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Eliminating forefront shadow

tkztkz Posts: 149
edited July 2017 in The Commons

Hey Guys,

So I'm rendering on a transparent bg, with ground shadows... I've tweaked the enviro settings quite a bit to get the shadow pretty minimal... but there is a tiny bit of shadow coming oposite of the main light source, that's leaving me with a crappy hard line at the bottom of my image. 

I was thinking that I'm going to need to put some sort of illuminated plane / light source on the ground there to prevent those shadows... but it feels a little hacky. An alternative would be the hi studio lighting kit... which looks pretty neat, but i don't want to kill all ground shadows, just the ones at the forefront of the image....

Is there a better way to deal with this in volume in daz (not post... going to have way too many files to want to deal with that in post)?

Post edited by tkz on

Comments

  • FishtalesFishtales Posts: 6,217

    Turn off Draw Ground and you wont get shadows, assuming Iray is the render engine.

  • FistyFisty Posts: 3,416

    (S)he wants ground shadows, just not the subtle one in the front making the line.

    Honestly, I would just clean that up in postwork with a nice big feathered brush to soften the line.. trying to get rid if it with lighting hacks would probably look unrealistic. (Unless you're doing an annimation with a lot of frames, then it could get annoying)

  • Worlds_EdgeWorlds_Edge Posts: 2,153

    Maybe render it twice, once with and once without ground.  Then you will have two layers that you can work with in Photoshop. Using masks, you can then keep only the shadows that you want and have control over intensity. Alternatively you can carefully erase the unwanted shadow in postwork. 

  • FistyFisty Posts: 3,416

    Just saw you updated you first post..  hmm..  yeah, try adding a focused spotlight pointing to the floor in front of the figure, change the geometry on the light to none so it doesn't add bright specular spots.

  • tkztkz Posts: 149

    Thanks everyone.... (I am a he if that makes things any easier... OP always good too.)

    I've tried a few experiments with putting a spot light, a plane light, and even a bar? light in near the ground at the front of the frame... but I am almost a complete infant when it comes to adding lights for this purpose. I've tried to watch everything there is to watch on Daz in youtube, and i think i recall there being one tutorial that got into what I need here, but wasn't able to find it on my last check.... iirc it involved turning the illumnation up a lot so that it wouldn't just be drowned out by the hdri dome lighting... If anyone knows the one I'm talking about, and can link me to it... or a better one, I would be very thankful. I think this method would probably be ideal if I could figure out the right light setttings. 

    I've been working with the more common side of photoshop for nearly 10 years... so pretty comftorable doing this in post... only probelm is that there is going to be 250 or so images in this render set... and I'm going to want to do more versions of it with different models and different props for special ocassions... So probably going to need to learn how to script the work to avoid blowing out my wrists over days of additonal work time. Rendering twice is probably the preferable way to dealing with this in PS, but with 250 renders at 4k, that's going to slow things down quite a bit.

    Just to confirm - there isn't a way to get DAZ to save the ground shadow as a seperate layer?

  • FistyFisty Posts: 3,416
    edited July 2017

    Learning how to set up the spot light would be a lot easier than postworking 250 images.  =)  Try these settings, note "Point" for geometry (what I meant by none in my previous post), and Luminous Flux (Lumen) at five hundred thousand (500,000).  If you have to make it brighter or dimmer try to think in percentages, it's easier when dealing with those huge numbers.  if you want it 150% brighter change the Lunimous Flux to seven hundred fifty thousand (750,000).  Spread angle is easiest to figure out when you're looking through the light like it was a camera (also easiest to get the right placement that way, if you didn't already know, you don't have to guess like with Poser, just choose the light as a camera and use the camera controls.)

    bright spotlight.png
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    Post edited by Fisty on
  • tkztkz Posts: 149
    edited July 2017

    "change the geometry on the light to none"  -> The only setting i've been able to find with the word geometry... which i have set to point... and does not have a none option.  Is it somewhere else?

    Looking throught the light. That just blew my simple mind. wow is that better than using params from a 3rd perspective. 

    Thank you kindly for the screenshot, just got my first working(?) spotlight setup - starting to run some tests now. 

    Post edited by tkz on
  • tkztkz Posts: 149

    So... I've tried quite a few tests... have a spotlight that works... which is a good start.

    Seems that tmy problem with the lights getting terrible when i add something was the headlight turning off. So using both for now until i get a handle... and that's stopped things from getting bad. 

    But back to that foreground shadow... had that spot light so bright that it was drowing out M7,  and it didn't seem to be getting any better.... 

    Screen Shot 2017-07-02 at 10.01.06 PM.png
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  • FistyFisty Posts: 3,416
    edited July 2017

    Headlamp setting is in the camera, change it to "on" for it to not turn off when you add lights.  (Think you already found that, but just in case)  As for the shadow, I'm out of ideas besides changing to an HDRI that doesn't have any rim light to it, or maybe rotating that one a little..  or both.  Or just not using an HDRI at all and use a few spotlights instead so you can better control where the shadows are going to be (in render settings, environment, change it to scene only).

    Post edited by Fisty on
  • tkztkz Posts: 149

    Hey @Fisty, Thanks again.

    I think you're on the money with the rim light casting a light shadow from the back... I'll run some tests with the sun at different angles to see what happens...

    I saw in another thread that some people reco one of the winter scene HDRis that has much softer light... which if i understand correctly, means lighter/softer shadows... but my tests so far indicate that I'll need some extra lights to get the look I'm hoping to get with it... 

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 108,735
    Fisty said:

    Headlamp setting is in the camera, change it to "on" for it to not turn off when you add lights.  (Think you already found that, but just in case)  As for the shadow, I'm out of ideas besides changing to an HDRI that doesn't have any rim light to it, or maybe rotating that one a little..  or both.  Or just not using an HDRI at all and use a few spotlights instead so you can better control where the shadows are going to be (in render settings, environment, change it to scene only).

    You don't have to set it per-camera, set it under General in render Settings and that will apply to all cameras that aren't given a local override. (If you are using saved camers, make sure they don't have a local override.)

  • FistyFisty Posts: 3,416
    Richard Haseltine said:

    You don't have to set it per-camera, set it under General in render Settings and that will apply to all cameras that aren't given a local override. (If you are using saved camers, make sure they don't have a local override.)

    Sweet, thanks, that'll make things easier.

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