In the attached image, I'm not happy with the shadows that are coming from the hallway light (visible at the top center of the picture).  I made the supplied glass material transparent and placed a white point light inside the light fixture with intensity at 37.5% and using inverse square attenuation.  There is another one just behind the camera and a third (without the fixture - just a point light) further back behind the camera.

The shadow across the door (and floor) from the light cage is what is bothering me the most and I'd like to minimize it.  I know it will fade a little more with more IBL bounces (I'm only using 1 right now), but I'd like to soften it a little more.

I'd also like the light fixture to look a little more realistic - more like a frosted cover.  I find the image a little strange to have an "invisible" light source in the frame.  I'm going to play with the material settings for the light cage glass and see what I can come up with, but I would appreciate any suggestions.

This model also has florescent fixtures in the cells on both sides of the hallway.  How would I simulate that kind of light in Poser?  I don't know if the fixtures will be visible in my final renders, but I want the additional illumination (and shadows) that these lights would generate.

Render settings are (I'm still in draft mode): Pixel samples 3, Shading Rate 1.0, Displacement 1.0, 2 raytrace bounces, IDL Intensity 1.0, IDL Bounces 1, IDL Samples 32, IDL Irrad. Cache 50, Sinc Filter 2

All materials have Gamma Correcting shaders.

Thanks in advance  for any comments or suggestions.

First why adding two lights sources behind the camera ?

If you are using IDL, no need for IBL.  There is also no need for Gc in the shaders.  The equivalent would be Tone Mapping, HSV Exponential, settings between 1.6 (default) to 2.0.  Any higher and your scene will become extremely bright.

Also try repositioning your point light in the corridor.  It appears to be illuminating outside the lamp fixture. 

Just a little addition to what hborre stated,  may want to check the lamp itself and see whether it casts a shadow or not--try unchecking casts shadow and see if that gets rid of the shadow on the door and floor.  Jan

Be careful suggesting we don't need GC. We do for perfect realism.

I tell people that they can get away with HSV ETM, as being better than nothing, but I'm fairly convinced that for physical realism, it is not acceptable. For art, it is, if you're an artist who does not insist on physical reality.

Frosting the bulb is pretty easy - just apply the tiniest bit of opacity (i.e. don't make it perfectly transparent). With the inverse-square light being so close it will get incredibly bright.

The harsh shadow can be softened. You have to use blur on the light's shadow. At the particular angles here, you may have to use much higher shadow samples when you blur it.

The effect of flourescent lights is they are larger (not points) and they are a bit more green. We don't have area lights, so you can use point lights with a lot of blur. If you're really into maximum realism, you'd simulate an area light with an array of many point lights - something like 16 to 24 lights, per fixture. That's if you're crazy, of course.

Thank you, BB for the clarification on the tone mapping and Gc.  I am wondering about the flourescent lighting.  You do not need to have all the cells lit and perhaps the lighting may not need to be very intense.  It is a matter of preference.  And BB is correct, flourescence does impart a greenish cast to the area.  Just as a thought, could a one-sided self-illuminating within the scene but off camera would accomplish the same effect?

 Many thanks for the input.

Anthanasius:  A couple of reasons - It adds more light and shadow to the environment.  I also don't have my final scene(s) fully figured out yet.  I'm not sure what camera angles I'm going to need, so I want to make sure I have light everywhere I might need it.  Oh yea, I forgot - there is also a mirror in the scene (cropped out in the picture I posted) that may reflect what is behind the camera.

hborre:  I'm not using IBL  (I never figured it out and then 8 came along with IDL which is easier for me and I think works just as well for my current level of expertise).

As best I can tell, the light is just above the bottom of the fixture.  I think the light is still too intense which is causing the effect you are noticing.

Plutom:  Unfortunately, I can not uncheck casts shadow for the light fixture.  The light fixture is just two material groups on the figure, not a body part.

Bagginsbill:  I've tried dropping the transparency to 70% and adding in some diffuse at 20% and it looked like it had been pasted on in postwork.  I then tried 20% translucence and it didn't do anything at all.  Once the computer comes back up (Poser crashed on me, so I'm rebooting just to make sure everything is good) I'll try a render with 90% transparency and 5% diffuse.

I'm also increasing the blur radius to 1 and the shadow samples to 32 as a start (they were at 0 and 19) and I will keep playing with that.

I was afraid that was my choice with the florescent lights.  I'll probably start with 2 point lights per fixture (there are 5 fixtures total) and add a third if needed.  (I don't have the computing resources to go crazy).  How much green are we talking?  RGB(250, 255, 250)?  (I always thought florescent lights looked bluish - maybe I need to go get my eyes checked.....)

hborre:  I've played a little with self-illuminating things in Poser, but never been happy with my results.  (I'm probably doing something wrong).  Does they light from a self-illuminated object behave the same as light from a Poser light?  (i.e. IDL, reflections, etc.)  If so, I will need to go back and play with them some more.

Thanks for all of your comments, I do appreciate it.   I'll post an update later this afternoon (I hate it when real life gets in the way of my hobbies.....)

 Quick update - the change to the blur radius and shadow samples is looking real nice, it's just slowing the render to an absolute crawl (it was taking about 20 minutes before, I have no clue how long this is going to take).  I'm going to kill it here in a few minutes (I want it to get down a little lower on the door wall to see how that looks before I stop it).

