AoA Advanced Lights vs. uber Lights?
XoechZ
Posts: 1,102
Hello!
I am rendering with 3Delight only, either in DAZ Studio or the standalone version. And I am always looking for the best lights tu use in my scenes. Recently I have worked a lot with uberLights (UberArea, UE2, UberSpot). Now I have discovered the AoA Advanced Lights for DAZ Studio - http://www.daz3d.com/advanced-daz-studio-light-bundle
My question is:
How do these lights work, compared to the uber lights?
I have seen that there are some cheats for faster rendering times, but this is really not important to me. All I need is functionality, useability and of course quality.
Would you recommend these Advanced Lights to someone who is used to work with uber lights?
Any suggestions and opinions would be very helpful. Thanks!
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Comments
I would. They produce a similar visual quality to the Uber lights at a lower system cost; but optimally, I like to use them along with UE lights in a scene.
The AA lights offer functionalities no other light set has, especially the ability to flag surfaces and control light radius in a direct, literal way. You can light a character with a red light and have that light affect no other character; you can create a "pool" of light that only covers one area of the scene; you can control the falloff out to that radius and its color. It's important to read the manual, but once you've got used to them it's impossible to imagine not having them. The Advanced Spotlights are nice, but the Advanced Ambients are essential.
AoA Advanced Ambient deliver quality renders and a faster speed than UberEnv2. UberEnv2 slows to a crawl with transmaps.
Simple as that. Significantly visible quality renders at faster speeds. AoA Ambient delivers that. I don't have the Advanced spot so can't comment on that.
I have both the advanced lights and would highly recommend them both.
Thank you very much! :-)
Ditto - I love the AOA light.
I bought Advanced Ambient Light before the release of the Spotlight or the bundle, so I don't have that one.
I absolutely love it.
I never use Light Dome LE from that Dreamland guy.
Don't know what you mean with cheats but faster render times are usefull when you are still working on your scene.
And only when you think "ready, this is what I had in mind" then you adjust the values to final quality.settings.
From my point of view, the AoA advanced lights are a very good addition to the "common" lights of Daz Studio. E.g. for me personally the UE2 is not replaced fully, as the UE2 got some specific qualities that I don't want to miss all the time (like IBL), so it depends on the occasion which light I use. Render time can be shortened with UE2 due to various means as well, but not as easily through the light control only (unless the whole render gets the quality reduced). Render scripts (point-based occlusion) and special surface shaders can cut down the render time with UE2 tremendously.
Still, overall I think both AoA advanced lights are in the "must buy" category.
If they had nothing other than the surface tagging, they'd be worth it. Tagging surfaces to respond to specific lights is something higher end tools use a lot for effects, rendering optimization, etc.
Renpatsu has a point about the Image Based Lighting (IBL) feature of UE2 (that isn't included in Advanced Ambient). I'm personally not a fan of IBL as I like to tailor my lights by hand, but people who use that technology would need UE2 to get the best use out of it.
HELP! I just purchased the Advanced Lighting package and enjoy the ease of manipulating these lights. HOWEVER, when it comes to rendering an image, none of these lights are rendering, its just a dark image as if no lights have been added. When I tried the Iray soft lights again, they rendered fine which leads me to believe that there is some issue with the Advanced Lights themselves. Is there a setting I don't know about that allows them to register in your render??? What am I doing wrong!?!? Please help!!!
They only work in 3Delight.
Thank you!
Can you recommend high quality render setting for 3Delight? I have only used Iray and don't know what does what now. Thank you again.
There is a diversity of opinion, so I'm not going to respond to arguing after this, but as long as I rendered in 3Delight these settings worked for me (unmentioned settings are unchanged):
Raytrace Depth 1 (max 3, if you have water near a mirror or something)
Pixel samples X and Y 12
Shadow samples 16
Shading rate: 0.4 to 0.6; never as low as 0.1 unless it's a small render with lots of detail, never as high as 1.0 unless for a test render where blurriness doesn't matter. Lower shading rate = sharper, but you can overdo sharp.
