Panel lights in 3Delight
dHandle
Posts: 617
I did this render a couple years ago when I was learning lighting in Iray. Notice all the glowing panels and button lights. It was pretty simple to do once you figure out emissives.
So how would this be done in 3Delight?
Post edited by dHandle on
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There's an uberArea shader included with DS that will make a surface emissive - it's in the Shader Presets folder or category.
Hi Richard, and thanks for replying.
I tried the UberAreaLight shader, and it did indeed light up the scene, but it didn't make the surface glow like the lights were on.
This is Stonemason's Generic Sci Fi Corridor. He managed to turn all his lights on.
I'm still in the dark...
As I recall (can't check just now) you need to make the ambient colour brighter or turn on a switch to enable the emitter to be visible (I don't think it's called that though).
HA! Good suggestion!
That triggered a memroy of something I did once before. I changed the diffuse color to match the ambient color of the glow and LEDs. Then I turned off parameter limits, and set the diffuse strength to 400%.
Need work, but at least the lights are on!
Thanks!
Yes, Ambient Active on and adjust the ambient strength and colour.
I went back and tried your suggestion, and it looks better. Played with the settings and lights, and learned a lot. 3Delight can be as flexible as Iray, it seems. I got a couple of additional nice looks. I need to see about getting the grainy look out now.
Thanks Richard!
To fix any graininess, especially in shadows: increase the samples parameter (at the cost of greatly increased render time). The value varies greatly depending on the light. I have seen 32 work for some lights, 1024 was needed for one.
To help get rid of the graininess in the image you have to set the lights samples setting in the surfaces tab to at least 80 but the higher the better.. Also turning up pixel samples, shadow samples and lowering the shading rate down should help as well..
Thanks guys. That was a big help!
I changed the samples to 80, and played with the lights...turning some on, off or lowering the intensity to get different looks. I didn't mess with the shading rate or pixel samples yet.
This was a good test to put my new system through some of its paces. My old system would have taken a week to render these out! The grain is greatly reduced, but not completely removed. I like the photoreal look, and some grain is to be expected in low light photography.
Here are some results:
For the benefit of newbies, could you please post a brief tutorial to show them how you did it?
Looks good, dHandle! I don't know how to do that in 3DL so the suggestion of doing a brief tutorial sounds like a good one to me, too!!!
Sure, I can try explaining what I did.
First of all, I got the model to look the way it does by experimenting. I’m not suggesting that this is the right way to do it, or the only way. It’s probably not even the way @Stonemason intended it to be done. There may be a better way, and if so, I hope someone who knows better chimes in here.
I used Stonemason’s Generic Sci Fi Corridor, and loaded up the 1st set. There are 3 sets included in the product; I assume for the various versions of Poser. I think they all work in Studio because they're all .CR2 files.
I wanted to get the LEDs and panels to glow like in the promo pics. They even show the walkway glowing. Plus, Stonemason included 2 Bonus light sets to “evoke a moody atmospheric scene”. I tried them both. I liked the one with the red light shining down the side corridor.
To get the panels, LEDs and railing lights (for lack of a better word) glowing, click on the model in the scene tab. Go into the surfaces tab, open it up so you can see all the sub items and click on “glow”.
You need to add the UberAreaLight base shader to each item you want to become emissive (like in Iray). It can be found in My DAZ 3D Library > Light Presets > omnifreaker > UberAreaLight. Find the UberAreaLight base, and click it to add the shader to the “glow” item. (Make sure “glow” is still highlighted.)
If you watch while you’re clicking, you will notice that under the surfaces tab, a number of the parameters change; new ones are added that weren’t there before. Find “Ambient Active” which will be off, and click to turn it on.
If you render at this point, the blue lights along the walls (the railing lights) will now be glowing. These lights can serve as 3DL lights and light your scene. Adjust the intensity to your liking. If the glow on the lights needs to be adjusted, change the ambient strength up or down from 100%.
Do the same for LED01, LED02 and LED03. If you want to make the walkway glow like in the promo pics, figure out which one is the material for the floor, and do the same for it.
I didn’t like the way the moody feeling was ruined, because at the default settings, every glowing light was an emissive set at 100%. Much too bright! So for each of the 3 LEDs, I set the intensity to 10%.
There are about 20 lights that come with the bonus light sets. I tried turning off all but a couple to get the mood back. I left the red one on, and a couple of the spotlights shining down on the walkway, I left on too.
As someone above suggested, the graininess can be addressed by setting the samples in the surfaces tab to a higher number. I think it's at 8 by default. I turned it up to 80, and it increased render time by a lot!, so you might want to try 16 or 32 and see if that's good enough.
Oh, also, I was experimenting with @Marshian ‘s Kaliedoscope3D to get that infinitely long hallway look.
