Yea Ambient is the way to go. I know it works in DS. Ambient is one of those surfaces that is very glowy so if you were to do a dark scene but had, say skin, set with too much Ambient, it would have an unnatural glow to it. SO I imagine that applying that to a light bulb or the filament inside of the bulb (if the artist bothered to include that, would cause it to glow.

TheWheelMan said:

RKane_1 said:

You can also, I am told, use Area Light on the filament but I am told that this may not be sufficient to cast light as far as need be and so an additional pinlight may need to be added.

Poser doesn't have area lights. Aren't those lights used in programs like 3DS Max?

Although, that doesn't help the OP much. Working with the Ambient channel is probably the best way to go for Poser right now.

RKane_1 said:

You can also, I am told, use Area Light on the filament but I am told that this may not be sufficient to cast light as far as need be and so an additional pinlight may need to be added.

Poser doesn't have area lights. Aren't those lights used in programs like 3DS Max?

You can also, I am told, use Area Light on the filament but I am told that this may not be sufficient to cast light as far as need be and so an additional pinlight may need to be added.

The usual way is to use Ambient Color, but it depends on the lightbulb's materials. Some of the models I've made have separate materials for glass, filament, etc, so it's fairly easy to control the different elements. If its just a bulb with a single glass material, you can make use Ambient and Opacity to get a 'pearl' bulb effect. Go for a warm orange Ambient Color.

mac

Hi folks;

Back at it after several days of revising my lantern spotlight - Ran into a number of issues with my computer and some software so had to spend good part of the day fixing that.

I did a complete revision of the lantern including the battery which I tried to scale as close to the real thing as possible. Went a little goofy with some details as I even added the wire normally seen on such lanterns as well as putting a filament into the light. Speaking of which, I have not actually put a light into this version yet, so this is a project to play with later tonight.

I do have the lantern head parented to the body so in theory the head could be tilted up and down, but I am concerned this might be an issue for some people as I would like it to go only up and down and not side to side, but I don't know if anyway to do this as you can in some software like DAZ Studio or if I should just group the head and lantern as is so anyone using it doesn't get it turning off to the side by mistake.. Any thoughts on this from the group here and our Bryce Experts?

Thanks for looking.

Bruce

Maybe instead of a spot/bulb light in the center of the filament, you could use a tube light.

Eddy

evilproducer said:

Following this thread, my suggestion would be to set up your glass shader for the bulb with your transparency, reflection and refraction the way you want it, then set your alpha channel in the shader to around 50%. That way, you can still see the effects of the shader, and still get your lens flare and other effects.

In addition, I would use the 3D light sphere. It's visible no matter the alpha setting. Set the effect to Realistic and play with the intensity, diameter and quality settings. It can look really good and can help hide the point of origin of the flare or other effect, especially since the filament is long and spiraled, and the bulb light is a single point.

Thanks, EP! I'll try that out.

Following this thread, my suggestion would be to set up your glass shader for the bulb with your transparency, reflection and refraction the way you want it, then set your alpha channel in the shader to around 50%. That way, you can still see the effects of the shader, and still get your lens flare and other effects.

In addition, I would use the 3D light sphere. It's visible no matter the alpha setting. Set the effect to Realistic and play with the intensity, diameter and quality settings. It can look really good and can help hide the point of origin of the flare or other effect, especially since the filament is long and spiraled, and the bulb light is a single point.

tuckersaur said:

Thanks for the tip.

I did exactly what you said and set up a shader domain on my mesh rectangle. I have to play with the scale and make it more focused like the spotlight it's replacing. More experimentation is needed to get those caustics as focused as they were with the spotlight, but a few more test renders and I'm getting there. Do you have suggestion for mesh objects that make good spotlights?

What Paolo does with his Reality stuff is he tries to build objects that mimic the kinds of things you'd use in an actual photography studio.

I usually go into the vertex modeler and create a Grid. I usually bump up the number of vertices because, unless I'm mistaken, that creates more "light" (at least, I think it does with the Anything Glows; I could be wrong about the Luxus Area Light on that case.) To simulate a spot light, there are a couple of tricks you can use.

