I Hate the Camera Headlamp
Nyghtfall3D
Posts: 710
in The Commons
I can never remember to shut it off, and wind up wasting time trying to figure out why my lights don't look right. Last night, I got so frustrated with a project that I scrapped it and went to bed. It wasn't until I woke up this morning that I realized I forgot to turn off the headlamp.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
224 S 200 W, Suite #250
Salt Lake City, UT 84101
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2023 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
I'm sure you're not alone!
Make a scene with a spotlight far above any area you will use, pointing up and dialed way down. Use this as your default start scene and keep headlamp on auto.
Or turn the headlamp off in Render Settings and save your startup scene.
I noticed the Auto Headlamp has a setting labeled "When No Scene Lights". Does it look for the old DS lights, Iray emitters, or both?
Nice, Richard. Didn't realize it would work that way also.
...there are some cases in which I do find it useful (you can adjust the intensity, offset, and even colour).
Define "old." If you mean lighting solutions that predate 4.8, then all bets are off. Turn the Auto Headlamp to Never.
It works for the types of "built-in" lamp fixtures, spot, point, and distant. There's no difference between these, from a headlamp point of view, as long as the scene uses the lamps defined in 4.8+.
D|S has no clue you're using HDRi or emissive lights, so if your scene it lit with these, When No Scene Lights is disregarded. It assumes there are no scene lights, and the headlamp is called into action for the reason it was developed in the first place.
Yup. Thanks.
Some of the sets (uber, maybe?) have a headlamp blocker that load in to take care of the enviro lights not tripping the headlamp switch
And most other 3DL shader lights. So if you don't have one 'normal' Studio light in the scene, it doesn't know what to do.
It just seems easier and more reliable (to me), to turn auto headlamp to never. If I need other light then I add other light. Then again, I quit using on camera flash decade(s) ago.
is there the possibility of heaving a light only for scene lighting ?
that does not effect the render ?
when working with only hdri lighting this would be very useful
now you always have to switch off the scene lighting
and ....forgetting that goes quick
Sometimes I like the way my characters look in the scene pane with the illusion of the headlamp, only to render a realize they look like sh**t... :)
deleted - quoting error
That function seems to be not working. At least I have never managed to get rid of the headlamp that way. It's either on or off, and it often comes back on when you import things in your scene and similar peculiarities. I filed a ticket for that but never got a response.
Auto looks for actual lights, not surface emitters or HDRI environments. That's why sets that use area lights on geometry, such as many of Jack's PC sets, have a pseudo light as a "headlamp blocker".
Turn off Preview Lights in the Window menu, or hit cmd(Mac)/ctrl(Win)-L
I have a spotlight parented to the default camera set at intensity 0.0000001. It doesn't add any light to the render but turns off the headlamp. This is saved as my default scene so loads automatically.
I usually make a copy of my RenderCam and call it PreviewCam. The PreviewCam has the Headlamp switched on, the RenderCam has it switched off.
I loaded in a headlamp blocker from one of my lighting sets, turned off the headlamp on the camera, then saved the whole thing as my default scene.
Headlamp should be off by default. I forget about it as well.
I set my studio so that it will load without a default camera.
ha so easy thx Richard
New scene.
Add a spotlight, pointlight or distant light.
Make that light invisible (Which turns it off.)
Save the scene.
Open the scene in a text editor and remove the authorship information. (This prevents it from accidentally getting overwritten.)
Set this scene as the default on opening of DS and/or starting a new scene in preferences.
Note that this method does work when importing a scene into the current scene, or applying render settings that comes with a set, though opening a scene will cause it to come in as designed, to include a headlamp if that is how the scene was saved.
It would be nice if the add new camera dialogue had a control for headlamp amongst its options.
Headlamp options should be part of Edit-Preferences. End of story. Add it to the Scene tab. There's plenty of space.
When I set the headlamp to auto (so it should turn off if I have lights in the scene) it's always on, even with lights in the scene. When I turn it off everything is pitch black looking through the camera. A frusturating addition to my workflow, for sure.
What kind of lights? If they are surface shader lights they don't count for this purpose.
Ah, well there that is. I use the Real Lights shaders for almost everything these days. Good to know, but obnoxious since I rarely have non-shader lights anymore. I suppose now that I know this is a thing I can add a light outside of view to force the headlamp auto feature to work.
I would love to select a camera in render settings. Then you could setup that camera exactly how you want, but use a different camera for all your WIP. Well, you can already do that, but then you have to remember to switch to the correct camera for rendering and switch to your other cameras to "work".