I know better than to change multiple things at the same time, but I did it anyway.  Does anyone have an idea of which parameter is slowing down the render?  Blur radius or shadow samples?

Thanks again for the help.

The self-illumination is not the same as Poser lights.  It responds to IDL and imparts a radiating glow which does cast light on its surroundings.  If you follow the link below, you will see an example.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2784248

The scene is dark cause is there only one light source, ok i can add more light but by this way the result wont be realist cause too many shadows ...

Always only one light source !

PS : I've used the default value, with the d3d panel you can tweak it for better results

 One way to get the lamp to not cast shadows would be to create a prop from those material zones that make up the lamp and then make the original part of the prop 100% transparent. You create props with the grouping tool. Select the scene prop, open grouping tool. Find the material zones and select them. Hit the Create Prop button. Spawn props will spawn all groups as new props, not what you want here :)

In my scene there are several visible light sources.  These should each produce shadows, though not as strong as in my original image.  I think the blur radius and samples on the lights is part of what I need to keep playing with.

TrekkieGrrrl:  Way Cool!  I'm going to go give that a shot right now.  Between this and the light settings I think I may get what I think I want!

I've attached the latest render - with the lights changed to have a blur radius of 1 (from 0) and the shadow samples to 32 (from 19).  It only took 2:24 to render (that's hours:minutes!) up from 20ish minutes for the first version.

I also adjusted the lamp_glass material to be 90% transparent and 5% (gamma corrected) diffuse white.  I'm not sure I'm liking the glass, but not sure how to fix it.  Maybe I need to reduce the intensity of the light some more?  Once I get the rest of the lights built I should still have enough light for the scene.

Thanks for all of the input.  I'll post another render later with an update.

2:24

I think you can reduce that  ...

I agree.  That time can be reduced. 

BTW, the blur radius will soften shadows as you increase it's value.  You could drop that shadow sampling further.

 Dropping both Blur Radius to .5 and Shadow samples to 16 cut the render time to 1:32 (hours:minutes!).  I know - I made two changes so I don't know which one had the impact.

I then dropped Shadow samples to 4 (leaving Blur Radius at .5) and render time is down to 32:14 (minutes:seconds!!!!!).  That's still a little long for a draft render.  I'm going to dread the final render(s).

I still like what I'm getting so I'm going to play with a couple of other things later tonight and see what happens.

Is there any documentation on what units the Blur Radius is in?  Is there any documentation on Shadow samples at all?  There's not much in the Reference Manual (shadow samples is not mentioned at all that I could see).  I did a quick scan of the forum and didn't find anything definitive.

Once again, thanks for the input, it is appreciated.

could you post your render settings ? screen capture !

If there is something I can do with the render settings that will speed this up, I'd love to hear about it.

As always, thanks for the input.

Increase the bucketsize to 32 and the number of threads to the number of processes in your machine (dual 2, quad 4)
For draft you can lower the samples for IDL.

A blur of 8 for shadows slows things down, for draft you might want to lower that.

There is one other thing which slows down the render quite dramatically: transparency - especially multi-layered transparency.  So a light in a transparent bulb in a transparent encasing will be slow. But I am not sure how you might work around that.

It's not the same scene ok but ... 3 points lights blur 5 sample 30 and exactly your settings ... about 2 min ...

 Upping the bucket size from 16 to 32 added 2 minutes to the render (from 50+ to 52+).

Threads are at 2 because it's an old hyper-threaded processor.

I'm wondering if it's the partial transparency that's hurting.  Let me turn that off and try it again.

Put the first irradiance cache to 0, tou dont need it with idl ...

 Anthanasius - The first cache is being ignored (it's in red) once IDL is turned on, so it doesn't matter what it is set to.

I changed the transparency on the light fixtures from 90% transparent and 5% diffuse to 100% transparent and it sped up the render by about 10 minutes.  This tells me that my speed issues are because of my attempt to make the light fixtures partially transparent.

What I need to do is make the fixtures a separate prop or body part so I can make them invisible in ray tracing.  Trekkiegrrrl tried to talk me through it using the grouping tool, but I made a big mess when I tried that.

I've opened the figure's .obj file in Hexagon (V2.5) and can find the "body part" and material groups I want to make as a separate body part.  Is there a tutorial somewhere that would talk me through the steps I need to split off a new body part?  (Does this even make sense?  Am I using the correct terms?)

Also - I have 2 questions on point lights.  Does Poser treat these as infinitely tiny points or do they really have a size?  Is there any significance to the inner or outer circle that represents the point light or is it just the icon that was chosen?

Thanks again for the assistance.  This is a learning process.

Hum ... May be it change since sr2 ... you're right

Ok lets go to the grouping tool ... ( take me two minutes ... :-) )

1 ) Changing the view to smooth lined, the selected polygon turn red ...

2 ) unselect all polygon

The bulb become red, clic on create prop, name it bulb ...

A new prop appear in the hierarchy called bulb

Now close the grouping tool and go to the material room ...

Select the lamp and go to the bulb material set like this ...

Diffuse 0
Specular 0
Ambiant 0
Transparency 1
Transparency_Edge 1
Transparency_Falloff 0

Select your prop named bulb and set it like this

Diffuse 0
Specular 0
Ambiant 1 color what you want
Transparency 0
Transparency_Edge 0
Transparency Falloff 0

Close the material room and go to the property panel select the bulp prop and uncheck " cast shadows"