Well this thread is in response to Bagginsbill's request that i start a thread about lighting since i am  working on an image that needs a little help lol.

here is the link to the image in question.
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1893099

I have another version rendering (almost done) that uses some of the suggestions You mentioned BB.  Actually this is an outdoor scene and i used your sunset lights. the forge is behind her and i put a red and an orange point light in the forge to give out a bit of colored light for the forge glow. I just recently learned how to use the start and end dials on the lights (not too good at it yet though)

I can use all the help I can get with  this stuff because i kinda suck getting lights to work like I want them to and when I do get a good effect (like in my elven mage queen image) its usually an accident lol.

(flagging for nudity because the next render i post has it.)

BTW the clothing is a little bit that my GF made for me  its dynamic and it fell off her shoulder and exposed her like that because of how I moved her around during the cloth simulation.

EDIT: Oh yeah raytracing is on as are shadows and raytraced shadows on the main light in the original image.

Oooh - so much better. OK maybe 1/2 was too much.

What version of Poser are you using? If Poser Pro, we should turn on gamma correction (GC) before we go any further. If Poser 7, we can talk about using GC materials on the rest of the scene to bring some of the light back.

Without gamma correction, things appear darker than they really are. As a result, lighting your scene is always more difficult because things don't show up the way they should. If we try to solve the problem only with lighting tricks, it takes more effort. If we solve the underlying problem, which is that things need to be gamma corrected (everything) then lighting is easy.

So if you're using Poser 7, I'm wondering where you want to expend effort - tricky lighting, or tricky shaders.

Of course, you already have tricky shaders on the figure - VSS shaders are all gamma correcting. If you have Poser Pro and we go with render GC, we'll want to turn off the GC in the VSS materials.

Which Poser version are you using for your creations?  And are you familiar with Gamma correction and proper monitor calibration.  These are topics thoroughly covered here in the forum and drastically affect the way you perceive and light your scenes.  Also, are you rendering on a PC or MAC?  This is also a valid question which bears direct reference to Gamma correction and monitor calibration.

Your original gallery post is obviously way too saturated with light.  The second image is much better, but the concern there is your background detail has virtually disappeared.  IBL should bring that out a bit. 

Is your lighting solely dependent on the IBL?  Or are there other lights present?  As a recommendation, activate your ambient for the forge to give it a glowing effect.

Well I have Poser 7 with SR3. ( I never had the cash to get poser pro lol)

I don't have a clue about gamma correction never done it and don't know how (hopefully you feel like teaching today lol)

EDIT: I know my monitors arent calibrated properly and its a pain because one is CRT and the other is LCD. The computer I use is a PC.

the cloth is not casting shadows? 

the cloth is not casting shadows? 

Oh the cloth is casting shadows but it  is about 30% transparent so it allows some of the light to pass through it. ....at least I can see shadows of it in a couple of places like  on her right breast and left arm.

can you show a test render with IBL turned of?

render with no IBL is rendering now. I have been adding to the scene because like I said the whole thing is a WIp but not a huge amount has changed I don't think. (yet) Ill post it when it is done.

you are saying that it is rendering now.

you mean while you typed it was rendering? i think for test renders you dont need good settings. this render should be done in 2 minutes. 

shading rate : 3 or 4
pixel samples 1 or 2

I added a couple of lantern lights in the background with pointlights but the light from them should not reach the foreground because i used the end dial to make the area of effect smaller.

man reading some of bb stuff.. sheesh it reads like the writings of a mad scientist.! LOLOL!!

That is what makes it so hard for me as i am basically a 2d artist and making the transition to 3d is a task. Things i did well naturally or instictively i now have to understand the mechanics behind to work them correctly in Poser...

Quote - you are saying that it is rendering now.

you mean while you typed it was rendering? i think for test renders you dont need good settings. this render should be done in 2 minutes. 

shading rate : 3 or 4
pixel samples 1 or 2

Yeah well I'm using a single core computer ,just an old AMD 2800+ it gets the job done but not extremely fast. I can cut the size of the render down if that works but I don't want to make it so small that people cant make out details.

i see that your eyes are glowing. did you want this effects ? 

Quote - i see that your eyes are glowing. did you want this effects ? 

Yup glowing as intended.

some props dont have GC . because they didnt change when you turned of IBL

Right but for lighting test renders, you don't need any detail in the textures, and you don't need anti-aliasing.

Change shading rate to 8.
Change pixel samples to 1.

Your render will got 5 times faster or more.

I'm confused by perspective here. Where I think the cloth should be shading her legs it isn't.

Is the cloth flying out towards the camera, so that it is not between her and the light? That would cause much confusion on my part.

