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Hello, @asums, and welcome to the New User Challenge. You've got a good start to an interesting lighting challenge image. I see that your G3M character is using the AoA Subsurface shader. That is a 3Delight render engine shader. Are you rendering in 3Delight or Iray (the default render engine in recent Daz Studio versions)? If you are rendering in Iray, Daz Studio will do an automatic conversion of most 3Delight shaders to Iray, but the results will probably not be optimum. I'll hold off on further advice until I know whether you are rendering in Iray or 3Delight. (The render engine is selected in the Render Settings pane.)
@Tynkere, I didn't understand the technique you demonstrated with the man and the green outline. Can you explain more, please? You mentioned an image in a light. Are you using a product from the store or something you created? I'm working back from the end of the thread so that I'm looking at the latest version of people's images, so I apologize if I missed some important information you posted earlier.
Barb its from my tutorial, the link is a few post further up.
The conversion to Iray is a nice creative addition to the concept there @Tynkere
@daybird, This is shaping up well. I wonder if you could backlight the characters more to create a rim light effect around them. I think that would set them apart from the background more. I've never used Iray Bloom in a dark setting like this. I've always found Bloom difficult to adjust and control. A bloom setting that I like to use for just a small amount of bloom is:
Bloom Filter Radius 0.020
Bloom Filter Threshold 15000.0
Bloom Filter Brightness Scale 0.20
I wonder if that would work in your situation.
Shinji Ikari 9th, I like the potential of this image a lot. But, I find your images to be too dark. The important details are lost in the very dark shadows. I wonder if you are rendering on a laptop where the angle of the screen changes the apparent brightness. Perhaps they appear brighter to you than to me. Since this month's topic is lighting, how about trying several experiments to bring more light into your image and see how the community evaluates those changes? I understand that you want a dark and dramatic scene, so I am not suggesting that you flood the scene with light to make everything flat. You might start by lowering the Tone Mapping EV. For example, if it is currently the default of 13, try 12 and see how that looks.
I want to mention a tool available in the store that I find very helpful for adjusting lighting. That is Iray Light Manager Pro. It is not on sale right now, so it is pretty expensive at the moment. If it sounds interesting, maybe wishlist it for purchase on sale later. It allows you to do things like adjust ALL lighting to be proportionally brighter or dimmer. It will find ALL emissive surfaces in your scene and list them, so you can adjust all of them together or select a group to adjust at once. And it does much much more.
Ah, thank you. I figured I'd miss something by going from the bottom up
, but I didn't want to comment on "old" versions of entries. It's hard to catch up after being without internet for several days.
@Diomede, thanks for jumping in to help out other users with your helpful links! Sharing tips and techniques is an important part of users helping users in these forums.
Hi Barbult, I'm definitely rendering in Iray. Where would I change the shader?
@Tynkere, This is an interesting lighting challenge. Shadow is an important element of the image. I prefer the image where the face is less shadowed (this one). But I did like it when she was looking more toward the camera. I guess different people have different opinions about where she should be looking. It seems to me that the man's shadow is too hard-edged. It is as though he is very close to the wall to make such a hard edged shadow, but we know that he is further away, because we don't see his body. I find the partial sign in the upper right corner to be distracting. It pulls my attention away from the character. I'd also suggest trying some less uniform lighting, so the entire wall is not uniformly lit. I think you are trying for more of a focused spotlight effect, right? Or did I misunderstand? You could try some vignetting (Tone Mapping tab or postwork) to fake it, perhaps.
@HighElf, I notice that the character seems to be floating in space with no shadow on the ground. Do you have Draw Ground turned on in Render Settings? Is the character positioned so her feet are on the ground? I think a ground shadow will help give the image depth.
I like that you have already tried different lighting "colors" with your Kelvin temperature settings - one very warm and one very cool. Have you experimented with different brightness settings (lumens) and sizes for your emissive planes? It would be a good lighting experiment to learn how those changes affect the overall look of the image.
Shaders can be changed in the Surfaces pane. Shaders can also be changed by applying a Materials Preset that uses a different shader. (For an explanation of the difference between shaders and materials, take a look at this post in a previous month's challenge.) In the case of Daz Figures (characters), the normal way to change the skin would be to apply a Materials Preset. Some Daz Characters are sold with Iray skin materials, but older characters often have only 3Delight skin materials. I see that you are using Genesis 3 characters. The basic Genesis 3 Male comes with 3Delight skin. The character skin is called "Eddie".
Here are some options for getting Iray skln on your character. Other users here may have some more suggestions, too.
