Me!!

Yes, the new lighting features are indeed an adventure unto themselves. I have seen great results from other folks, but I'm still learning how everything fits together as well. I'm having a LOT of fun while learning, though. 8-)

One point about the "specular" light: it seems obvious that the specularity will follow the direction of lighting (specular highlights are indicative of the light source being 'seen' reflected off of a 'glossy' surface). With that it mind, your specular light should coincide with the direction of the IBL light's main light source - from the right in the image. Also, I have found the default AO settings are to strong (causing deep and unrealistic shadows). A Strength setting of between 0.25 to 0.50 yields better results - might help fix the 'gray' eyes. You may also want to check the eye material settings (Corneal specularity?).

With that it mind, your specular light should coincide with the direction of the IBL light's main light source - from the right in the image. Right ... I'm seeing that they almost have to be in exactly the same position for the effect to be believable. I'm also finding that the default settings are too strong as well.

That is the Toyo hair, which I like to call in this instance, the "Banana hair". :) The specular highlight on the eyes is in the texture. I'm working on getting real specular in and the tex-spec out.

another important IBL thread

tbird10, I noticed you monkeyed with the colors in the subscatter script. The default one shifted way too much to red. Good job. What are your ambient occlusion settings?

Okay, fine but... Am I the only one not really impressed with the fancy new lights? 1. I don't understand why it all has to be so esoteric. I just want some natural looking lighting, can there be a button I can press for some natural looking lighting? All the nodes and terms and stuff one has to learn just to (Maybe) get some "sort of interesting" results is too much! 2. Point lights are like lightbulbs, I think I read. Good! One should be able to make pretty realistic studio-lighting sets based on them alone, I would think...but not so much. Can't lights just be "What would a photographer need?" sort of thing? Ug, getting very frustrated with the new lights and texture nodes and all this crap I can't keep up with. -WTB

Obviously, you haven't dealt with lighting in other 3D applications. ;) The problem, and this is for 'artistes' who might not understand the maths and physics and models and programming, is that computers are not "reality machines". They are computational engines. That's all they do is perform math (boolean and arithmetic) on bits (1s and 0s). Everything else is built on top of this fundamental idea and structure. To make a long story short, in order to 'model' (as in physical simulation) reality in a computer, it requires, well, a model (physics) and math to back up that model. In a perfect universe, we could have a virtual light source which emits virtual photons which interact with virtual atoms/molecules in a virtual world so that we could place the sun in a scene and, voila!, instant real sunlight. Not even every computer on the planet networked together and running for millenia could do such modeling! It'd be amazingly realistic, but who's going to wait? :) So, we cheat in order to do things in a somewhat timely and cost-effective manner. This means that everything in a computer is approximation. Actually, worse, it's discreet approximation - since these are not analog engines. What you get are better and better approximations as better models and algorithms evolve to model reality. Now, I agree that all of these complexities in order to get natural lighting seem too much. This is the price to be paid for incremental evolution and cost of implementation of these approaches. You can get good realistic lighting with non-GI light sources, but you pay for that too. You pay for it in the number of lights and their proper strength, distribution, color, and other factors to simulate the ambient lighting that comes 'naturally' in the real world. I, for one, find the IBL/AO lighting to be a snap. You go to the Material Room, click on the IBL button for a selected Light, and add a probelight image. IBL is done. Turn on AO, done. It goes without saying that tweaking and tailoring are needed as each user, project, scene requires its own signature. Let's remember that there still isn't the "Make Art" or "Make Photorealistic" button in any 3D application, no matter how expensive...

IBL is done. Turn on AO, done.

Perhaps for some, but for others the defaults are way too bright and produce images that are washed out. It's too bright for my tastes, which is why I'm struggling with finding the optimum settings for my own purposes ... I like "drama", ie: stark shadows and dark-to-light moody stuff. The defaults produce far from that, so I'm still trying. 8-)

Did you say that there was a Make Photorealistic button somewhere in P6? LOLOLOL

Message edited on: 04/09/2005 01:09

Did you say that there was a Make Photorealistic button somewhere in P6? Yeah, the image based lighting light sets in the lights library. Try 'em and see. You'll have to tweak their positioning, for sure, but eventually, you'll be hacking python scripts with one hand tied behind your back. :O)

If it were still around April 1st, I'd write up a quick Python script with a "Make Photorealistic" button. But it would just load a photograph. :)

This whole discussion is really helpful to me. Thanks everybody.

IBL hints and tips from my experience so far! IBL is great, but the default setup presumes too much that you want to use it with only that one light (I cant see any other reason why the settings default like this) to get more colour from the IBL, attach the image_map to the diffure node also, but make the diffuse colour a medium grey. intensity is set at 1, for 2-3 additions lights in the scene I set this to around .2 (depending on the brightness of the image I am using for IBL) next is IBL contrast, the default is 3, from my experience this is more of a personal preference option, decreasing it (ALOT) will make the light less aggressive, but less lighting detail from the IBL. Up the image resolution a little (256 is one blocky image) all other lights in your scene should be quite dark, the IBL (with AO on) will fill the scene with light, so extra lights are additions, only additions well, I know that made no sense! I will try and explain anything in my wierd wacky way, just ask!