How many materials are there in the rest of the scene? Is that room a big single prop, or a huge pile of individual items?

The perspective  of how her outfit is moving is this  the front os pretty much towards the main light which  comes in from the right side

this render rendered in the time it took me to type up the above.

crap forgot about the materials thing.
the scene is built from Faveral's midevial blacksmith shop

the different pieces are the shop which is the overhang forge and building in one piece and then the tools and racks  the tools are part of the racks not separate if that was what you were wondering about. the large walls out in the background are castle wall sections 4 in the scene the stable  and the ground. so not an enormous amount of things in the scene but there are a few.

its transparent.

p.s.
every material needs to be GC.

I already said i know nothing about doing that so someone will have to tell me how to go about doing that.

there are two big threads about ''gamma correction''

read everything.

Gee thanks....... have any specific links?
If this involves making a huge  spiderweb of nodes for everything in the scene its no wonder that almost no one gammacorrects every render.

noone corrects GC because they dont understannd the material room IMO. its not so hard to have GC.last year i was lost in the material room. now i am not anymore. and now i can create shaders.

www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php
www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php

you have poser 7 so you need to have GC in the shaders. if you use bagginsbills skin shader then the GC is already inside. if you want to create your own shader you need this
www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php

connect the texture and voila.

I'll give you a generic shader for the props and room that should work for most cases.

It is very simple to use even if it has some spaghetti. :)

Can't do it right now, though.

Your latest lighting looks great. The figure is revealed perfectly. Once we GC the other materials the whole scene will look splendid.

Quote - I'll give you a generic shader for the props and room that should work for most cases.

It is very simple to use even if it has some spaghetti. :)

Can't do it right now, though.

Your latest lighting looks great. The figure is revealed perfectly. Once we GC the other materials the whole scene will look splendid.

Thanks BB I am trying to make sense of the threads I am finding about gamma correction but some of the stuff I am seeing is giving me a headache. Im not sure what out of all of that stuff i should even be looking at. I want to know how to do all this stuff myself eventually. I may try to screw with the lights a bit to make it look better with just the lights but eh I have it saved at the current state so who knows what i can come up with lol.

http://sites.google.com/site/bagginsbill/free-stuff/random-shaders

Find the material file GCGeneric.mt5 and save it to your Poser materials library.

Work slowly, one prop at a time.

Go into a material. Usually there is a color map, and maybe a color map and bump map.

Select those maps and copy them (right-click copy). If it has no maps, don't worry about it.

Then load the generic shader you saved.

There is a lot of spaghetti - remain calm! You only need to deal with 3 things.

Right-click and paste your map(s) into the shader.

The shader contains a Bump map and a Color map. Connect your pasted maps in where mine are.

If you don't have a color map for a material, just enter a color for it in the SimpleColor node.

Adjust shininess (from 0 to 1) using the Shine node. It defaults to .1 shine in Value_1. .Ignore Value_2 and don't change it - leave it at 0.

Do a quick render and see how it looks. Adjust shine as needed.

If you run into a strange material that doesn't look same/good after using GCGeneric, show me the before and after render of that part, and show me the material before you changed it. Then I can help fix it.

I'm trying to keep things simple, so I'm not giving a lot more instructions yet.

BB this is fantastic. its a GC shader. but i am more suprised how you made the Blinn node.

specular is not super bright when its wide.

Oh and if you don't have a bump map, delete that node.

Thanks again BB Ill see if i can get it to work right.

Just out of curiosity. I have a skin that is supposed to render as black. I ran it through with VSS and it comes out looking  kinda bluish gray. do you know if there is a way to get it closer to black? Im not saying completely black but darker would be nice. (I do like how  the skin looks as it is but it would be nice to be able to get close to the black as well.

Ill post a render in a bit of the character/skin in question.

skin can not look dark. skin has a lot of specular inside. shine if you want to call it. watch pics from real people.
it can not be very dark.

but thats just my opinion

Quote - Go to my web site here:

http://sites.google.com/site/bagginsbill/free-stuff/random-shaders

Find the material file GCGeneric.mt5 and save it to your Poser materials library.

Work slowly, one prop at a time.

Go into a material. Usually there is a color map, and maybe a color map and bump map.

Select those maps and copy them (right-click copy). If it has no maps, don't worry about it.

Then load the generic shader you saved.

There is a lot of spaghetti - remain calm! You only need to deal with 3 things.

Right-click and paste your map(s) into the shader.

The shader contains a Bump map and a Color map. Connect your pasted maps in where mine are.

If you don't have a color map for a material, just enter a color for it in the SimpleColor node.