This month we are learning about lighting. Don't feel pressured to buy a bunch of characters and utilities. Increase your library slowly, as you gain experience and are sure that you will want to stick with this hobby and this software. You already show talent, so I suspect that you will enjoy this!
Edit: Oops. I just noticed that your female is Genesis 2. Genesis 2 came with something called "Iray Optimized Genesis 2 Female MAT". That is an Iray materials settings file that you can apply to the Genesis 2 Female that loads with 3Delight settings. Give that a try on your female.
@sueya, I'd crop a little tighter to focus more on the character. That way you could eliminate some of the distracting green (a plant?) on the left edge and some of the blank yellow wall area at the top. I really like the spotlight (looks like sun) on the chairs and the shadows cast on the wall. The character seems to be backlit from the right side, since I can see her shadow over on the left side. Was that intentional? I bet if she were sitting in the other chair, on the left against the wall, she would pick up some more interesting lighting. Might be worth a try to see how it looks.
@Diomede, you image seems to be out of focus. Is this an Iray render? Do you have DOF On? If so, perhaps the Focal Distance is set incorrectly. Or perhaps the Pixel Filter in Render Settings has too high a Pixel Filter Radius. You can sharpen up an Iray render by selecting Pixel Filter mitchell and Pixel Filter Radius 1.0 instead of the default gaussian 1.5.
You can adjust the tiling of shaders (assuming that they use a seamless texture image) in the Surfaces pane. Select the object in the Scene pane and then select the surface you want to tile in the Surfaces pane. Then adjust the Horizontal Tiles and the Vertical Tiles. A larger value makes the texture smaller in your image. If you don't see those two items, you may be using a shader that has not implemented them. If so, what shader are you using?
To adjust the brightness of Iray lights, adjust the lumens value, not the Intensity slider. To adjust the brightness of emissive shaders, use the Surfaces pane. Set the Emission Color of the surface to something other than black (usually white). Then adjust the Luminance value. If you are using spotlights, you can select the spotlight in the camera selection drop down at the upper right corner of the viewport and look through the spotlight to see where it is pointing. You can change the place the spotlight points by adjusting it just like a camera. You can't render through a spotlight, though, so be sure to change back to your real camera before rendering.
I hope these suggestions help. Learning a new piece of software can be hard at first.
Whew! I think I'm caught up.
Heh! I think I can speak for all of us when I say we are very grateful!
Will try working on shadow a bit more, but I totally forgot. It's February-- duh! Love & Romance... A certain holiday?
Maybe people will like this one better.
(Not a contest entry)
Thanks for reading
--Bruce
You guys are working on some nice pieces. I just had a couple of comments. Please feel free to ignore.
@Tynkere I like the setup. It's a good concept. I'm not familiar with that particular film but I am familiar with the concept. It worked really well in Psycho, too. I was wondering if you might try to get your shadow to show a little fuzzier with DOF so the lines aren't so distinct. You might have to pull everyone away from the wall just a little but I think it would work well. I think you might find a nice dichotomy from the sharp lines as they fall on the girl with the fuzzy lines on the wall if you manage to get the DOF just right. Anyway, give it a try to see what you think.
Shinji - I think you have a nice start with the campfire. While I can see where you might find it difficult to do, you might find it also gives more passion to your final image. I would suggest some more ambient lighting. Are you using an HDRI for the background and sky? You might want to try playing with the environment intensity and increase it to see if that helps any.
@daybird You have a nice scene going on there. Have you tried rendering different parts separately? I find that bloom tends to bloom even the stuff you don't want to be affected by bloom. There are a couple of ways of doing it but both mean you need to composite in a 2D program. I'm not sure how comfortable you are with post work. My suggestion would be to render everything in the background that you want to be affected by the bloom and then render everything in the foreground that you don't want to be affected by bloom with all of the background elements turned off with the bloom off. Make sure you save as a .png so you have the transparent background. It's just a suggestion but play with it and see how it works for you. You could also render with canvases if you know how to do that. I'm still a little challenged with canvases so I can't give you any input but it should work if you know what you are doing.
@Barbult - thanks for the helpful comments. Yes, an Iray render. Will go through some of the shader and camera settings to see what is up. The shaders on the wall and other set pieces were acquired in the Daz store, so I will check tiling as per your suggestions Have never looked at the Studio cameras so I am especially grateful for the information on those. Regarding the lighting, I have it set to use only scene lighting. Then the primary lighting is a simple 3 point rig with the strongest coming from inside the hallway pointed into the room at the Minotaur. One technical issue is that I tried to place a supplemental point light behind the minotaur but it did not issue light in all directions. I couldn't get it to put any light on the rear wall. Not sure why. I replaced it with a spotlight to get some light in back but didn't want it too strong. Will try to clean to the render up and post a revision. I hope it is still in the spirit of the New Users that I post an NAE for Studio and ask for comments.