The first is to take your area light and just curve it. Bend it so that the light is focused where you want it to go. You could take a sphere, chop part of it off, give it thickness, and make the back of it a non-light texture and the inside of it a light texture.

You could also take that original grid light and add a non Area Light "box" around the light grid to limit and focus the light and to keep it from scattering around too much.

Another is to actually build a spot light. Create a dome-like shell with a Luxus Mirror texture and then create a light "filament" vertex object. Place the light texture so that it's like a bulb in a spot light. You can vary the proportions of the shell to focus the light the way you want.

WARNING: I've only ever tried the second one and that wasn't in Carrara. So take this advice with a few grains of salt.

thepencilneck said:

Here's a picture I'm working on using Luxus.

It's time consuming going in and cleaning up all the textures but I hadn't realized how fscked up so many textures are when they're pulled in from Daz/Poser.

The window is a Luxus Glass material with the original Gothic Study texture applied and then a Luxus Infinite light source poured through it.

I'm having frustration with the Oil Lamp. The base (which is a Metal2 with the original Texture applied) is fine. But I can't get the light to light up the way I want to. In this example, I've set it to Luxus Glass. I've set the Interior to an Area Light and the Exterior to clear. I had also tried setting it to Luxus Glass2 and putting a bulb inside but that got weird. I'm thinking about just creating a filament, applying an area light to that, and then placing that inside the glass globe.

BTW, I'm going to try to export some terrain shaders to texture maps. I haven't looked at it, yet. How do you guys do that?

In regards to the oil lamp you probably want to do something like this image, The outer is Glass2 with an Interior Clear Volume, leave Exterior none. Put an inner mesh that emits light, probably want it smaller than I have shown.

EDIT: oops you already figured this out.

thepencilneck said:

I'm thinking about just creating a filament, applying an area light to that, and then placing that inside the glass globe.Yeah. That should be just the ticket!

BTW, I'm going to try to export some terrain shaders to texture maps. I haven't looked at it, yet. How do you guys do that?

This darned forum...

Here's a picture I'm working on using Luxus.

It's time consuming going in and cleaning up all the textures but I hadn't realized how fscked up so many textures are when they're pulled in from Daz/Poser.

The window is a Luxus Glass material with the original Gothic Study texture applied and then a Luxus Infinite light source poured through it.

I'm having frustration with the Oil Lamp. The base (which is a Metal2 with the original Texture applied) is fine. But I can't get the light to light up the way I want to. In this example, I've set it to Luxus Glass. I've set the Interior to an Area Light and the Exterior to clear. I had also tried setting it to Luxus Glass2 and putting a bulb inside but that got weird. I'm thinking about just creating a filament, applying an area light to that, and then placing that inside the glass globe.

BTW, I'm going to try to export some terrain shaders to texture maps. I haven't looked at it, yet. How do you guys do that?

Dartanbeck said:

So, you send in your OBJs and have them print to 3d for you? That just sounds too fun. I've seen that those new freebie Autodesk Smartphone modelers offer a 3d print service.
So what sort of things do you get back, like a little plastic model of your character, or what?

I missed your post somehow until 3dage's reply. The printer sits on the desk next to my mac, loaded with PLA filament. Send it a print job (special software required) or load a print file from sd card (must be effectively 'printed to file' first). My hand isn't steady enough to do quality painting, but you can paint the result or take the native appearance. PLA tends to be slightly transparent which gives a nice effect. The green guy is printed with 0.15mm thick layers and was sized for maximum capacity of the printer (about 10" long IIRC).

Whether a finite set of frames continually travel from origin to perimeter, or whether there is a continual stream of “fresh” frames from an infinite source of frames, and once each frame returns to the source it disappears, I don’t know.

Let's back up to the beginning and use a single particle as our voyager. Keep in mind that where there is matter, there is heat. Where there is heat there is entropy, or the atoms disintegrating back to what is probably the famous Higgs boson, recently confirmed at both CERN' Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and FermiLab. As the particle sheds matter it acquires space. Still, entropy isn't in lockstep with generation. As we approach zero heat, entropy drops off because the particle is shedding space instead of matter. This is where String Theory (ST) derives its compacted, smallest 3space dimension. It is like a filament, analogous to our nerve fibers compared to the nerves themselves. How does that filament get there?

