Lighting Problem
Prince Wao
Posts: 373
Working with a 3DL scene which was glitching I exited Daz to come back to it later, but when I reloaded the scne all of the set lights - sun, ambient, linear point and point lights - while still appearing in the scene menu weren't shining in the viewport. IE: the viewport was essentially in darkness until I turned on the Preview Light. I've scoured all of the menus and I can't find anything that will make the lighting show up in the viewport or indeed anything which could turn it off. If I load any of my 3DL scenes the lighting is also gone, but when I load an Iray scene the lighting works as it should. In Iray if I select the sun from the scene menu and lower or higher its intensity the changes are instantly seen in the viewport, but now in any 3DL scene I load changing the sun's intensity doesn't make any difference in the viewport as for some (to me) bizarre reason it's switched off. But if I spot render the entire viewport the lighting is still there and the render is fine. Somewhere there must be a setting that turns the lighting on or off in the viewport, but I can't find it anywhere. Does anyone have any idea where that is?
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Update from yesterday:
Where I wrote "If I load any 3DL scene the lighting is also gone, but when I load an Iray scene the lighting works as it should", it turns out that the Iray scene I loaded differs to all of my others as I added my own lighting and so I can change the density, but all of my other Iray scenes load without any light in the viewport, just as with the 3DL scenes. Why the latter Iray one loads with the viewport lit when all others don't I've no idea and I can't find anything in the scene parameters or elsewhere which is different.
Re the 3 screenshots below, this G2M character in the full 3DL scene is in the far right background as a secondary figure and so won't be very large in the actual scene, but these shots example what I'm seeing. In the 1st, this is how the lighting appears when I load the scene and there's no Preview Light; in the 2nd the Preview Light is switched on; and the 3rd image shows a partial spot render in which it can be seen that all of the lighting works when rendering. So why doesn't it show up in the viewport?! I've checked every menu I can find and I'm at as loss as to why the active lights don't illuminate the viewport, yet work when I render. Surely there must be a simple solution?
Preview Lights is a verb phrase (what should we do with the lights? Preview them) not a noun phrase (what sort of lights should we use? The Preview Light). You are starting with Preview Lights on, and the scene is dark because the lights do not preview well, then you turn the preview off and get a pseudo headlamp instead. DS can preview only the first severn lights, so is it possible that you have lights with limited effect or spread thata re taking those slots and so preventing the Distant lights from showing? Are you sure that the render is actually showing the lights and not an HDR?
You must admit, the choice of term is not that good, especially considering that not everybody is native english speaker... If there is a button for "Preview Lights" that is activated by pushing it down, the logical conclusion would be that your preview would light up, not start resembling midnight in a coal cellar.
It certainly is widely misunderstood, so I'd vote to chnage the label in the unlikely event that I was asked.
Richard, when you say that "DS can preview only the first severn lights" does that include linear point lights and point lights? It can be seen in the screenshots above that I have a sun and 4 ambient lights, then beyond those I have 2 linear point lights and 8 point lights loaded, so that's a total of 14 lights. I assume it must include all lights because I just solved the problem by fluke: I deleted one linear point light which had no effect, so I next deleted 3 point lights and on the 3rd of those point light deletes the viewport lit up again as it should. But that still leaves 10 lights operative. So, just to see what happened I undid all 4 deletes and the viewport is still lit up. Whatever, I can now continue to build the scene and that's the key thing.
Although the Daz forums are the best and most sensible I've ever been on or needed access to, forums in general often drive me up the wall as so often commenters are only guessing solutions; some people interpret what are straightforward questions and complain they're obscure when they're not so long as you don't interpret them to mean something else; and endless other ludicrous issues arise. The following is my parody version of a simple question on a forum and the kind of bizarre and sometimes rude answers posters receive (it's from an email I wrote almost a year ago, though I've changed rude terms):
What's the capital of France?
Replies:
#1: Are you sure you mean 'capital' and not 'capitol'?
#2: Are you asking about the French currency?
#3: This forum isn't for asking about economics, you half-brained idiot!
#4: I think it might be Dijon.
#5: I think you can get there by train.
#6: Obvious, much! It's Calais!
Or the one I dread the most as it's the most common I've experienced:
#7: Open up the Atlas X program, select A from the main A-Z menu, then from the A menu select B, from that menu select C and you'll find a list of all world capitals.
(The Catch 22 with that last one is under the B menu there are only further A & B options and C doesn't exist!)
But with that in mind, you wrote "Preview Lights is a verb phrase", etc, but to most English speakers it's automatically read as a noun plural (I'm aware that I incorrectly wrote it above as Light singular). You wrote "You are starting with Preview Lights on", but I clearly wrote above re the first screenshot "In the 1st, this is how the lighting appears when I load the scene and there's no Preview Light." But that said, your help is always appreciated and checking back on my previous forum posts you've solved many problems for me, for which I thank you. Re my other recent post which you tired to help me with, I'm now convinced that my DS program is malfunctioning, as even though I've now solved the viewport lighting problem it's still a mystery that when I reloaded the scene yesterday it loaded as a small scale 1:1 ratio when it's been regularly saved as a large size 8:5 ratio (some other old scenes I've loaded also load the wrong size, while others load okay); plus if it was just the number of lights I've used in this scene causing the problem, how come all other scenes, Iray and 3DL also loaded like the first screenshot above? Another easily solvable recurring problem with the latest DS is that the viewport which was previously grey suddenly loads black or white, but when I go to the Style menu the colour given is the correct grey, then the only way to change it back to grey is to first change it to any other colour then change it again to grey. In 8 years of using Daz I've never had so many glitchy problems.
PS: there's no HDR in the above scene.
Well, I can't see the menu or button in your screen shots but I'm prtty sure from the behaviour that the scene was loaded with the lights in the scene being previewed and when it lit up you had turned preview Lights off (you can tell by the colour of the icon in the Window menu or on the toolbar).
It's the first seven lights (actual lights, not emissive geometry or environment lights), as created. The Scene pane doesn't necessarily reflect that order. Deleting and restoring the lights would, I think, move them down the creation order which would be why restoring them didn't make the scene go dark again. Lights do have a Render Priority settings - if you make the ones that matter higher then you can bump them up the list without having to fiddle with creation order.