I never found progressive rendering in 3Delight to be faster, but I also switched away from UberEnvironment as soon as I had AA lights, so that may make a difference.
The other thing you can do to speed things up without costing looks is to apply UberSurface to every transparent surface, and change the Occlusion setting to Override and 128 samples (recent AprilYSH hairs, for example, already come with this set this way). This won't stop transparency from slowing the render, but it will greatly decrease the degree to which it does.
Many thank youz. Will there be a drastic difference in skin texture between 3Delight and Iray? The Iray renders I have done give great skin texture, the (incomplete and short) renders I have done with 3Delight look cartoonish, when rendering with Iray, even from the start of the render you can tell what the final skin texture will be by the end. I am hoping this is not the case with 3Delight. Does this question make sense?
3Delight will tend to give a more toon look to things, yes. It's a biased engine where Iray is unbiased, so it can be harder to get a physically based result from lighting and shaders. It's possible to get slightly more photoreal looks using very carefully calibrated shaders (UberSurface and some PWSurface presets are capable of slightly more physically based results, I think, I never tried) and some UberEnvironment settings.
I never really tried to go physically based with 3Delight because it would take so much longer that I couldn't reasonably get products done in time. It's faster to just use Iray if photoreal is what's wanted.
Much appreciated!
No problem! :)
I was wondering since you have been the most helpful resource I have yet to encounter (as I am new to this) (and thank you), can you possibly explain how to add surface reflection for Iray renders? I thought to ad the uber surface to transparent surfaces as you say, but in the Sento setting, I cannot select the water or the windows etc. What is the process for this? (If you don't mind explaining thoroughly) :)
Don't mention it! You caught me on a rare "actually looking at the forum" day. ;) I don't know what you mean by Sento setting, though?
In Iray you use refraction, not cutout opacity to create transparent objects, so you need to know the refraction index of the material you want to imitate. Pure water is 1.33, for instance, so you would set the refraction index of the glass material to 1.33 and the refraction strength to full. For a window you would need to find out the refraction of the type of glass. If you use google you can get a good set of values; a lot of glass falls between 1.52 and 1.62 (but highly specific values are out there).
Ok I for some reason now it is allowing me to at least select the surfaces (not sure why) but yes reflections. And also like smoke in the lights etc? Any sources you have online that explain these things so you dont have to? :)
http://sickleyield.deviantart.com/journal/Tutorial-Creating-Dust-And-Atmosphere-in-Iray-522291773
i see the opposite. the iray promos looks toony to me.
Monique under advanced ambient light-
i be curious to see how her texture detail looks under your iray setup?
Here's very nice table of IOR values...
http://www.pixelandpoly.com/ior.html
Thank you so much everyone. I am just curious now...where will I find the values of refraction (and the like) in order to change them, once I have an object selected? I am guessing you must be in "Lights and Cameras" tab??
Well I just now realized its in the Actors, Wardrobe etc... but I still do not know how to access the values...
They are in the Surfaces tab.
I have changed the parameters of the water index refraction to 1.33 but I am not seeing any reflections. I must be missing a step?
Is there something in the scene for it to reflect, such as an HDR? Is Draw Dome turned to On in the Iray Environment tab?
Oooh really sorry to say this but I dont know what an HDR is unless its High Dynamic Range AND.....I cant find the Draw Dome option OR the Iray Environment Tab...So sorry. Under Light and Cameras and Render there is an Environment tab but that is as close as I got...Sento is a level with a pool and I want to get a reflection from it and a window next to my character. When I did a test render earlier with the 3Delight as you suggested the reflections were automatically there, so now of course I want to add them for an Iray render...
I tried this but I dont think it worked as I was still seeing the texture of the plane during the render...
http://lacyann.deviantart.com/art/ReflectionTutorial-DazStudio-42429145