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The same limitation exists in Iray (if you use the OpenGL viewport...which most do for the main viewport)...or anything else with OpenGL. And it's 8...
- 1 for the headlamp.
Yeah, the headlamp counts as 1...
hi
does some presets exist for the aoa armor light(cold light, warm sun ... ) , i can't find them in the store
thanks in advance
Are these what you need?
http://www.daz3d.com/advanced-light-presets-for-aoa-s-lights
...umm "a bit"?
Most of my overnight 3DL renders in the past used UberArea lights. There also seemed to be no correlation to the intensity setting and how much light was produced. For one scene I created I needed to up the intensity scale by something like 850% just to make it look like there was a 60 W light shining through a window. On top of this there was the samples setting (something Iray emissive lights don't deal with) which you had to adjust as well to get a clear non grainy image. The higher the sample rate, the longer the render time
..the flagging that was broken related to the 3DL SSS shader. Annoying but there is a workaround, albeit in a large or busy scene, a rather tedious one.
...I have the latter as well, interesting, that I can get more "realistic" looking grass in 3DL than in Iray.
...there used to a Realistic Renders Thread for years where people tried to push the limits of 3DL as close to photoreal as possible, even before the introduction of UE and the AoA lights. It also spawned a parody thread that can still be found here called Realistic Renders...NOT for those who didn't care about photorealism and just wanted to post their best scenes.
...pretty much what I aimed for, as I used to paint in oils but had to give it up because of severe arthritis. You can do it with Iray in post if you have something like PS or PS elements, but I like the fact I could accomplish the look in the primary render pass just by playing with the lighting and surfaces.
Here is one of my early ones:
...not just hair but skin as well. Even after gleaning what I could understand from the Tweaking Skin in Iray thread (before it became overly "uber technical"), my characters still look like rubber dolls compared to the more "photoreal" look of the surrounding setting and props.
..yeah that grass shader is nice.
Meshlights in 3Dl seem to be really unpredictable. That candle-lit one of mine rendered in an hour. And considering it's a huge scene (human figure with dynamic robe, loads of textures and books and etc), at 2160x3360 or something, with two dozen meshlights... that's pretty dang fast.
Well, I thought I understood flagging but I can't get it to work at all, so I guess I'll just go without. The AoA lights still look a lot better than the toolbar lights, which feel like deliberate 3DL sabotage at this point.
Hi Stryder87, I'm happy to show you an example of how I used flagging with AoA's Advanced Spotlight.
I used a different spotlight for each mermaid in a complementary color to her skin. However, I did not want that color splashing onto the mermaid next to her, or any other object. So I set the Flagging to Iluminate Only and set it to Diffuse 99. I selected all surfaces of that mermaid an set them to Diffuse 99. The second light/mermaid was Diffuse 99.1, then 99.2, etc., so I didn't have any crossing colors.
Here is the result:
Here are a couple more examples of AoA Spotlight flagging:
I wanted to light my figure, but not the structure. The first render shows the splotlight without any flagging:
I selected the light. In Lighting Control, I set Flag Surface Shaders With / Diffuse Strength Value of, and left the value at the default of 99, then set If Surface is Flagged to Don't Illuminate.
I selected the whole structure and the ground. On the surfaces tab, I set the Diffuse value to 99. Here is the second image with the figure illuminated but not the structure or ground.
That is basically what I was trying to do (your second example). I wonder why it didn't work for me. Do the AoA spots need to be adjusted heavily like the IRay ones do?
No, I didn't do anything special to them. Here are my light settings:
Awesome image, dracorn!
- Greg
...that is so cool.
WOW! o.O
That is just fantastic awesome wonderful terrific ;).
Laurie
Those are awesome examples! That really helps me understand how it works. I'm going to guess that the 99% diffuse setting is determined by what you want the surface to be, not an arbitrary number for the flagging purpose. I'm basing this on the numbers you used for the mermaids (awesome pic btw) being 99.1 99.2 etc so the surface stayed the same, but each was different enough for flagging purposes.
I think what I said that makes sense... haha...
I wish I would have known this when I tried to make one of my characters 'blush' in this pic. It probably would have made it easier to do (I think).
...that's really good.
..one other "in render" effect that 3DL lets you do is motion blur. This one took some time to render, about sixteen and a half hours (the two instances of Bolina Hair I used were no doubt part to blame), as I used a UE based HDRI with five frames of motion blur. Was woth the wait. The only post was "warmifying" the tone mapping slightly in PSP and blurring the chain and sprocket as those were stationary parts of the model.
That's a sweet pic! I'm tempted to steal it for my computer wallpaper! haha
I've used motion blur before. It's a fun effect... except when it's on by accident and characters suddenly disappear during a render! (not a true story... never happened.. nuh uh...)
Why did you use 2 instances of the hair? For volume?
...yes along as for a bit more depth as the second instance's colour is slightly different from the first one.
I still flail at lighting. Enough that I'm not particularly tempted to try to grapple with a whole new paradigm yet. Nothing that I hear about Iray makes it *sound* like it's any easier than 3DL.
Plus, I'm an illustrator, and I don't particularly *want* the end result to look like a photograph.
These are from an unposted publication project (Harry Potter fanfic, obviously). For this particular project I used Flipmode Easy Environment lights for the setup stage, and for rendering, usually deleted those and brought in one or other of Knory's Carressed by Light sets. For an exterior, I might keep the sun light from the Flipmode set. For interiors, I usually added linear point lights when I wanted an actual light source.
All these examples are so inspiring. Though I'll be honest, 3DL actually seems a lot more complicated than IRay, and a lot more finicky.
I had a lot of trouble with lighting and included lighting in 3DL stuff. But understand that 3DL covers a huge range of time, and a lot of different stuff was 'in' at various points. One of my big reasons to move to Iray, originally, was that a lot of 3DL lighting was like a dozen different distant lights and diffuse lights and specular lights and UE doing backflips with weird HDR and this and that and OMG MY HEAD IS EXPLODING. Iray seemed way easier.
But I've learned stuff. Now it's just set two lights, most of the time. Maybe meshlight if I'm feeling hugely ambitious and want specific weird effects.
AoA Distant light, 200% shadow, 75% intensity. Maybe give it a little color. Rotate it however I want.
AoA Ambient light, set light range to 0 (so it affects everything), 50% intensity, maybe a little color (sometimes I set distant light to be very slightly yellow and ambient to be very slightly blue, to create color contrast).
Bam. Done.
Gets a LITTLE more involved indoors or if I want to use candles or something, but even then... not so bad.
Indoors, distant light from outside, then maybe one or two point lights (AoA spotlight given broad range).
And it renders FAST