no headlamp lighting?

intrinsicanomaly_262dc77de2

According to the user manual, I can toggle my lights and "headlight" lighting on or off by clicking on this icon in this toolbar, which it says should be labelled "use scene lights": 

However this doesn't appear anywhere in my UI and I can't find it inside any of the menus. Where is this?

The only icon like this I can find is the one for "preview lighting", which I have to say is amazingly useless. Why is it that with preview lighting turned on, when I shine a light on my character, it drastically brightens the scene, but when I render, it is dark and almost as though there isn't a light there at all?

intrinsicanomaly_262dc77de2

I know this is a different topic, but the reason I'm trying to get headlamp lighting to work is because according to the manual this will "perfectly illuminate" the scene, at least so I can see what it looks like. I'm just finding it way too frustrating that no matter how many lights I add and how bright the scene appears in preview, it always renders exactly the same and it almost seems random which lights affect the outcome and which ones don't. 

intrinsicanomaly_262dc77de2

so I decided to just delete all the lights so I could at least get the headlight view and see the dark areas of my scene, and I was very surprised to see that,once again, the render is lit exactly as it was when I had 8 lights. What am I missing here?

ben98120000

Window - Preview Lights or Ctrl+L.

JimmyC_2009

intrinsicanomaly_262dc77de2 said:

so I decided to just delete all the lights so I could at least get the headlight view and see the dark areas of my scene, and I was very surprised to see that,once again, the render is lit exactly as it was when I had 8 lights. What am I missing here?

First of all, what render engine are you using?   If it is the default render engine, it will be Iray which is an unbiased engine (PBR - Physically Based Renderer) and mimics light in the real world, unlike 3Delight which is a biased renderer.   When you view a scene in the Viewport, it is displayed using OpenGL, which does not display lighting in the same way as the renderer (especially Iray), it also does not display shaders properly since their look is a product of the render engine, and can only be seen properly after a render.

There is a great deal to learn about lighting in general, but there are some very useful threads on Iray here :

Chris Palameno Iray thread
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/56788/iray-start-here#latest

The headlamp is just a light parented to the Camera (which you cannot adjust), and is used just to illuminate the scene, and should not be used for rendering.   There is a tool called the 'Spot Render Tool' (Alt+Shift+C) which can be used to select an area of the Scene that you want to render on it's own to give an idea of what the finished render will look like. Useful for lighting.

There are also many kinds of lights available in DAZ Studio, and the choices change depending on what render engine that you are using.   You can change the defaults for your render in the Render Settings pane, and the program will load that way the next time you run DAZ Studio.

If you are still having problems, please give details of what lights are in your scene, and what you are trying to accomplish.

 

Richard Haseltine

"Perfectly" doesn't mean "ideally" - it means that the headlamp will give an even light over everything in the viewport (unless you zoom really close) which makes it easy to see what you are dfoing while posing, it will not give a good-looking light for renders.

intrinsicanomaly_262dc77de2

I have spent hours reading through the iray documentation, I'm not finding anything useful. Here's what I'm trying to do:

I have no environment set up at all, I have just created two characters on the empty default space, tried to set them all up and posed them, and now I just want to light them and see if they will look the way I want. 

However, no matter how many lights I turn onto them, they always render pretty much the same as without the lights on. But when I point the lights on them, the lighting appears to drastically change in the preview. Especially there are a couple of small dark spots (result of shadows between the two characters) I want to light. I've tried every kind of lights I have. I'm trying to use the FWSA Adaline iray lights right now. 

Richard Haseltine

The default is to render with an environment map, the Ruins HDR, and that is goign to swamp local lights. Under Environment in the Render Settings pane set it to Sceen only isntead of Dome and Scene, then adjust the Tone Mapping options (lower the shutter speed of fStop values, raise Film ISO) to reflect the relative lack of light.

intrinsicanomaly_262dc77de2

Great, thanks so much! Although, I'm a bit confused, because when I was doing the renders, the background is perfectly black, it isn't a ruins. 

Now I just have one new small lighting problem. What lights do you recommend to use if I have a very small area on a character I want to light, that isn't hit by the bigger area lights? For example, a small part of the body is having a shadow cast by some clothing or an arm, and I don't want that small area to be in shadow, but I don't want to move the main lights to take care of it. 

So far, everything I try just makes a big, obvious, highlighted blown out area, or it's too dark, but in every case it's really too obvious that i'm shining an extra light there. 

mjc1016

Iray tries to mimic real life as much as any simulation can, so things like bounce cards work.  If you are familiar with photography, you'll know what bounce card is/does.  If not, it's a plain white card placed out of view of the camera to bounce light back at the subject.

Novica

You can also reduce the Crush Blacks in Tone Mapping which affects how dark shadows. If you have a light shining on it and it's too obvious, consider using a Linear Point Light instead, and lowering it near what you want lit. 

Richard Haseltine

A Linear Pointlight will be an ordinary pointlight in Iray - light falls off by the physically correct inverse square law in Iray.

intrinsicanomaly_262dc77de2

I am a photographer in fact, which is part of why I've been rather frustrated here. In the real world, when you put lights on things, they light up, lol. 

I'm not seeing a bouncecard anywhere. 

This is strange again. I am using the "fill, rim, main" iray lights. I finally got it lit nicely. But I still have the small area I want to light and can't. I tried duplicating my rim light, focusing the beam width down all the way to just that spot, pointed it right at it, and matching it's brightness to the other rim so it would blend. To my surprise, this not only didn't do anything, but even when I put "intensity" to 200%, and "lumens" up to ten times their original setting, the area remains completely dark. There is nothing blocking it, the light is directed straight there. 

Any explanations??

intrinsicanomaly_262dc77de2

I expanded the beam width back out and it shone light after all. So I must not understand what beam width does. Is there an adjustment I can make that will focus down the beam to just the small area I want? If it spreads over the whole scene, it'll mess up the lighting elsewhere.

intrinsicanomaly_262dc77de2

Although I wouldn't mind if I could make it behave a little less realistically when it comes to reflecting the lights in the subject's eyes sometimes! : P

Richard Haseltine

The spotlight has an adjustment for the angle over which the beam spreads - that is Spread Angle (in degrees) - lower that to constrain the area affected.