At one stretch of arbitrary time, there had to be absolutely nothing. That is mind boggling. Even a mind the size of the entire material universe would run out of capacity to imagine forever save as an understanding in concept. As artists, most of us by now understand the meaning of a gradient. With these machines we envision the gradient with permanence, but also with those filamental elements dimensioning, as in measurement. The analogue we imagine is digitized and eventually divided to a minimum element. As the radius expands so does the quantity of those elements. In material space, the gradient increases in heat and pressure as the elements increase in number. In vacuum space, or the void, cold and vacuum energy increase the same way, till the vacuum forces become infinite. The cold, or negative heat as thermodynamics defines it numerically, becomes infinite. A center develops, then a particle with radius approaching zero erupts at velocity approaching infinity.

That particle immediately will become subject to the forces of vacuum surrounding it, losing speed till what began at infinite velocity, like the ball, curves and is sucked back toward that violent center. Still it cannot regain all of its initial velocity because, like the ball, it no longer has anything to impart energy to it. There is no hand in the air to throw it back down above freefall velocity. It never quite returns to the void, instead likely becomes what we define as dark matter. In that, just like Einstein protested, matter cannot be destroyed... only changed.

What this alludes to is that the frames keep on coming like the Energizer Bunny at the rate of 10^42 frames each Earth Second. Each frame has volume like that torus and we are just a speck within a speck within a speck ad infinitum within that solid ring area, shedding frames as fast as they are made and collide, the frames shedding space as they fall out of this lightspeed, interference area.

I'll take a break there and let my two Malamutes back in before they terrorize the passersby...

rg5a said:

[Well, only if said 3D printer owners could indeed make a profit from selling their prints of DAZ content, and that is something I personally need someone to explain to me: Why would anyone want to spend any serious money buying smallish white plastic prints of stuff? :gulp:
(Not trying to be smart here, just wondering. Any suggestions are welcome.)

@rg5a - I'm coming at this from a completely different angle. It's not about making a profit from 3D printing; it's not even about making the best models. For me the interest is all about using and improving my 3D printer. You only have to take a look on Thingiverse to see some of the amazing 3D models that designers are generously sharing with other printer owners. It's very much in the spirit of the open-source community for people to be helping each other to improve both their printers and the printed output. I don't expect anyone to pay for my "lumps of plastic", but I get great pleasure out of designing a new sculpture and then trying to achieve the highest quality output that my machine is capable of.

Kyoto Kid said:

Now I as don't have the financial resources to purchase a 3D printer and the software to support it, I approach a third party 3D printing service to have the miniature made.
...
One idea, how about if Daz offered a 3D printing service? That way the mesh distribution issue pretty much becomes moot and they would also have a new source of income.

@Kyoto Kid - I've no idea how much a game developers license costs but if we're talking large sums of money then I certainly won't be buying one. As I said, my hobby is building and using 3D printers. The machines I have built cost a few hundred dollars each for the hardware, and all the software was all free to download and use (including DAZ3D Studio). If DAZ were to offer their 3D printing service I would welcome the competition in the marketplace, as long as they play fair and allow other print services to compete on an equal basis. But that wouldn't really help me in my situation as a 3D printer hobbyist.

Of course, I almost pity the people who try to make high quality models on the sub $20,000 3D printers. I work at a company that has two 3D printers, one is the $20k variety, the other is around $80k.
...
And a big thanks to DAZ for finally putting a definitive statement in the user agreement allowing for 3D printing. Now please make the hopefully inexpensive ($1 to $3 would be appropriate) 3D licenses available soon.

@KorvisBlack - How lucky for you to have access to such expensive machines, but please don't pity me just because I can't afford more than a basic machine. The point is, it's a 3D printer and I built it with my own hands! It is an amazing machine and I would like to have the freedom to use it to print out the sculptures that I create with my limited design capabilities. I don't need or want large, high resolution, full colour models; for me the challenge is all about making things, not owning things. Once I've finished one model, I'm always thinking about how to improve it and make a better one.
And that's the big difference - iteration cycle times. I have used 3D printing bureau services for many years and the two main drawbacks are cost and time. Each print would cost me between $20 and $50 and I would have to wait a couple of weeks for it to arrive. Now, I can have the result in my hands in just a few hours and if I need to make a change, or the print doesn't work, at least I know it probably only cost me $1 in plastic filament.
I enjoy what I do and I would happily pay a few dollars to have the freedom to print out my own creations.

rg5a said:

bringho said:

the smallest can of wax is 10.8kg and the cost is 2350 €...

