I have a room with no light source - in the room is a fish tank which is lit and also a fireplace.

My problem is trying to get the lighting effect that one would see given this scenario in real life.

I spent a frustrating afternoon yesterday trying different varieties of Anything Glows / Environmental Lights - and judt cant seem to get the right amount of light coming from the either the tank or the fire to get the illumination effects I want....

Any suggestions, tips??????

For the fire I would suggest using several bulb lights (maybe 1 red, 1 orange, 1 yellow, each with a shorter distance than the one before). If you are animating, I'd apply the Jump behaivior so the firelight "dances". I'd place the lights slightly above and in front of your fire. For the fish tank, are you using caustics? Are you sure that Light through Transparancy is on in the Render room? Holly

The way we do it in theater, is to hide regular lighting instruments as near to the purported light source as we can. Gobos (aka projected patterns) can help a lot with the realism. I use this method in 3d as well as I find it more intuitive and easier to get specific effects from. If you mean to do this in Anything Glows, however, it can probably be done. Unfortunately Aglows is limited to, I think it is, 200%. Then there is the glow channel of the object, which since that affects what the object itself looks like can't be set too high. Lastly, I do believe Aglows uses the Indirect Light model and slider. Again, funny things can happen with Indirect light set to several hundred percent -- but it is the only setting in this chain that you can crank up to extreme values. You do have a last problem; both your fish tank and fireplace are set into one wall. Meaning they backlight anything in the foreground, and can't even illuminate the wall they are set into. So for this scene, particularly, I think a non-realistic, theatrical, approach may work better for you. You could add in a little subtle front fill without having to excuse it. And besides...this way you can also make sure there are nice detailed caustics coming out of that fish tank light!

If you download your .car file mabe some of us could experiment with it?

Not too sure on the legalities of that one - it's all imported from Poser
:b_smile:

However - I am in the process of going the "faked" route...

In these sort of exercises you should not have any legal problems--file size to put into a zip is another question.

Looks challenging.  I'll create a scene that does the fish tank enviroment and post its CAR file for you to try out.

That would be great - thanks - it's certainly a challenge .......

The light in the fishtank needs to be a Carrara bulb light and you,also, need to be able to control the transparency of the fishtank glass--which may be a problem if its a Poser thing?

I  think!

AND---!!!--check "Light through transperency" in trhe Render???

Lets know the secret to improving your lighting results please

Its more likely your computer will choke rather than Carrara--every day seems to make one want to upgrade to faster equipment. Need to win the lottery!.

Attached Link: Here's my fishtank so far.

Attached Link: Some improvement done on the lights.

Looking good Shonner...

As you progress can you you share your settings?

bwtr - what I have done so far is put a spot light in both the fire and the fish tank - both with a gel on them and invoked caustics in the render.

I think my issue with the tank is down to using the proper gel on the spot to get that slightly dappled effect .

As for Carrara choking - I'm on an AMD 3200 with 2.5 gig ram and Windows XP.

I did a quick experiment last night night and I can render the pz3 of the daz figures nicely - same as far the room - but put them together and I get a memory allocation error.

So I think some rethinking is in order on the morphs/ textures in the figures as I really want the ambience that this room gives the scene.

As this is for publication - failure is not an option - so back to the fray!!!!

Attached Link: Fixed the soft shadows here.

That is great - well done!

Attached Link: My final attempt.

Attached Link: Download the complete fishroom scene.

Good one mate.

Thanks for that Shonner - will have a poke around and play with it tomorrow