Hi Guys I'm here again with a question... How I can manage to get Backlights in Poser? I'm a newbie in creating lights and yet I get amazed with certain effects I find in images on the internet, like this one: http://oddpixels.deviantart.com/art/The-Archer-72986091

The image is from oddpixels (one of my fav artists) and she said, when I asked, that she worked with DazStudio to get this backlights (that white halo that kinda surround the main character)

I was wondering if I could do that in Poser7 using only lights. I actually did some tests but nothing close what I expected to achieve...

You can create new lights using the "lightball" controller. Just swing them around to the back. It looks like she may be using several - I usually use one distant light. You may also want to consult books on lighting and cinematography. My current favorite is Painting With Light by Alton, available at Amazon.

replicand, is there a tut somewhere on point lights to specific characters and excluding others? I know in other 3d packages u can do, say point a spot on one character and not another, or exclude parts to light and parts to not, etc. I could not find in poser...and that light ball is a pain in the butt yes? :)

Quote - ...
I was wondering if I could do that in Poser7 using only lights. I actually did some tests but nothing close what I expected to achieve...

 

Have a look at this short tutorial by Traveler at RDNA....
http://www.runtimedna.com/mod/forum/messages.php?ShowMessage=138091

It may help you getting there.

Martin

wow that is some fierce tutorial from Traveler... thanks!

Well, it's been a while since I did anything with a "halo effect", but I can tell you how I did it in poser the last time I did it.  I used a simple box primitive and placed it immediately behind the character in the scene.  Then I did a render and went into photoshop with that render, filling in with black everything that wassn't my box primitive (fairly easy to do, the primitive was white so I just selected by color to get the primitive selected, then selected inverse to get everything other than the primitive selected, and filled with black.

Then I switched to a grey color (started with about 80% black to white ratio) and painted sort of a halo around the black edges of my render.  It doesn't have to be very accurate or even all that pretty, I did it with a fairly soft brush and just went around the outside edges of the black portion where my character would be once the scene was rendered.  Once your finished with your halo select all the white that is left over and change it to black as well, so the only thing you have in your image file that isn't black is just the halo you painted.

Save this file as a jpg and go back to poser, load up your scene again.  Select your box primitive and go into the material settings, load up your jpg file in the material editor and connect it to the transparency portion of the primitive, then set the transparency strength to 1.  

This will cause the box to become more or less invisible, except for the halo you painted, which will allow light to still pass through it from behind but it will change the color of the light based on the specular color you've chosen in the material settings for your box primitive.  You can add whatever specular color you wish for your "lighting" to be, I believe at the time I used sort of a gold color - it was to place a "halo of light" around a space vessel that was crossing in front of a sunrise on a planet as I recall.

If you need to make the halo less subtle and more obvious, open your transparency jpg and increase the brightness settings and contrast settings, then resave.  You want your background for the transparency to remain black so only the halo will be visible in your render, the rest of the box primitive will stay invisible as long as the rest of your transparency jpg is black.  Conversely if you need the halo to be more subtle adjust your image so that it is darker, the darker grey your halo painting is the more light it allows to pass through and as such the less noticable it becomes.

You can also get some really spectacular effects for your halo by playing with the reflective and refractive properties it it possesses in the material room. 

While using the transparency on a primitive like this might seem a bit more time consuming than just playing with some lights, it was the only way I could find to get what I felt was a sufficently decent halo image myself using poser.  

Hope that helped,
Stepdad

As far as I'm aware, P6 does not allow "light linking", but a spot light with a narrowish cone should give you a similar effect. OR you can render (and light) characters and background objects separately and composite the images.

Select the light, then go to Object--Point At.  Select the head or hair from the hierarchy list.  For more control, point the light at a primitive, then uncheck visibility for the primitive before you render.

John

that did it again john, thx!

part lights, part materials.

place the light behind or at an angle ot the character, so the edges will get highlighted.  severe angles work well.

now add a blinn node to the alt specular.  if you want to get fancy and play with velvet and such, you can play with velvet and edge blend nodes in your alt diffuse channel.  or if you're messy with  your nodes like me, you can try them in your diffuse channel.  i'm pretty sure that somehow doubles the diffuse effect, but i'm usually more concerned with appearance than an accurate model, so i try almost anything.

if you want a photoshop halo, there's a very easy way to do it. make a nice transparent render of just what you want haloed. you can even combine it with your complete render. open it in Photoshop, and ctrl click on the layer with just your figure (or whatever you want haloed).  expand (Select > Modify > Expand) and feather (Select > Modify > Feather) the selection according to how big and how soft you want the halo.  create a new layer, fill the selection with your halo color (Edit > Fill), and then put your halo layer beneath your figure layer.  now you can do stuff like radial blurs or other filters and adjustments to the halo as you like.

cobalt, great tips!!!

That tutorial at RuntimeDNA helped me a lot to do what I expected, and also the tips from cobaltdream... But I was wondering if the lights could NOT iluminate the environment, only the character... Oh Well, guess that it's another topic...

I will post my results soon

Quote - That tutorial at RuntimeDNA helped me a lot to do what I expected, and also the tips from cobaltdream... But I was wondering if the lights could NOT iluminate the environment, only the character... Oh Well, guess that it's another topic...

I will post my results soon

 

Not unless you want lights to behave unlike in the real world.  You could do two separate renders, one with and one without your figure, then stitch them together in Photoshop, if you are absolutely desparate to have only your character illuminated.

are you saying you want a character to seem glowing or self-illuminated?  if so, you might be thinking about it backwards.  it would be really odd for the environment not to show light that was cast on the figure, and what you want sounds more like the figure casting light?

if so...

for the materials you want to be brighter, try making the ambient color white, plugging the texture into it, and then set the ambient amount to something not zero. tweak your lights to fake the cast light on the environment, and then postwork any atmospheric effects.

