Hello All, I have created a scene for a few characters to be placed; but before I do I need to get the lighting correct. It's an indoor scene of a room in a house. When I put a roof on it, the infinate light is blocked and renders the scene almost black. I am trying to get the ambient light of the infinate lights to light up the indoors as light streaming through windows. I have tried many lighting posiions and combinations as well as spotlights and nothing yet. So far my only solution is to remove the roof and eliminated the shadow effects of some of the objects in my scene, which I don't want to do because indoor shadows give a realistic effect. It would be a nice feature of P5 to be able to place an infinate light withiin a scene so you could control the lighting effects: similar to the lights that you can place where you want in a scene in Bryce. That would solve my problem; short of that though I'm wondering if anyone might have a work-around. Does anyone have any experience in this or perhaps a good tutorial on this subject could be recommeded. Thanks in advance, Larry

Turn the shadows OFF for the ROOF.

Addendum to my above posting: I have been experimenting with leaving the roof off and assigning different ambient values in the Mat. room to the various objects in my scene with encouraging results and I think I am in the right direction. However this is a tedious process, especially with many objects in a scene and will require a lot of time for experimentaion. I would like to control the effects with the lights rather than the objects.

Geep, I just read your reply as I posted mine. I will try it thank you.

Light coming through windows is best done with spotlights - this needs patience and lots of test renders, unfortunately. If you turn off shadows for the roof, you will most likely get an unrealistic band of light where it shines over the top of the walls; unless you can make the walls very tall with a morph, or perhaps by blocking the light with an additional prop. If you want interior lights as well, they will have to be spotlights too. I'd suggest getting the outside light to interact with the window first, though; and take care that your interior lights don't overpower it.

I have done a similar project. Check out my still life #4 in my gallery. I did what EnglishBob suggested, and made the walls taller than the picture. No ceiling shows. Also, I left the walls that were not in the picture out. There are two spotlights outside the window offset a bit to spread the light out a bit once it's through the glass to simulate some ambience. I used a sneaky trick and put a modeled tree outside the window to get a throw pattern. I kept the shadow maps turned down around 200 I think to keep it from being too crisp. The rest are about seven spotlights shining into the room from the other side with very low shadow map settings. This softens all the shadows. In order not to wash out the window light, add spots with low intensities to slowly build up the light in your scene. I rendered probably 30 times. I noticed without a figure the rendering times were not too bad. I had zero luck with added ambience to the materials of the objects. They always glowed. Like others have said, there is nothing to do but test render alot to get what you want. At the end of it all, I still had to connect shadows to their casting objects in post. I kept getting a line of light along edges that should have been completely in shadow. Basically I post worked the shadow under the window sill and the left hand side of the curiorack. That's not very much post, but it would not have done for animation. Another thing to try, you can save your renders and not change the camera angle. If you wind up in the end liking different things in different versions, you can put them together in a paint program and use layers and opacity to fine tune your overall scene. Or use them as reference for final lighting. I don't like having to do that, but you might find a you can get a remarkably improved render by combining the images. In fact, most special effects lighting is not rendered in one pass at all, but a series of passes for highlights, general illumination, and so forth. I would like to see what you come up with in the end, if you would like to post it.

Thanks for the tips, I am trying some of that, but as I said, I am finding success with turning off shadows on objects or adjusting ambience on them to acheive what I am looking for. I will try all your suggestions though to see what effect I get. It sure is tedious work and yes, I will post it, hopefully by the weekend.

Cool! I'd like to learn how to control ambience on objects from the materials room. I just had no luck with them... I hear you can go that route tho. Is it by upping the color from black to a dark grey?

Hi Dr. Geep! I see that you have plugged in the node to both Ambient color and Diffuse color. This node is for the wall only, right? So, the grid, is the image Source? Is the ambient color bumped up a shade from black? I have another question too. In the interest of not hijacking Larry-L's thread I'll post a new one. Thanks and regards...

Hi Larry-L. Ok, I don't have poser 5, only 4, so I don't know how much of what follows is correct for Poser 5. Light coming through a real window will bounce off the walls adding a difused light to the room, in Poser you need to componsate for this missing reflected light in some way. "It would be a nice feature of P5 to be able to place an infinate light withiin a scene so you could control the lighting effects:" Normally Poser(4) uses two types of lights Infinite and Spot. Internally, in the library files, Infinite are "type 0" and Spot are "type 1", there is a third, undocumented type of light "type 2", these seem to a hybrid of infinite and spot, they share the same type of shadow cams as spots, but the "rays" seem to be parallel, and they can be positioned in a room like spots. Perhaps this is the kind of thing you are looking for. There are two ways to convert a light to "type 2", you can either edit a Poser library file (lt2, cr2, etc) directly in a text editor, or use a pose (pz2) file on the lights from within a Poser document. The syntax for a pz2 to convert a light of "type 1" (Spot) and species "spotLight" to a "type 2" is:

{
version
    {
    number 
    }

light spotLight 1
        {
        lightType 2
        }
}

Where "light spotLight 1" is the internal name of the light. There are pose files to convert between the diffrent light types included in my "SpotLight Utility Pose Pack 1" in the free stuff.

That .... is looking very good!

Thanks Dr.Geep, that means a lot! Especially from one who is referred to as "Dr."

It's my pleasure. ;=]

That was worth the effort, I think. :) The back wall will need a little attention in postwork, but that's an excellent result for an in-Poser render.

Hey that's nice!

Thanks all. EnglishBob I'm assuming, by post work, you mean completeing the shadow directly under the far window? If so I was thinking about that. I made the Soji windows with 100% translucence so light would filter through, which it has, but I haven't figured out if that is a correct shadow for that effect.

That's what I meant, although I admit I was making an assumption about the way it should look. You're the artist here, after all. :-) It just has that typical Poser "light leakage" appearance to it, that's all. Seems to be one of the things that can't always be totally fixed pre-render.

I finally finshed and posted in the Poser gallery. Thanks to all of you for all your help. I learned a lot about lighting in this one.