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Lokai2000 — Swirl
Published: 2008-03-02 17:17:39 +0000 UTC; Views: 3948; Favourites: 41; Downloads: 161
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Description
This was not meant to be anything overly exciting.This is my first V4... err... I mean A4... render. But it primarily a trial for a new lighting engine I am writing for Povray. It, hopefully, will address some of my own annoyances I have had with PIBL. The current code name for the new lighting engine is IBX, but that might change. Unlike PIBL... I might actually be able to make the new lighting engine write poser light files.
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Comments: 39
Neat stuff. Don't suppose this light-set engine would be compatible with DAZ studio?
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Nope. It is not even compatible with Poser. Povray only at this point.
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Ok, I figured. Even most of DAZ's stuff isn't compatible with DAZ studio - go figure? Lol!
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I just wonder if it would be cool if you map some lighter red incandecent eye with glows? 
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smashing scene, nice touch making her eyes just as red
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It looks pretty good. I guess I like that you can see the specular effect of the lights on the spheres, and that there are some defined shadows. What are the annoyances with PIBL?
An interesting hallway(?) you've made there too.
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Annoyances....
A) Specular highlights get severely subdued.
B) The only way to get soft edges is to add an obscene number of lights.
C) Even then, the edges look like lots and lots of lights.
D) The bright lights in the scene don't actually correspond to the bright areas in the source image.
E) Regardless of the image, the bright region is always in the same location....
F) There is no chance PIBL could ever be adapted to make poser light files.
Unfortunately, it looks like I am introducing all new problems.....
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"it looks like I am introducing all new problems" - well, it wouldn't be the first time you did that to yourself, would it? 
Thanks for letting me know what the annoyances are.
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I've been good at that lately.
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Good lights for poser would be good. Going through large numbers of lights is a PITA to set just right. I've been working on wild settings of light in my renders for the last five or six of them.
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Love the render, the lighting is great!
Is she prehaps 'related' to the new terminator on the Sara Conners Chronicals?
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Congrats on your first V4/A4 render!! 
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I'm still mad at DAZ. I ordered the pro bundle and some of the links were broken. I wasn't able to download all the files. Now the links have expired entirely and they still haven't corrected the problem.
As for the dark face, the is often a problem with area lighting. I often get around it by either making the face the center point of the lighting system, or moreoftne, use an old photoghrapherr trick. I just add a light to the scene for which the sole purpose is to hihlight the eye area.
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That's funny, I bought the A4 pro bundle with the nice 40% promo and all links were good when I tried them. One important thing is to DISABLE all download managers when downloading contents from DAZ because they usually result in *failed* downloads. That can be easily avoided by right-clicking the links and explicitly telling the browser to "save as" to your hard drive.
I see what you mean about extra lights just to light up the character faces, but in my experience that makes it harder to keep a more consistent character illumination as a whole. Instead, I prefer to leave the lights alone and work more on the IBL parameters setup that will provide a better color balance despite of the hair proximity to the faces. For the eyes I prefer to "cheat" on the materials setup to give them a better look that is usually independent of the lighting. Thankfully Poser has a wide variety of illumination parameters that allow for all this, but since light reacts differently depending on how materials are setup, each case is a case and there is no one-click solution for all cases. ^^
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I love what you did for/to her eyes
Other than that, good luck!
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Neat-o. Point of interest, and Ibex is a wild mountain goat with large curved horns.
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Weird.... my zodiac sigh is Aries.
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It uses a reduced set of area spot lights instead of a lot of spot lights. The region covered by each area light is also controlled by an algorithm such that some shadow edges are soft and others are harder. The tool now also attempts to compute an optimum rotation for the lights based on the assumption that the camera is a pretty standard setup.
since I'm using a smaller number of area lights now. It is conceivable to write out something that poser could use as well. The same edge control could also be applied to the poser lights.
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why spots and not infinites? i tend to use a few infinites to setup ambient light then fill in and shadow with spots, depending on the scene. i've never been able to make poser lighting do a convincing outdoor lighting, though.
poser really doesn't like a lot of lights per scene. especially not shadow generating lights. i've discovered the joys of the probelight. i wish i knew how to use IB effectively.
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Actually.... the ambient lights are infinite, shadowless, lights and the mains are spot lights.... (You asked me what was different than PIBL.
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ah yes. just the diff.
i've noticed some weirdness with ray traced shadows in poser. i've been messing with blur radius to see if that will fix it. it happens with dynamic cloth; it's like the offset from the figure is not taken into account when calculating shadows.
it's all *all* so confusing. my brain hurts. (or course, the fact that i smashed it mountain biking might be the real culprit)
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Firefly (poser) doesn't use raytraced shadows by default. It uses shadow maps. I'm not surprised there are problems. You could try increasing the map size or enabling raytracing for the lights to see if it gets better. (NOTE: Render times will go way up....)
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i *do* turn on the raytraced shadows. otherwise firefly won't deal with transparency maps correctly. which can really mess up certain hair models (notably, the beautiful hair by koz)
since i can at least distribute firefly over 4 threads, it's not so bad. i can't do multi-processing, though. seems to hang on a race condition.
but it's still a really slow rendering engine.
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Wow you *are* brave!
Firefly usually just crashes when I push it's limits.
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it sure doesn't deal with limited system resources very well.
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For some reason, it makes me think of basketball. Maybe the balls and the hoop...
Dunno, but nice!
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I hope you do, would be very please to try them out in poser 7... superb render
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great if you do. Will you be willing to offer them up to lame with lighting people like me?
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I've got to get the tool to a place where I'm happy first. There are some technical challenges ot overcome first with going to povray, but I will be looking into it.
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