Boah, so many new entrys in the last time.
Ok, most things are said by others and so I hold it short from my side.
@Shinji
Great Idea with the fire. But why put it out of sight...I immediately tried your suggestion in a new render and even while it's not perfect until now I like this idea a lot and work on it.
@Tynkere
How Barbult said, is this technic from Linwelly something which I never heard before. (I should really read about this, but it's allways a time probleme. ....ok, to be honest I'm a lazy guy in such things....
BTW.. have you tried to crop the scene ( zoom in) so that only her upper body is visible and use more an camera angle, who is over her head. I think this makes it easyer to work with the shadow and give the enemy a more threatening attitude.
@ barbult
Thx a lot for the Bloom Setting and the link for the Iray Light Manager Pro ( on my wishlist now ) I will try this in my next testrender for the scene.
@ Knittingmommy
Yes the Bloom Filter is a difficult ( impossible *gg*) thing to handel. Your idea is very enticing, but I'm a lousy postworker and don't know much about layers in Gimp. So I try to this without, but when it won't work, I give this suggestion a chance.
Ok, enough bla bla. Next testrender where I shameless used Shinjis idea with the fire. (THX again man
)
Bloom ist still to much and the light may use some adjustment, but now where I have brought the rain to work, I have some other problems. The rain nearly blocked the sight at my background picture, so I have to play with the surface, to find a good mediocre. The lightning looks like he is before the fire... and, and, and...yeah, still a lot to do. ^^
Mhh, now that I have posted the Image I realised another strange thing. I have a few bright stripes (above the monsters face and in the sky, right of her head).
My first guess is, that this are reflections from the mechbay who shine on the rain prop, but I'm not sure about this.
You are trying to learn a new-to-you piece of software, so as I understand the New User Challenge guidelines, you absolutely qualify as a "new user". You may participate and enter if you wish.
I suggest you work with one light at a time and adjust it, so that you can see what contribution to the scene it makes. If you aren't getting enough light, boost the lumens a lot, like 1000X and see what happens. Sometimes Iray lights have to be set to ridiculous looking values to emit the desired amount of light. I don't know if it is a bug or not, but it is something we Iray users have learned to deal with. Maybe your pointlight was too far from the wall to cast much light on the wall with the number of lumens it was set to. Like if you had a dim nightlight in a cavernous room. There would be light near the bulb, but far away would be pretty dark.
Tone mapping in the Render Settings can be used to lighten or darken your image overall. A lower EV value with lighten your image. The default is 13. For an interior scene, I sometimes go to around 9. The effect is similar to photographing with a slower shutter speed instead of turning on more lights in your house.
Keep working on it and asking questions. The more specific the question, the better we can help.
Josie at the cafe version 2
I have moved the girl nearer the wall as suggested. Not sure if her face is too dark.
By the way I have been a member here since 2003 but I still consider myself a new user as I have only been using Daz Studio for about a year and I don't often get time to practice. This is why only do these challenges once every two or three months.
Yes, her face is too dark. I wonder if it is the materials for the skin. If you are rendering in 3Delight, are you using 3Delight materials for the skin?
The shadows look unnatural. There is a strong shadow on the wall. but no shadow on the ground at her feet. The back wall on the right is too bright. How many spotlights do you have in the image? Do you have any other lighting? Maybe you have too many competing "suns".
I see you have changed the image crop, but you can still go further and improve it some more. Let's cut out that bright distracting wall on the right, so your image focuses more on your character. Zoom and pan your camera in the viewport to eliminate that bright wall and reduce the large blank space above the character. Try an aspect ratio other than square for variety - maybe give 8 by 10 a try. I am attaching a couple images as suggestions for the section to zoom in on. One is your original square aspect ratio, the other is approximately 8 by 10. Enjoy experimenting.
I do like the fire! That really adds a lot. And I like that the character is lit up a bit more. I preferred the lightning in the first image, because it was thinner and had more branches. I don't know what that bright horizontal bar in the upper right is. Strange? Perhaps you can use the process of elimination to figure out what is causing it.
Another month where I've been more a lurker than a participant - paid work takes up a lot of my time at the beginning of the year. I've been following but kept mostly quiet - I know less about lighting than about anything else, so all the tips and suggestions have been great!
@Daybird - I really like the render you've got going - love the added fire and the way it reflects off the steel grid floor.
@Highelf - Love the liquid metal curves, but I'm also a little distracted by her seeming to be floating in midair.
