Hello I have been rendering using poser 6 and IBL light probe . Lagoon that came with poser. I have found that one IBL light does not seem to light the scene properly. So what I have been doing is to place the IBl light directly overhead at 50% or so with shadows turned off.And Ambient occulsion on. Then I use several infinate lights with low shadows to light my scene. I have also been using shaodow size set to 20 this seems to give a more realistic scene to indoor scenes.  I am looking for realism in indoor settings. I have been getting a few small dark streaks on my renders. They are not a big problem because thay can be brushed over with the clone tool in PS. My question is can someone explain the various settings for IBL lighting and other techniques with lights that I can use to achive more realistic results. I know that textures and modeling play a big part and I am also working on that part. The manual dosent explain IBL lighting very well. Thanks

I don't have the solution to the streaks ... but I have found that if you restrict the number of lights in your scene it helps a lot.  I use the IBL overhead raytrace shadows on NO AO, one Key light to the front and slightly to the left with  Raytrace shadows set to 15 and Ambient Occlution on and sometimes when needed a fill light at low intensity to the right with or without shadows and no AO. According to the balance of intensity in the lights as well as the colors you can get a variety of effects without overtaxing Poser.  Key and fill are both infinate lights by the way.  Let me know if this works for you.  :)

Boni

Thank you Boni for your responce and suggestions. I have been trying your method and some variations of it. It is working well but as with all lighting set ups it all depends on your scene the mood of ithe scene. ect. What I have been doing is to create many many light sets and saving them to light library and then trying them out quickly when I set up a new render scene. This seemed like a quick way to find just the right lighting even if it will need some tweeking. I still dont comprehend all the settings associated with IBL. and AO especially the settings and bias ect. Poser manual does not explain any of this. Also I do a lot of animation with poser. I have been trying to save animation sets. Using the animation sets pallet, but it does not seem to save the animation sequences as I had thought that it would. Here again the manual does a very poor job of explaining this. But the animation pallet does work well. Do you have much experience with animation sets and saving them? Thanks Steve

It would be easier to comment with an image of the rendered scene. Otherwise we must guess what your problem is.

I think the streaks may be coming from your shadow map size. Do they go it you inscrease it.

I'm not aware of the position of the IBL light mattering unless you have shadows set. I usually set it to 70-80% strength, and put in 1 or 2 infinate/spots for shadow/specular. If I have AO in a light I usually put it in the IBL but reduce the strength to 3 or 4. AO can leave artifacts on some surfaces and I have to alter the bias in the scene settings.  This could also be the cause of your streaks which is why I asked for an image.

As an alternative to putting the AO in the lights you can also put it in the actual materials.

Thanks for your comments Nigel.  I will try to find a recent render with streaks on it to show. But I was not aware of the size of the shadow map size and its affect on the artifacts . I have been setting all my shadow map sizes to 1024. You may ask why 1024? well I dont know 256 is the default size. I tried 512 then went to 1024. I tried 2048 and I could not see any difference with my eye. But there was a little bit longer render time. So I stuck with 1024. The same theory is true for my render sizes . I have a very fast computer now. So I have been trying to render at 3000 to 3500. Sometimes I get a message after the shadow maps have been calculated that " A problem has occured and a map cannot be read and  I should reduce the size or reduce the bucket size.   The default is 64 If I reduce the bucket size to 32 or maybe even 16 it will then render. I am going to experiment with the shadow map size and see if it reduces artifacts. But as I said I dont want to just increase  everything and just have overkill and longer renders with no visable differance in the quality of my renders. I am becoming convinced that most of the photo real looking renders I am seeing have more to do with materials and the newer V4 type models that are using very photo real texture maps and shaders. I think that some of the new Daz models look real even with the poser 3 light default setup. This was not  the case a few years ago. Thanks again

Do you have "Min displacement bounds" in the manual Firefly settings set to zero?   If so, try a setting such as 0.2.

The attached shows what the effect of the shadow map can have. The right hand side of the image has the map size set to 20, the left it is at the default of 256. As you can see there are lines across the image where the map size is 20. Do they look like the streaks you mentioned?

If they don't then the cause is probably either AO in the IBL. The answer will be to change the bias setting in the scene AO options