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Flagging Surfaces and Measuring Distances

Stryder87Stryder87 Posts: 899
in The Commons

I'll ask the easy question first: How do you measure the distance between two objects in Daz?  I have Measure Metric but I don't think that's something it does (I could be wrong there), but I want to measure how far a spotlight is from a figure and then set the fall off accordingly.  This leads into the main question topic...

So I've been using Above the Fog and in some of the help it mentions flagging surfaces to get light to do certain things.  I've seen that mentioned in other places too, usually in reference to light.  Thinking that it could be something that could help with a scene I'm working on, I took a look, but I can't figure out what that means.  How do you flag a surface?  Are there different things you can flag it for?  How do you make a spotlight (or any light I suppose) recognize and work with that?  If I wanted to put a spotlight in a scene, give it a wide angle but only have it illuminate a specific character and nothing else in front of, beside or behind that specific character, is flagging the way to go?  It sounds like it could be a very useful thing, but I can't figure out from the controls for surfaces and lights how to go about doing it.  I see a couple controls for spotlights that mention Flagged Surfaces, but nothing is obvious on how to use it.

 

Comments

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 108,068

    Create a new Measure Metric tape measure with the Create a Persistent Point At Target option checked. That will create a null, scale that to zero %. Now you can either manually place the measure metrics node and the Null where you want them or you can use the Align plane to place them more precisely (the scaling the Null was to make the Align pane useful if you aren't aligning centres).

    Flagging for what? In the Age of Armour Advanced lights (for 3Delight) it is done by setting one of a range of properties to a certain value (e.g. 99% instead of 100%) and telling the light to treat surfaces with that property at that value in a specific manner.

  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 41,857

    ...note: flagging with the AoA Advanced Lights when using the SSS skin shader no longer works.  Something in the 4.7 update broke it and no fix was made that I know of..

  • Stryder87Stryder87 Posts: 899
    Richard Haseltine said:

    Flagging for what? In the Age of Armour Advanced lights (for 3Delight) it is done by setting one of a range of properties to a certain value (e.g. 99% instead of 100%) and telling the light to treat surfaces with that property at that value in a specific manner.

    I was pretty much thinking or this: "If I wanted to put a spotlight in a scene, give it a wide angle but only have it illuminate a specific character and nothing else in front of, beside or behind that specific character, is flagging the way to go?"

    Are there any particular settings one would adjust on the surface?  Where in the light properties (does it only work with the AoA ones?) do you set it to only affect the flagged surface?  I didn't see anything in a standard spotlight where you would set that.

    This could be sooooo handy if it works like I'm hoping!

     

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 108,068

    For 3delight yes, it works only with the AoA Advanced lights - you have a choice (in the light settings) of which property (on the iluminated surface) will act as a flag, and which value will be the flagging value as well as options for how the flagged and unflagged surfaces will be treated. Of course you can do the same thing manually by doing multiple renders with different items loaded/visible. In Iray you can use the Canvasses feature and Light Path Expressions to do the same job.

  • Stryder87Stryder87 Posts: 899
    Richard Haseltine said:

    For 3delight yes, it works only with the AoA Advanced lights - you have a choice (in the light settings) of which property (on the iluminated surface) will act as a flag, and which value will be the flagging value as well as options for how the flagged and unflagged surfaces will be treated. Of course you can do the same thing manually by doing multiple renders with different items loaded/visible. In Iray you can use the Canvasses feature and Light Path Expressions to do the same job.

    Ok, that's good.  But, taking Kyoto Kid's comment into consideration "...note: flagging with the AoA Advanced Lights when using the SSS skin shader no longer works.  Something in the 4.7 update broke it and no fix was made that I know of.", and the fact I'm using v4.8, does that mean it wouldn't work on just characters using AoA SSS surfaces, or does that mean that if I have a character in the scene using an AoA SSS surface that it will break it entirely?

    How DO you insert multiple quotes in a reply anyway???  haha

     

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 108,068

    Only the skin using the AoA SSS shader will be affected, if you can achieve the desired rsults by flagging other surfaces you should be OK

  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 41,857
    edited June 2016

    ...however in a big scene that is a bloody lot of work which would not be necessary if the SSS Flagging hand't been broken in the first place.

    I am almost thinking to rolling back to 4.6 (I saved the installer) even though the version of 3DL it has is a lot slower.  The AoA lights and effects cameras were my main "go to" tools as UE renders so bloody slow in comparison and pushes my core temps a lot higher. 

    Post edited by kyoto kid on
  • Stryder87Stryder87 Posts: 899

    It seems strange that they never fixed that issue since AoA SSS seems to be the default on most characters (at least on the many ones I went through and looked at), and the AoA lights are so good.

    I just hate dealing with the lizard skin issue it seems to give me so often.

     

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