@shinji My old eyes have a hard time picking out details of darker scenes, especially with an orange-red light. I do like the way the firelight falls across both faces, and how the warm glow sets up a sort of cozy, safe haven with the dark woods around them.
@Diomedes One of my favorite myths! One of the tricks I've used when I'm trying to shine light through an opening is to hide the wall with the opening, position the light so that it hits where I want it, then unhide the wall. What kind of light are you using? For spotlights, it sometimes helps to widen the spread angle.
@asums Welcome! I love your couple and the backlighting. I realize I'm an outlier, but I kinda like the translucence. It really caught my eye. It doesn't look natural, of course, but they have a lovely cartoon-y kewpie doll feel to them. Very cute... even though I know it's not your intent.
@sueya Hm. I wonder if you could lose that dark shadow across her face by turning Josie's chair back toward the table?
@Tynkere I keep looking at your stalker creep trying to figure out what bugged me about it and finally got it. What if you moved the shadow figure over so that the shadow of his ARM falls across her face? (Also, I love the title of her book, and the hint of location that the library sign suggests. Nice little bit of #resistance.)
@barbult and @linwelly - your hints and tips have really taught me a lot, even before I got started with my own render! Thanks so much for all that you and the other volunteers put into these New User challenges.
I'm going to work on something a little more conventional afterwards, but I started out just wanting to play with lighting. Instead of doing a scene, I tossed up a couple of primitives and started adding lights and playing with emissive surfaces. I'll probably come back and play with this more to figure out how to control bloom, intensity, luminance and angle but this is where it's at right now. My own personal challenge this year is to step outside my comfort zone and stretch my creativity. In this, I used the exact same settings on all the figure's skin surfaces, and used spotlights and distant lights to "paint" her. She and all of the spheres are shaded with a frosted, etched glass shader (with a custom "etching") and thin-walled set on, so the blurred lines and stars are actually on the other side of the shape being seen through the shape. I'm trying to decide if I like the way the lines "break" at the figure seams, or if I want to go in and try to adjust the tiling and angle of the textures so there's a more seamless flow.
It is almost impossible to match tiled textures across seam lines, unless you have a UV that is designed to do that. I know that there is such a UV for Genesis in the Sculptural Genesis Ultra Fun Kit. I can't think of such a UV for later generations, but there may be one. Perhaps other users can chime in about that. Another option is to try a procedural shader. That will work on any character.
Here is a Genesis 8 Female with a procedural shader from esha's Procedural Gem Shader for Iray A procedural shader does not distort when the character is morphed.
Here is a Genesis character with the Sculptural Ultra Fun Kit UV. Note that this UV allows you to use any tiling texture. If the character is morphed, there will be more distortion in the pattern caused by the morph stretching of the skin. There is still no ugly seam line between body parts, though.The texture I used is from PD Iray Shader Kit 2.
How do you make a candle light look real? I used a point light, but it looks strange rendered with Iray.
In Iray I would suggest to make the canlde flame itself an emissive surface. Dial the light temperature to something about 2900 and power up the Luminance ( its easier if you change the units to kcd/m2
If you then add a tad of bloom in the render settings filtering, its a nice candle
I've seen the procedural shaders and love them - thanks for the reminder, @Barbult! I hadn't seen the Structural Ultra Fun Kit, and it's definitely going on my wish list now. The part I forgot to mention is that I also used the texture as the emissive pattern for the body, and as the bump map. I really liked the way it spirals around her arms and legs, and I'm not UNhappy with the lines breaking the way they do at the seams. I've got a render cooking with a different pattern right now, where the seam breaks aren't as obvious. I'll upload it as soon as it's done rendering.
OK, so hopefully this will help explain where I was going with this idea before I got called out on the hashtag thing.
In hindsight, that probably wasn’t a good idea. (Rule #15 I think)
Sorry. Didn’t occur to me, but can see how that would be major turn-off. Will not happen again.
Anyway, her face & eyes (along with thug’s shadow) all hopefully point to the sign that would have a topical reference.
Suggestions? It probably needs something on her left to balance out the sign if that makes any sense. If everyone still wants her head facing camera a bit more, can do one to compare.
Thanks for reading!
--Bruce
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Change log so far:
Remove book/sign before I get in trouble...
Move actress forward & set DoF (thanks to KnittingMommy)
Tilt thug on -X axis to make his shadow taller & skew
Pose thug’s torso so shadow is also curving right.
Add place holder so people can get an idea of what tribute movie poster might look like
===
PS:
Looks like others have been busy too! Will be back to check out everyones renders, but dishwasher isn’t working so have play appliance repairman. Fun fun... ; )
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Edit: weeding out old imgur files. PM missing links.