Wasn't that my point? :lol:

Sorry m8,

When I read your post I thought it was only about those filament printers with inferior resolution :cheese:

I usually just copy/paste the name of the object that gets AG.

An important thing for people new to Carrara to remember, is that Anything Glows turns the object into a light source, but it does not make the object itself glow. So if you model a light bulb and apply AG to the filament, it will emit light, but it will not appear white hot. You would need to use the glow channel in the filament's shader to give it the white hot look.

While I admit I am a 3D printing technology booster, you can' t really ignore the content on these websites:

http://www.ibisworld.com/industry/3d-printer-manufacturing.html shows that 3D printing is a $2 BILLION industry, and has a growth of about 7.2% average per year over the past decade.

http://www.prweb.com/releases/3D_printing_products/3D_printer_services/prweb9719642.htm shows projections for the 3D printing industry

http://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2012/03/27/3d-printing-industry-will-reach-3-1-billion-worldwide-by-2016/ for more projections by Forbes.

http://moneymorning.com/2012/03/08/3d-printing-how-desktop-factories-will-create-the-next-1-trillion-industry/ deals specifically with "home & hobby" type 3D printers

The above links are from industry analysts, investment gurus and financial wonks. These people are experts at understanding market trends.

As to 3D printers in the home, all you need to do is look at the growing maker movement. http://makerfaire.com/ As people get back into the habbit of creating things for themselves, the maker movement will grow even more. Most 3D printers under $3000 use ABS filament that, oddly enough, produces parts that are just as usable as "original" ABS parts. This material is cheap, under $2 per cubic inch. There is no "plastigoop"; the equipment operation is clean and easy.

Obviously the market is growing. Why? Because people who are buying these things are finding a use for the technology. And this use has a cost/performance benefit, or people would not buy them. Is it necessary to identify a specific example? Hell, no! Obviously there are thousands of people who already have their own specific example of how this technology improves their processes; otherwise these devices would not be selling so well.

And this industry is just taking off. I remember when 640K of RAM was considered the "most you will ever need" and a 20MB "Winchester" hard drive was HUGE storage. That was only 29 years ago. In my city, 98% of the population has at least 1 computer. That 20% of homes will have a 3D printer within the next decade is not a crazy projection.

Yes, 3D printing technology will be a major game changer - not everywhere - but everywhere it makes sense.

Bejaymac said:

mjc1016 said:

I'll have to check, but I think that Opacity can be used to give an 'invisible' emitter...in other words set to 0 should turn off the visibility of the item without affecting it's light output.

Yep, exactly what it does...

Render 1 Sphere opacity is 100%
Render 2 Sphere opacity is 0%
Render 3 is using the 'eye' icon to turn off the sphere' visibility...

All three are rendered with 'low quality' render settings for maximum speed...

There's an option in the Arealight shader called "Fantom", turn it "on" in the surfaces tab and you don't have to mess about with Opacity, the pic is a quick spot render showing the Area disc lighting up Genesis, as you can see fantom is on.

Yes, Fantom works, too...but with the Opacity, you can still use maps to give a pattern to the emitter,,,just create a normal transmap and enable Ambient, with a bit of color and you have a shaped, glowing emitter...

While not quite the same, mesh lights/area lights are loads of fun. I once modeled a light bulb, down to a simple filament. Then used that in a flashlight, with a carefully modeled parabolic reflector. Then I rendered it in Lux, with an volume defined. The reflector was set to a mirror material, the filament was a mesh light and the bulb was a glass material...and when all was said and done, it looked great...but I didn't get a chance to save the final image, as my network went down. I should go back and render that one over again...I should have the scene file somewhere, I know I've got the models.

I wonder what it would be like doing that in DS 4.5 with UA