Adjust shininess (from 0 to 1) using the Shine node. It defaults to .1 shine in Value_1. .Ignore Value_2 and don't change it - leave it at 0.

Do a quick render and see how it looks. Adjust shine as needed.

If you run into a strange material that doesn't look same/good after using GCGeneric, show me the before and after render of that part, and show me the material before you changed it. Then I can help fix it.

I'm trying to keep things simple, so I'm not giving a lot more instructions yet.

Ok let me see if I have this right  basicly go into each part of each model and add the Gc shader and then  reload the textures?

Quote - skin can not look dark. skin has a lot of specular inside. shine if you want to call it. watch pics from real people.
it can not be very dark.

but thats just my opinion

Its a fantasy race of elves called Drow. and their skin is jet black.

You can try adjusting the Tint parameter. It's in the Template Skin shader, top left, called PMC:Tint. Make it a darker shade of gray and re-synchronize. To make more blue, add some blue to that color (assuming you're already at a shade of gray). To make it less blue, take some blue away.

Have a look at this thread.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=3449469&ebot_calc_page#message_3449469

Dasquid, BB's instruction is to select your original color and bump map, right-click for the menu to copy, and load your Gc Shader.  Select an empty area, right-click again and paste your color and bump maps.  Do not reload the texture!  Your texture links are preserved with the copy and paste.

Any way this is what i have so far.

On the drow i have to disagree. Skin has tones and highlights.. They are jet black but light still reflects of the skin, adding color and form...
There is a lot involved with it

Quote -

Its a fantasy race of elves called Drow. and their skin is jet black.

Quote - On the drow i have to disagree. Skin has tones and highlights.. They are jet black but light still reflects of the skin, adding color and form...
There is a lot involved with it

Quote -

Its a fantasy race of elves called Drow. and their skin is jet black.

I never said that they had no highlights  and they are jet black. Or at least the original ones are.

Getting ready to render a good render.

Wow what a differnce..
and this is just the test render? Did you apply bb materials to everything?
And is that the only diffenence between this image and the one above it?

Quote - Wow what a differnce..
and this is just the test render? Did you apply bb materials to everything?

Everything that is in the view yes.a few things are out of view so I didnt bother with them yet but if i change the camera angle Ill do them too

Looks like excellent progress!

I'm really enthused about your willingness to take on something new and involving a crapload of work. Your image is already way better. Once you GC all the materials, you will find that making lighting changes will be quite easy.

Did you have a look at the other thread regarding a black skin? I linked into the middle of the thread, but if you look at the previous image, it is jet black. This was accomplished by setting the VSS Template Skin PMC:Tint value to black, which forced the M4 color map to black. But the specular highlights were still there.

OMG! now that what i was talking about.. how'd you do that?
The skin is amazing....

It is beginning to look much better.  In the Material room there are 2 modes of selecting nodes for copying.  First mode, right-click to open the menu and click on 'Select all'.  The node title bars will change color hence become selected.  Second mode, manually select the nodes by holding down 'Ctrl' and left-clicking each individual node.  When you right-click for the menu to copy, make sure that you click over the title bar of a node.

Once all the Gc is done, you can start turning down light intensities to your liking.

Quote - OMG! now that what i was talking about.. how'd you do that?
The skin is amazing....

The generic shader I posted will do that. Just put black in for the SimpleColor and raise the Shine value to a medium number - somewhere between .35 and .5 depending on how you want it to look.

I actually used the VSS skin shader for that render - just set the Tint to black and adjust the PMShine value. But for all black the specialized skin shader and the generic shader do roughly the same thing.

Oh yeah I forgot to tell you what hborre said. Ctrl-Click to make multiple nodes selected simultaneously. Then you can copy them all at once.

By the way, after you get done with this, you'll probably want to learn how to configure VSS to do this automatically. What I mean is, this is what it was built to do - copy a shader onto lots of materials zones, while preserving the color and bump maps that are already there.

If I had the Pro version finished (which I do not, sorry) you would have a GUI and you'd just select all the props and drag the GCShader onto them and you'd be done already.

The one thing i dont like about AO is  the darker areas like between fingers and toes and other deeper areas of the body.

AO is on the IBL only, right? If it's on your other lights, don't do that.

The AO can be adjusted. The AO Strength can be changed, on the light properties. There are other AO properties too, like the distance it looks, the number of samples it uses, etc. I like to use 7 samples for a final render.

Also, are you using the VSS skin with material-based AO as well as light-based AO? If you are, don't do both. Light-based AO will work for your whole scene, and is often a good idea. If you're doing that, use the VSS control prop that does not have AO built into it. If you're using both, it overdoes the effect.