Confused about lights

nsteele84

Hi,

Just started using Daz 4.8 previously used Poser. I cannot seem to get the lights to work, I have a simple scene backplane, floor, victoria 7. I have set the iray render settings to scene only and deleted all the lights and set camera headlamp to off.. I do a render and the scene is fairly well lit (first thing that confuses me I expected it to be dark). If I add a spotlight to the scene everything goes dark and no matter what I adjust I cannot change it. I can add a distant light and the scene is lit but the spotlight still does not have any affect. Any help in setting up a basic three point lighting system in Iray that I could expand on would be appreciated.

Thanks

Nick

videoninja719

iray use a different kind of lights. rendering using normal lights will make it dark. those normal lights(distant light, spotlight,etc are for 3Delights).For iray renders, make sure the light you select has the word 'photometric' in it. such as photometric spotlight. for area lighting u can select dome on and use hdr maps or sun sky lighting.

Herald of Fire

Firstly, it would help if you said what render engine you are using (Iray or 3Delight). When there are no other light sources, Daz Studio will automatically use a 'headlight' lamp which is attached to the active camera shining forwards. This applies to both Iray and 3Delight, which is why you are getting unusual results when rendering without lights.

mjc1016

videoninja719 said:

iray use a different kind of lights. rendering using normal lights will make it dark. those normal lights(distant light, spotlight,etc are for 3Delights).For iray renders, make sure the light you select has the word 'photometric' in it. such as photometric spotlight. for area lighting u can select dome on and use hdr maps or sun sky lighting.

Not quite...the 'regular' lights are context senseitve and will have the proper options (be photometric) depending on the renderer selected.

KA1

If you are using iRay the creation of the spotlight automatically overrides the headlamp so the render won't use one, have you tried adjusting the lumens that the spotlight is outputting? As I recall they are pretty weedy on initial creation so a single spot won't light much at all.

videoninja719

mjc1016 said:

videoninja719 said:

iray use a different kind of lights. rendering using normal lights will make it dark. those normal lights(distant light, spotlight,etc are for 3Delights).For iray renders, make sure the light you select has the word 'photometric' in it. such as photometric spotlight. for area lighting u can select dome on and use hdr maps or sun sky lighting.

Not quite...the 'regular' lights are context senseitve and will have the proper options (be photometric) depending on the renderer selected.

so you mean it depends on render engine. if its iray all lights will be photometric and if it 3Delight, it will all be 3Delight lights only. is that what u mean?

Szark

no what mjc mean is that the lights know which render engine has been selected and will provide the parameters for that render engine. 

Steven-V

If you have scene only and you have NO lights at all in the scene of any sort, Iray might add something by default just to be able to render (not sure).

If you get it going dark after adding a single light, I bet it is doing that, and when you added the light, it is not bright enough anymore, and Iray is no longer 'helping' you by adding the fake light to the scene, since you had one in there. Try bumping up the lumens significantly (add several 0s to the amount) and see if that fixes it.