How do you get Point Lights to play nice with other lights?
Stryder87
Posts: 899
Daz v4.8 / 3Delight
So I'm having another struggle, again, with point lights. I had a couple point lights in my scene and they were working, along with some spot lights and the ambient light. I made a change to the skydome, and BOOM, point lights don't work any more. No matter what I do, even deleting the ones I had and putting in new ones, they just don't work. Now I know from some reading in the past that point lights are difficult buggers, but how on earth do you get all these lights to play together? It's always point lights that kill me. Is there some kind of trick to get them to show up without killing every other light in the scene, and vica versa? They are such a handy idea, but wow are they tough to get to work.
I've got AoA Advanced Ambient, AoA Advanced Distant, a couple standard spotlights and a couple standard point lights. Everything is working but the point lights.
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I'm using DS4.8 and 3delight but I tend not to use Studios' point light. I use AoAs' spotlight and set the spread angle at 360°. If I need to limit the distance it throws, I set the falloff rate to custom and set the custom max range to a length (in metres) that works. I haven't used point lights since finding AoA lights and I'm pretty sure I was using 4.7 the last time I did.
I'll give that a try because every time I try to use a point light with other lights, something blows up, and it's usually the point light(s) that stops working with no reason why, all the settings are still set, just no light.
Point lights have limited range so if you add other lights, especially an environment light, they are very likely to be swamped. Do you have the render gamma set to 2.2 and Gamma Correction on in Redner Settings?
Most likely not. I rarely have changed that setting as the one time I did I blew the scene out bad. lol
It's a good point about overpowering it. Maybe that's what the problem has been the whole time. I can try bumping the intensity up to 200% and see what happens. The only thing is that, when I had put it to 100% it was reflecting off surfaces all over the place, yet the light itself didn't show (it's a landing beacon on a heli). I went with trying out an AoA Spotlight like 3delinquent suggested and it worked better, but the light itself still doesn't show too well, but there's definitely a glow around it. I think I still need to play with the intensity and limit the surrounding effect with the custom falloff.
Are you wanting to be able to see the light source? That's often best handled by using and object with a light ambient and diffuse colour and high ambient strength, lights are not in themselves meant to be visible in 3Delight (though they will show by their specular effects on other surfaces).
Yes, the idea would be to have that 'light' glow in the scene. However, the actual prop is not a seperate surface, but I could probably create some kind of null (or something) inside to turn into a light. I was just scaling a spotlight and positioning it 'inside' the prop.
I'm using the police version of "http://www.daz3d.com/rotor-heads-gdds76-helicopter". ; There are two small lights on the tail and one on the belly.
If they have their own surface groups then you could use the ambient trick. You could also combine it with the uber Area shader to make the surface shed light at the same time if it's supplemental light (it can be tricky to remove noise, in my experience, if the uber Area light is doing a lot of the scene lighting).
I did that ambient thing on the light surfaces on a spaceship. It made the light surface glow itself under the lights I already had in the scene. I put an AoA spotlight in point configuration next to it. I played with the proximity of the light to the 'light surface' and the intensity, custom falloff and diffuse setttings to get it to look like the 'light surface' was throwing light on the surfaces around it and other objects near enough to it to be affected. I've only recently started to understand what the uber area shader is and what it does. Thanks for info on its application.
I understand 3delight can only use 7 or 8 lights. Does uber area shader count as a light?
OpenGL preview can only display the first 8 light, 3Delight and Iray render engines can have as many light as you want.
So I removed the AoA Spotlights that I had been trying to use as point lights and put actual point lights back in, set to 200% Intensity and the Intensity range (can't remember the actual name right now) to 2 meters... set it up to render overnight. I get up this morning to check it out and see that Daz crashed at 0% render.
At least the fog looks good in past renders....
This is turning into too much work. lol
Thanks Jestmart, good to know, so you're telling me I skimped on lights in all those scenes when I didn't need to..... :/ :)
I didn't realize there was fog Stryder. Are you using a volume in that render? It's a pain in the proverbial when you can't get an effect you want, but it's worth persevering to learn how. I guess for me with some things it's a matter of come back to it when I've learned more. I'm not sure if posting your WIP would help for people to see exactly what you're trying to achieve? It might inspire some ideas. Good luck anyway!
Ok, it's not exactly what I was wanting (I gave up on the Police Heli point light), but it's good enough. I don't have any more time to spend on this render. Too many others to get done!!
Thanks for all the help and I'll be sure to use it elsewhere.
Enjoy!
http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/166061/