Questions About Lights

Faeryl Womyn

I am curious about what exactly the lights do that come with Daz.  I know I came across a site or several some time ago that explained them, but can't for the life of me remember where they are.  Seeing as I have a new computer, I no longer have the bookmarks for such things.  For instance, I don't know the radius of the lights, a full circle, half circle or more like a beam like a flashlight.  I also don't know the strength of each light, so is it for candles, lightbulb or some more like a sun.  I try to figure it out on my own, but unless I constantly render with each light and each of the changes on each light (would take forever...lol) I have no idea how far the light reaches and that is kinda important with regards to shadows (I tend to like raytracing to actually get them to show up) and how each light displays shadows if at all.

If anyone has this information or knows a site where I can check it out and save the information, would be greatly appreciated.

Oh and I am talking 3Delight since I presently won't be using Iray for a while.

JimmyC_2009

Have a look at this, it is quite old, but most things still apply

http://digilander.libero.it/maclean/DStutorial.htm

daveleitz

The basic lights are spot, point, and directional as you already know.  On top of that, there's UberEnvironment which adds an ambient level of lighting to the scene.  UE comes with several options such as ambient occlusion and indirect lighting.  Ambient occlusion is pretty important since it add darkness in the corners and cracks of objects that need to be calculated at render time separately from shadows.  UE also adds the option to use high dynamic range images as an ambient light source in some scenes.  Another kind of area lighting is the light emitting objects which are found as presets in the Lighting tab.  They are adjusted by changing the surface settings, though. 

Many figures come with lighting presets, but you can always edit what they do.  I often add the preset light for YT Aaron, for example, no matter what figure I may be using, and then parent the specular to the infinite light.  Then I parent the specular only spot to the camera.  The UberEnvironment is usually good enough to leave alone.  On the parented lights, I will zero out the parameters so that I can move the camera, and the specular only spot will follow along and point at the scene from the camera position automatically.  In the scene view, I switch to infinite light view and aim it from there.  Of course, I do a lot of quick tests to see what the intensity relationships are between the lights in the scene before commiting to anything for larger renders.  I also might add an area light plane for filling or contrasting with the main infinite light.

Mainly, it's just a matter of trial and error.  However, every scene I've rendered so far has used the lighting tools included in DAZ Studio.