 0.4-0.6 for sharper quality), Pixel Filter (SInc, X / Y = 6)

tmraider said:

For some reason I can not find the the render settings for DAZ can you please let me know the correct settings here. Thank you so very much.

TY3DArt

thank you so very much! love the product!!

nokoteb99

Hi.

I got Studio Light Pro for my Mac DS 4.7.
It's great but it crashes when i delete it from my scene. Specifically the Lights/Spotlights.

Like if i add them to my scene but then i want to delete them , the program crashes and exits.
Why is this?

I have Mac OS X 10.9.5 10GB ram... 2.66 Ghz Quad Core Intel xeon.

SamWM

I have the same problem with it not being able to delete. I can delete everything but the target. So I end up having to either export everything except the lighting or open the scene in DazStudio 4.8

argel1200

I have seen that too, but with other products as well. I wonder if DS 4.7 does not like lights parented to something else or grouped. One workaround is to save a scene subset, making sure to leave the lights out.

TenTen71

I just started using the original Studio Light Pro with Daz Studio 4.8. I assumed the crashing was due to the fact that there is a 4.6 version of SLP which I'm not using.

What versions are you guys running when yours crashes?

fixmypcmike

tenten71 said:

I just started using the original Studio Light Pro with Daz Studio 4.8. I assumed the crashing was due to the fact that there is a 4.6 version of SLP which I'm not using.

What versions are you guys running when yours crashes?

Are you rendering in 3delight or Iray?

TenTen71

Doesn't seem to matter. Without rendering anything.. just setting up scene and then deleting SLP item (because maybe I want to replace it with a different one), the program crashes. I originally had 3Delight selected under render settings and had the same results with Iray selected.

I'm using Daz Studio 4.8, SLP original version on a 64-bit Windows 7 Pro machine with Intel Core i7 (3.5Ghz), 8GB of memory and NVidia GeForce GT 730 (2GB) with latest drivers.

Don't know if it's worth purchasing the newer version of SLP. Would it perform any different or better?

I will do further testing.

TenTen71

After testing each kind of light, this is my conclusion...

It is safe to delete the following elements:

- lights
- ref
- handle

Therefore it should be safe to delete these type of lights:

- Area Lights
- Ambient Lights

It is NOT safe to delete the following elements:

- reference point
- ref point
- center point
- target
- main target

Therefore it will ALWAYS crash when deleting these type of lights:

- Super Spot
- Soft Box
- Magic Sphere
- Fire Light
- Disco Light
- Portrait Preset
- Fashion Preset
- Pinup Preset
- Alien Preset
- Horror Preset

Knowing this, I could in theory just delete the actual light elements and handles, etc. and leave the rest in the scene but I don't wish to have cluttered files. I assume no one else does either.

Personally I'm not a fan of having so many lights in a scene so I'm not a fan of this lighting system. But I'm also new to Daz and I know this is a very popular system among users. I at least wanted to provide my findings. Hopefully this helped.