Attached Link: ZOOmify - The Game

Cobalt that's a great tip too. Any suggestions for lighting on this scene: it was composed in Poser 7 but postworked in Photoshop...

imho, bright outdoor scenes love IBL.  i'd use an IBL for ambient light (something that's not too saturated but cool green with bits of yellow for sunlight coming through trees), and an infinite to cast shadows and specular.  if you can find an appropriate HDRI probe, then even better.  i'd look up jungle lighting.

Yeah, IBLs are fantastics as mood light, I found a tut in Runtime DNA about doing an IBL too, fantastical results actually...

SamTheraphy: You are right, this lights that I'm trying to emulate will not behave as a natural and real light system, but that's okay, I just want the glancing lights effect

Attached Link: http://www.phoenixstudios.com.np/Zoomify.html

thanks cobalt, i redid the lights with IBL (I think) and my piece looks a lot better. Is there anymore to it then just using an IBL light set? Do I have to go back to the material room for every character and make some changes too? thx.

well, there's more to it in general.

first, there's getting the right image or HDRI for the source of your IBL.   you want something that fits your environment and your artistic goals. then you want to add particular lights based on realism but also where you want people's eyes to go, the mood you want to set, etc. 

personally, i've never really assembled an outdoor scene i like, so i've never tried to do a jungle scene.  i really don't know the best way to light it.  but i'd say the key to it being interesting is the shadows cast by leaves and trees, and the differential between the ambient green and brown light under the trees vs. the yellow light of a clearing.   you can fake cast shadows effectively with "light gels," which are just images attached to the diffuse color of a spot light.  you can do the same with an infinite, but i've found it hard to scale the effects properly.  find a good, free picture of some appropriate tree tops (no maples, for instance), make it properly greyscale and dark where the leaves are like a shadow, and attach that to the light.  there are lots of free photo resources out there, and trees are a pretty common subject.  the only trick will be trying to find tropical or jungle images, but i'd bet you can find them.  once you've attached the image to the diffuse color, change the intensity and scale of the image node to make the shadows fit your image.

it's a lot quicker and easier than actually using trees to cast shadows, but you can do both.

once you have your spot, your IBL and maybe an infinite in place,  i'd suggest finding a reference image or 3, and tweaking your intensities and colors to match them.

Lenora2 - if you just want the glancing lighting, blinn node in alternate specular should do it.  you can also control the blinn's settings with edge blends to refine it,  but i think plain blinn should give you the look you want.  i think the real trick is going to be getting the lighting you want.  if you're still working at it, maybe you could post some WIPs and say what you'd like to change?

Attached Link: http://www.phoenixstudios.com.np/Zoomify.html

thanks for that. i was just using Linda's Heart of the Jungle scene which came with a light set that did not look so hot, so I used some IBL set that I installed, lagoon or something like that, and it all improved dramatically. But I compose the characters separate from the background, ie. I don't render them on the background, so I am wondering if I have to have all the characters in the scene and re-apply the IBL to them all, then export them all over again. As u can see, I really don't understand poser lighting! the scene url is attached.

export them all over again?  hmm. 

if your hardware can handle it, then the best answer is just to put everything in one scene.  otherwise you have to apply the lights to each scene you're bringing together. 

if you want to understand light better, keep working with one scene (not a compilation of multiple scene files), and start with variations of a single light.  in fact, in understanding anything about Poser or any other software, reduction is really essential.  just change one thing at a time, and work on one type of thing at a time. 

Cobaltdream - Yes, I'm developing more lights... I will post them soon, the renders I mean. And I usually add blinn to most of the skins I use. Usually in V4 skins is not needed (the ones I have already have specular nodes plugged on).

Hi cobalt, this is hard to explain...but I create scenes and export the characters independent of the background for further work in Photoshop. I like to work with elements on their own layers, and until Poser supports the export of layers in a PSD file, I don't know of any other way. So my confusion is this: I had already exported the characters lit one way, so now I have to redo that if I change the background lighting, or perhaps it makes no difference, at least not for this still. But I like ur idea about working with one thing at a time and that's what I will experiment with, to see how lights change the character and the background. cheers!

oh, that's not hard to understand.  i just wouldn't suggest it, for exactly the difficulty you're running into here.  imho, you shouldn't have to rely on an image editor like that all the time.  the only thing rendering everything separately should give you is either

• specialized lighting, which will break the coherence of your image if you have it in several different elements. 3d solution: optimize your figures' materials.
• ability to render everything, which generally seems to indicate a failing of the rendering application in handling resources efficiently.  3d solution: switch rendering apps, upgrade machine, and lots of annoying stuff.  but, imho, the renderer should just be more efficient. and there are a lot of free renderers out there.  it would be much more trouble at first to figure out how to get from Poser to something that could use them, but if Firefly really isn't working for you, switching is probably worth it.
• ability to move and scale around elements in the image editor, which should be done in the 3d app so that everything actually works together realistically.  3d solution: spend more time posing, working the camera and composing elements.
  -  ability to paint additions to lone elements.   i've run into this a few different times, and it still wasn't awfully hard to deal with the one image. some masks (especially made with vector tools), some clone tool use, and some plain old time spent painting have usually taken care of it.  3d solution: render the few elements you need to be independent as silhouettes to generate masks.

i can't think of any other benefits off the top of my head, but have you got another?  not that rendering to layers couldn't be useful, but using it on every figure in every picture seems to me like you're probably avoiding a problem that could have a more thorough solution.  if you look at my gallery, you'lll see varying levels of postwork and overall heavy Photoshop use, so it's not as if i'm a 3d purist or uncomfortable with 2d editing.  perhaps i'm missing an obvious benefit.