Attached Link: http://www.livejournal.com/community/rural_ruin/236276.html#cutid1

The upper picture at the given link. Or is this light setting sternly copyrighted by Mother Nature?

It can be approached, but approach with caution, there be dragons here, lol. No, seriously, I have gotten close to that in Vue. I think you actually have to use dark blue infinite lights with no shadows, lots of them, at very low power in Poser. And then fill in with brighter lights to complete the effect. I wouldn't try it in Poser though, Vue does it too easily to mess with Poser's lights.

Some of the light sets Anton did for Daz in the global lighting sets comes close. moody sunsets and darker kinda overcast cloud sets. some of travlers free lightsets over at runtimeDNA could possibly do something like that. in poser it really requires a lot of lights each set a bit different and depending on the scene, don't think you could do a SET that would work exactly the same for each scene needing lighting. Poser 5 with some of the atmosphere settings might help a bit. so could it be done, yea I think so with a lot of work. I think it would be much easyer in Bryce, Vue or a better program that handles lighting easyer than Poser, but poser "could" be able to do it.

well, to be technical about it, Poser 5 could accomplish that without using any spot lights or infinite lights, except for shadowing. Use of the material room alone could create that specific lighting (probelight), and then regular lighting could be tossed in for atmospherics to help get the particulate qualites of the air and grabbing shadows out. use of the ambient channel, the atmospherics, regular lighting, and probelight node in tandem would likely e the best, but it's a bit of work to set up. And, like any advanced lighting rig, it's going to be pretty much useful for only scenes using the particular elements within it, as any lighting is heavily dependent on the ambience and all that funky stuff of the place and time itself.

Yes it can be done. I been into lighting lately. I noticed the lights I have are, from Freebies, focus on the main character "Point at" and not the whole scene itself. You have to make a scene image and have the light(s) point at the scenes from far away. I am studying this lighting effects in poser(5).

That's the kind of lighting I (as a photographer) pray for, when I'm doing architectural work. It's globally diffused, with very soft "open" shadows that show all detail. Yes, that can be done, just in Poser (not too hard). I start with the mentioned "global lights" from Daz. The problem with these light sets is the lights are placed more in an upper "dome" shape (as opposed to a true sphere placement). This negates the effect of light being reflected up from the ground (that naturally happens in nature). This results in black shadows in areas that face the ground (such as under the chin, a hat,hair,etc). There are two easy fixes for this.... One is a "AllLightsRotateAsk" script I use, to rotate that half dome to the front, which now projects light coming from all angles (except the back, which is not seen). The other method is to turn the intensity of the global lights down (useing your light panel script). Then add fill lights under the dark areas with your "AsharaLight" script with a low intensity and blue/gray color. Note: Before your AsharaLight script,I tried to just add a spotlight or two...but they never looked natural, and were a major PITA to use. (The multi-lights used in your script, compliment the diffused lighting). Got a lot of lights now, but rendering is not a problem, as you render WITHOUT shadows. I also found, it is much faster to render at a larger size (in my case 4000x4000,instead of my normal 2400x2400)with Anti-alias also turned off....just resize back down later, with no "jaggies". When I photograph in this kind of light, I would use a film with higher contrast and saturation to compensate for the flat washed-out colors. With your render, do the same with your image editor...use levels and curves to punch up the colors. SWAMP

Thanks for full detail, Swamp. I normally pay no attention to artsy lighting; for both work and play I just want things to be clearly visible. But that photo knocked me out of the rut, and I had to see if there was any way to emulate the effect. I'll try your sequence and see what happens!

Ok, I decided to have a go. It's not very good, but someone had to start the ball rolling. Rendered in Poser 4, a little bit of postwork in PSP 5. 3 infinite lights, transmaped squares to cast cloud shadows.

With poser 5 you could probably simulate the cloud shadows with a "light gel" a picture node attached to the light.

Les, that's close enough for my art-impaired optical sensor unit. Think I'll try it your way!

Yea,Do it les's way,that looks really good....I was looking at the wrong picture. (Hey you said the picture at the top...so when I scrolled up,that was the first picture at the top...and,and...oh never mind,I screwed up). That is really nice work,les!

Attached Link: lighting.zip

Ockham, a few more notes on the image. It was actually made from 2 renders, the main image was rendered with the primary light using Shadow 1, and Map 512, without the cloud props (they were Hidden). In the second render the primary light used (I think) Shadow 0.700, and Map 100, to soften and blur the shadows. Render 2 (with cloud shadows) was loaded into PSP the background image. Render 1 (main render) was loaded as a layer. I then used the Eraser brush to expose the cloud shadows.

I dodged the side of the building to lighten the shadow, which was too strong. Uped the contrast and saturation, and warmed up the the overall colour a bit. The tree is just a bilboard prop, so I painted in some shadow for that with the "Lightness Down" brush. I played with the edges of the building to sofften them a bit and get rid of the straight edges.

I have deleted the the stuff that was not mine (except the background which is in the public domain), and include a link to the pz3 above, so you can see what I did. I will probably delete the zip after a few days to conserve web space. The lighting is realy very very simple. The textures should go in the textures folder, you will have to reload the background image, which is "Dsc01715.jpg". The building is ZIPPYS Wagon Store, available in the Free Stuff.

Okay, thanks. I'm DL'ing the ZIP. I'm only concerned with the light settings. In fact, your proof that it can be done with a simple setup is all I really need to start experimenting. I didn't want to spend time fiddling blindly with a setup that had no chance of approaching the desired effect. (As abovementioned, I'm not familiar enough with lighting to have any mental guidelines.)

I'm no expert in lighting either, I know a lot about the technicalities inside light files, but not much about setting lights up in a scene. Never the less my thinking goes this way, one main infinite light to represent the sun, and 2 or 3 low intensity lights set to fill in the shadows, representing light reflected from the Atmosphere and ground. Im sure it can be done much better then my attempt, but I think a lot of the time it is subtle queues that make the lighting look good, thats why I added the cloud shadows, without them it looks boring. Another thing to whach is the shadow cams, adding stuff to the scene can change the view from the shadow cams, and thus change the way the shadows themselves are diaplayed (but only if the item added has shadows turned on). In post #8 I said I used transmaped squares for the "clouds", that was a typo, I actually used flattened boxes, Poser 4 prefers some thickness to a prop, P4 squres can fail to cast shadows. All this harping on about shadows is because they are more important than the lights themselves, and they can be a pain to get right.

Ooh, ooh! Another great opportunity to bug Ockham for a new script (although this one should be useful for a LOT of people): For the currently selected light only, allow the user to specify a spread angle and a number of lights to end up with, then divide the intensity by the number of lights, and finally create the new lights in place of the old light. Optionally, have the ability to slightly randomize the light color.