Hey@all,

some days ago you finally helped me finding a solution to a fractal issue i had, rendering surfaces in poser. Now i have another issue, but relating to AO settings.... the below image was done as a render of an office i am working on. the walls are cubs, nothing bevelt or so. The have a flat material. There are two lights in the scene, one Spot doing the sunlight from outside, and an IBL with AO settings turned on. AO renders with 15 samples and BIAS of 0,000999 and a strnght of 0,048. However, whatever i do, i cant get this bad looking dots and fractals away. This appears only when using IBL. I tried with very high rendersettings for Irradiance caching of 99.no differnce... any idea where this comes from?

thanks all, your help is much appriciated!

What units of measurement are you using? If you are using metres, the AO bias works out at about one millimetre. If you are using feet or inches it's even less. 

Is there any bump or displacement on the walls? With high surface unevenness, low AO bias, and that many AO samples, you may well be getting self-shadowing across most of the wall surface, and the lighter bit is where (for some reason) this self-shadowing is not happening.

I would try reducing any bump/displacement, and perhaps increase the bias to, say, 0.1 inches (converted to whatever units you are using) and do a spot render to see what happens.

But wait for others' responses too, as I may be way off the mark.

Hi IsaoShi,

hm, i played a bit a found an error in the Max Distance. I am using meters as units, so i guess the settings didnt work together. I adopted them to a max distance of 1 and left the Bias settings as are. It looks much better now.
The maxDistance seams to make it working, i assume having it set to high makes poser to include items in the AO which are far away and therefore creates Fractals or dots which shouldnt be there....
Is there any really useful tutorial out there about how to make lighting in Poser?
Some of the setings dont make sense to me and even when playing around witht hem dont make it more obvious what they are for ...
thanks anyway for your comment! much appriciated.

pgmeri01 -- Let me see if I can help.  I usually use AO on materials instead of lights, because it's difficult to get a lot of control over the scene with lights.  (AO lights affect EVERYTHING the light touches in the same way.)  You might consider turning AO off on your lights and turning it ON for materials.

In any event, MaxDistance is the biggest distance (in whatever default unit you have selected in Poser's main settings) that a ray of light can travel between two objects and still casts a shadow, where Ray Bias is the smallest distance.  If you are getting dark spots from far-away objects (and you don't want them,) you should lower the maxdistance.  If you are getting dark spots from very close objects (and you don't want them,) you should increase the ray bias.  "Samples" will increase the number of light rays sampled, but usually 3 or 4 is sufficient, unless you have a very HIGH max distance.

I suggest adding AO nodes to your materials instead of using it on lights.  That way, you can adjust every material in your scene individually.  This can be a pain to do wth the material room, because you have to apply the nodes one material at a time.  However, there are some very good and inexpensive products out there that will do this in one or two clicks. 

Check out my tutorial on RuntimeDNA.  It might be useful to you.  The same principles I talk about in the tutorial apply to AO lights, too.

By the way, nice scene!  :)

Good luck!

Attached Link: http://www.physicalc-software.com/tutorials/ao/

This is one of my favorites.  I don't pretent to understand all the ins and outs but Paul Kinnane's basic are a great place to start.  I fully agree with Karibousboutique too.  I try to go with AO surface nodes rather than blanket lights.  There my be surfaces that don't require AO, and using lights with AO increases Render times.

There is a bit more set up time placing all of the nodes but I think it's well worth it.

Best Wishes,
Rªnce

Hi!

thanks all for your replies. Indeed i tried working with AO Materials as well, having found this very complex... i would need to investigate further. Working with nodes on materials, i sometimes find Scenes becoming unrealistic, as some matierials may cast AO shadows and some not, or they dont in the same way. I am not professional enough to say so, but have also found AO Shaders to be more CPU burdening whilst a render? I am not sure.
THanks for your answers.Rance, i will also read through the manual and see what i can get out of it. Below Scene is rendered with some more advance AO settings and found this much better then the one above.karibousboutique, The MaxDistance and Raybias is key, thanks for your hints and tips!

I think the floor looks pretty good in the above picture.  If you go through Face Off's tutorials just make sure you take into effect whatever Poser Display Units you're using.  I will effect scale.  Because I don't really understand it all that well, I tend to use stock values for props, floors and walls, and other stock values for figure and figure body parts.  I've have these written right at the top of render notes I keep.

If you use certain toons alot, certain characters you like to use over and over, you can apply all of the nodes and then save all of the characters groups to the Materials library ...

I DO have a number of light sets that use AO, but when I use them I kind of gotta bite the bullet and expect long render times.  Sometimes that's worth it too.

Best Wishes,
Rªnce