Sunlight for 3Delight - what is better?
cosmo71
Posts: 3,609
For outdoor renders in 3Delight, what is better as sunlight, a distant light or a positioned spotlight? What is your opinion?
I like spotlights because they lighten whole figure better than a distant but what I do not like when using a spot as sun is the positioning issue of this light, would be much easier to have a spotlight what can be placed at zero ground (x,y,z) like a distant but have the effects like a spot so a combination of a distant and a spot would be cool, a "distant spotlight".
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I prefer Distant Light for sun and moon light as it is more diffused. I might add a Spotlight with a wide spread and set to Specular Only if the subject is meant to be shiny.
How about a 'sun' light?
https://mustakettu85.wordpress.com/2015/04/15/3delights-physical-sun-into-daz-studio-a-yet-another-shader-builder-mini-tutorial/
I'm using that and HDRI (with or without a skydome) for most all outdoor renders.
Alternatively when I portrait somon outside I use a distant light for sun and add a spot light in the same orientation (play around with shadows so you don't get doubles) Take care to have the same coulour on the lights.
The problem with spotlights for the sun is that you have to work around shadows that spread away from the spotlight in a cone shape, which isn't the way that shadows from the sun look, so you have to always take that into account and work around it. The shadows of a distant light, on the other hand are parallel no matter where you place the light in your scene, which is far more realistic.
I like to have one distant light for the main light, another with shadows turned off for ambient, and then spots to fill in everywhere else.
That is what I did / and do a lot as well, but using an UE2 light with shadows on occlusion /soft instead of the second distant as ambient works really nice as well
I have used also a distant light for a sun until now, today I tried a render with an AoA spot positioned as sun and it looks better I think. The thing with distant lights is the straight light ray issue, a spot spreads the light and have better results on figure meshs I think. Have had some issues with the G3F mesh even with the catmull clark legacy SubD Algo which is better than the original catmark. So today I have tried an AoA spot as sun and here is the result. One AoA spotlight and one UE light
can`t upload an image
If you are seeing the broken image icon after uploading it, just try again. it often takes 2 or 3 tries before it works, but it eventually takes.
Also note sometimes you can't see your own image attachments after they successfully load, but I forget the reason, it might have had something to do with whether you followed a link or an email link or went through the forums. (I can't see see one either, so that's not what's happening here, but just wanted to make you aware of it for the future.)
Can't remember if there are size/format restrictions, but you could try a different format or smaller size if nothing else works.
there only pops up the "uploading..." and that was it, it never ends means never finished the upload.
Here's a render using the sun light that I linked to above...
...nice results, however, as I am not into scripting, it pretty much went over my head. Also don't use 3Delight Studio Pro. Tried to get it to work but all I get are lovely .obj renders from it.
You only need the standalone 3Delight for the shader source code. The scripting is done by Shader Builder...the only thing you need to do are the edits to the source and Kettu has them spelled out exactly.
too much of work. isn't there an easy way to render the scene directly from the daz3d with 3delight pro?
thanks, I did what you described in here and it worked for me. I also had to increase the samples (pixel, shadow) in the rendering settings to reduce the noise in the shadowed area of the girls. like left thighs, left arms.you may still see some noise slightly but they are hardly visible.
There is a product at RDNA and could be here now called SunlightDS http://www.runtimedna.com/SunLIGHT-DS.html that is really good, I have the Poser version as all was available at the time.. But ths product does a really good job as apart from having the Uber Environment Lights it also comes with skies as well.. And the light ranges from 5am to 8pm so does a wide variety of angles..
another try with a spot light as sun
that looks interesting, will wait and see if it is at the DS store in the future
It doesn't produce really good lighting. I know it produces good output ,but I want sunlight which is bright, but this looks nothing like that.
I found this one produces relatively good result with fast rendering time
http://www.daz3d.com/speedlights-outdoor-light-set-1
it doesn't produce quality images as Advanced Ambient Light or Ubershaders but still quite good for those who care about the speed more than quality.
Wondering do you have the product? Just that the pictures you show displaying it have no shadow at all, because looking at the promo pics for it do have shadow eitherway it does not matter for most people that product will do what they want..
OT These two pics I did use one AoA Distant Light set to 200 the first pic has a AoA Ambient Light set at 50 the second has that light turned off..
Render Settings were 4,8,8,32 in the Sampling section 2.2 in the gamma and .10 in the shadow sampling rate..
This one I did 9 years ago (Studio 2?). I don't remember what the rest of the lighting was (very simple I'm sure) but the sunlight comes in from rightish....
distant light intensity I remember was over 200 and the color was a deep gold.
That looks really good and shows it being either early morning or late afternoon is when it gets that particular colour as it has a lot more of the earths atmosphere to penetrate through.. A good way to see this is to look at the moon when it is above the horizon you will see it as a redish orange colour and as it rises higher in the sky it goes to a whitish colour.. So the exact same thing with the sun its light changes colour depending on its angle in the sky..
Well a great solution for 3Delight has always been http://www.daz3d.com/light-dome-pro
Had to look because I wasn't sure it was still around since that dates back to ds2.
Ahh forgot about that one it is a good alternative and in someways is very similar to SunlightDS although it does have two night time settings which SunlightDS does not have..
Deamlight is always a great source! I actually did some work for him back in the day. Anybody remember http://www.daz3d.com/dynamic-lens-flare-for-daz-studio
ok MJC1016 I'm trying to follow that sunlight tut but some parts are less than clear especially when it says "connect/create user parameter" and I'm not exactly sure what goes where.
In the imported brick there will be a list of settings...hover over the round dot for each one, right click and it will show a drop down list. One of the options is 'connect/create'...then you can edit the label.
Ok I think I have this now, thanks!