Question about ghostlighting in my renders (nasty arrow)
Mescalino
Posts: 436
I have placed a ghostligt in my render, this made my render look a lot better. Funny was that the render without the ghostlighting renderd far quicker then with it.I was under the impression it would speed up the render time but anyways.
The ghostlight has an arrow pointing the direction of the light. The arrow appeared in my render, the room was fairly small and i had to get everything in. The ghostlighting is fairly close above the models (Fairly low ceiling). I have been searching and searching untill i stumbled upon the opacity slider. I set it to 100% and that seemed to do the trick.
Is this the way to do it or is there another (better) way to do this?
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Comments
Depending on the pruct you use, there should be a material setting to be applied to the ghost light source item which does exactly that: set the opacity to 0.00001 which makes the item (and the nasty arrow) invisible. So yeah, you found the solution.
Sounds like you're using the Ghost Light Kit. By default it has a preview texture ("Debug Mat") with an arrow for positioning. It also has an "Apply before presets" icon that both removes the texture and sets the opacity (which usually is set to 0.0000001).
If you were doing this (and it would appear so from your description) then that would explain why the render took longer, as the ghost light would not actually be a light.
Ok so what im gathering from these comments is:
A: Opacitiy setting is "good"
B: Im using the ghost lighting (Yes i use the ghostlight kit 2 in this case) not correct? (i did not use that button)
Does the button turn it into a light then or is it just to set the opacity?
I Will have another look this evening.
EDIT: Apparantly it has a manual
Guess i will have to do some reading 
No, it hardly emits any light before "Apply before preset" is applied - Emission Temperature is 0 and Luminance 10. After "Apply before preset" it's 5500/100.
But making the emissive transparent seems to cause different problems, e.g. with specular highlights. There is a longer discussion about it, starting with this post:
https://direct.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/3443536/#Comment_3443536
I'm using those ghostlights a lot. And as my pictures usually aren't portraits, the lighting I do with ghostlights, sun light and some normal light sources comes out quite fitting - or at least it comes out as I want it to.
The only time I noticed longer rander times when using ghostlights was, when I had several additional lightsources and lots of reflecting surfaces in the render... but that's probably only non-artistically inclined me,who tries to set a scene lighted as in real light and not as if it's a shooting for some magazine's title page
No, it has some negative sideeffects, the only reason opacity is being used is to make the lights invisible so you can place them anywhere. Keeping them out of sight and visible (Opacity 1.0) is better.
The sideeffects are being discussed in the thread I linked to.
The Ghost Setup ("Apply before presets") icon does both.
Ok thanks all, I will do some reading and investigating and from there redo the scene.