Hope this helps. I have no idea if I included way too much detail, or if I didn’t include enough and you’re still lost.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Edit to add: Also, if you notice, all of the sub items in the surfaces tab are set to the "plastic" lighting model by default. (usually the 1st parameter) I changed most of them to "metallic", or "shiny metallic"; some, like cement or concrete, I changed to "matte", and a few, like the window and a few panels, I left on "plastic".
Here's a couple variations that I ended up with:
You might want to take a look at adamr001's "Render Profiles" as posted here - http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/16085/render-profiles-for-daz-studio-4-5/p1 for 3delight I have found them to be quite useful myself. Render using Draft quality while adjusting things then for final use High/Very High/Insane depending on your preference and patience level. Plus it has some other useful things like DOF and motion blur settings as well.
Looks great, dHandle. I'm going to have to give this a try. Thanks for explaining it.
There is also the possibility to raise just the ambient strength and enhance these neon glow effects with an Uberenvironment light in your scene.
Take a look at this: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/51056/help-with-glow-effect
Never tried it, but it should work with an AoA Advanced Ambient Light too.
@greymouser69 Yes, I've seen those render presets before. I didn't think about them, but it may have helped with all of the start/restarts.
@MN-150374 I actually had a problem with too much light. I kept turning things off, and it was still too bright. Now it looks weird. The floor looks like it's a night scene, while the rest of the scene looks like broad daylight. All I really wanted to do was make the LEDs glow. Well, they're glowing.
I was trying to think of what to use this nice background environment with.
Then it hit me...
If you use UberEnvironment, you can automatically make all ambient channels shed light. I forget the details, but I think it's the first option.
It can be slow if you have a large space/complex stuff, at which point you want to use Point something something with scripted 3DL something something (I forget many of the details, but... ), which (I think) precalculates a lot of stuff.
Note that the more 'realistic' you make 3DL lighting, the more render time is going to converge with Iray in CPU mode.
Thanks Will,
I'm actually not sure I want to be messing with 3DL all that seriously. It's always like this...everything is complicated, and it ends up taking forever to render, and then on top of that, it doesn't even look that great. I probably ruined this render with too much post work. It was very bland originally. I had gamma set to 2.2, but it didn't help. I tried gamma correction on..off. DIdn't seem to matter.
And yes, I love AOA's advanced light set. If it wasn't for the fact that this product came with 2 light sets, I probably would have used those. I just wanted to see if I could get something similar to the promos. Stonemason will probably be mad at me for botching his nice set.
I need to go back and revisit it, and check out the Uberenvironment. I never did get that familiar with it because Iray came out.
Going to put this one to bed for now.
That's... kind of what keeps bouncing me back to Iray, yeah.
Finally got around to finishing this one. (I know,....I said it was done...but it was bugging me!) Added the little guy that mom is looking for. Maybe I need to add some victims...er...people.
I also tidied up the postwork.
Title: "Mother and Monster"
This why I think that 3DL's days are numbered, with pretty much 99% of all effort these days going into Iray..
As time goes on I'm finding the things 3DL does uniquely erodes.
Like, Sketchy shaders (and my art shaders) just really blew away one of the big reasons I was going back to 3DL, which is cartoon/drawn effects.
There are still some things, like better displacement, grass and rock shaders, and so on. But those are winnowing down, and I expect as people experiment more with MDL you'll see things reduce further. I mean, heck, I already made an Iray shader which is fundamentally a lot like the 3DL Rock shader, and whenever LAMH hits v2 with better Iray support, that will cut into things like the grass shader.
Like, for example, one of the big problems with Iray is that it will only run on GPU if you A) have NVIDIA card, and B) can load into GPU's memory.
Well, if you are willing to have a less realistic image, one way of dealing with the B issue is getting rid of most of the maps. This works for a lot of content. Yes, it looks less realistic, but so are most of the faster 3DL renders.
This is why for those that do not have cards with a ton of ram on them, there needs to be a better way of dumping overflow onto the systems ram.. It has been done we all know that just that it needs to happen for Iray, again I am still hesitant to use Iray after my previous card a 570GTX fried while doing a series of renders in Iray I have a 2 gig 650GTX TI now.. But I have come to the conclusion that I will eventually have to go Iray..
IF you are willing to do less realistic Iray stuff, it's actually not that bad on CPU. Like, the sketchy shaders? Really really fast.
Well since the bulk of the work I do is comic creation the need for realism is not needed.. Will be interesting to see how fast Sketchy renders on my system that is in my sig below..
I'll do a big CPU test of sketchy and see where it gets me.
(and post about it in the Sketchy thread, since it's off topic here)
Couldn't find any vict...er...people, but found these guys hanging out by the water cooler. They said they weren't doing anything, and they'd be happy to find a few people.
Great and helpful thread!