I am getting frustrated and pissed off. I have been trying to get a light effect where there is bright light and sharp shadows. I know it is possible because I have done it. But I can't remember how the hell I did it. I have tried placing the light in front of the subject and playing with the Dist end dial.

My problem is  there is no bright light on V4 her entire body looks reddish and shadowed and there are no dark shadows at all on her skin.

Really starting to get irritated here because I can't figure out what the hell I am doing wrong. Anyone have any ideas?

Could you post your light settings, please? Can't get any clues from the image alone.

If you could post back with what version of Poser you are using, what kind of lights and are you using special mats for skin?

 This effect is caused by the skin shader. (Been there... done this before...)

Go to the material room and pick some body part... say the chest. Click the advanced tab. Look about 6 lines down for "Ambient color." Dollar to donuts it's some shade of red. A lot of the people creating mats these days do this to help with skin tone, but when the light levels are really low, this screws the pooch, letting the character "glow."

Sadly, the only answer is to go through each and every major body area and set the "Ambient value" to zero. Set "Skin Head" through "Skin Leg", then hit "Toenails," "Fingernails," and "Skin face." All should have a zero value for "Ambient Value."

Your model will now render correctly in low lights. Remember to save a separate copy for your normal light renders, as the red tone DOES help in good light. 

Looks like your lights are outside of the room and the walls will bann the light.

rule number one when using poser. never use shaders that you get with the figures,skin textures,....

80% of them suck . not a little but they suck 100%.

rule number two. use shaders from Bagginsbill. you dont need to use the exact same settings. but start with hes shaders and then tweak to get the results you want.

rule number three: you are still reading my post. you should already use the search function for bagginsbill's post's about hes skin shaders.

I see from your gallery that you are no beginner, so your frustration must mean there is something fundamentally wrong in your scene setup that you are overlooking.

Simply put, there is no light shining on your figure. Without knowing how you have set up your scene, lights and camera we can't tell you why that is. Is the light behind a wall? Is it below the GROUND which is set to cast shadows? Is it pointing out into space? Is it turned off? (Sorry, have to ask the obvious!)

The red glow is explained by basicwiz. With the skin shader you are using this will show up even though the figure is completely unlit. But that's not the main issue here.

If you are using a single spotlight, make sure you set it to Point At your figure, at least to start with.  (EDIT: and set start and end distances to zero. If you are using P8 or PPro2010, set fall off to Constant, so it does not matter how far away the light is. You can change these later once things are under control).

Keep us posted... you'll get to the bottom of this soon!

Ok first thing. thanks for the replies been busy and haven't been able to comment till now.

I am using Poser 7

Ice-boy: I already know about BB's shaders and they are all I use for the most part other than the rare occasion I will use the one that came with Alice. I use the hell out of VSS.

This render was supposed to be just a quick and to the point render because it was for a project I am working on. The whole point was to not use anything fancy because I wanted the render time to be short but still have decent render quality.

 I did not think I was even using any shaders. Imagine my surprise when I go into the material room and find that there was a shader attached to the alt diffuse node. I am in the process of rendering the scene again with VSS instead of the one that i did not even know was installed.

The only difference from the default lights are:

1 there are two and they are point lights.
2 they have Dist End value set at something other than 0.

In preview mode they look close to what i would expect.

The light that was supposed to be lighting up certain parts of V4's front was definitely not through a wall because I could see the light with the camera I was using.

I am starting to think that maybe the shader was the problem  (considering the fact that i did not even know a shader was there that it possible ol)

Quote - In preview mode they look close to what i would expect.

Preview does not accurately display light fall-off. If I set Distance End on a point light at the exact distance the figure is from the light, Preview shows it lit quite well, but the render shows it virtually unlit, as you would expect.

So unless you are certain that the distance end on the point lights is far beyond the figure you want to illuminate, I would suggest trying it with both Distance Start and Distance End set to zero (i.e. no fall-off at all). This will at the very least eliminate this factor from the equation.

It might be the shader not working, but it seems unlikely that a default skin shader has little or no diffuse in it.

The standard DAZ V4 shader includes an approximation for SSS that involves forcing some red in darker areas, as judged by the output of a Diffuse node. The mistake was that it forces red even when there is no light. Many 3rd party character sets copied this technique. It is has been promoted across the whole line now.

It is actually sort of my fault, since I posted the first example of this technique. I can't remember if putting color in where there is no light was in my original posting or not. When I first posted that shader (2006) I had not yet embraced mathematics in my shader work. I knew math, but I had not yet connected the dots that shaders are math, and if the math is f'ed up, so is the shader.

Now that I know that, these things are not a mystery at all.

So, always keep in mind:
1) A shader is math.
2) Most content creators don't know the math. They create shaders that behave right only in small regions of the solution space.

1. A shader can ignore lights - can create blackness inches from the sun and can create incredibly bright objects in complete absence of light sources.
   4) The number of possible wrong shaders or wrong behaviors VASTLY exceeds the number of right ones. There is only one physics in real life, but in the parallel universe of shaders, there are an inifnite number of absurd physics. Ask yourself what the odds are that the one you're dealing with matches the one and only true physics.

IsaoShi is correct.  Don't take the preview window as your definitive render outcome.  I think you have composed enough scenes to know that.  However, using light fall-off in P7 is alot trickier than what it is intuitively suppose to be. 

Dr. Geep does have a tutorial and explanation about light fall-off at his site. 

[http://www.drgeep.com/p4/l2/l2.htm

](http://www.drgeep.com/p4/l2/l2.htm)Perhaps you should become familiar with it's dynamics to narrow down your options. 

It would appear that everytime you begin a new scene, examine each model's shader arrangement in the material room.  It will save you grief later when things don't render correctly due to incorrectly structured nodes.

A screen capture of the set up, please. I'm betting it's something even simpler than shaders.

Sean,

If all lights are deleted and it's red not black, then it because of shaders - there is zero doubt.

Specifically you will find a Color Ramp node driven by a Diffuse node.

I'm not guessing. I've answered about the V4 glowing red problem at least 10 times.

The first entry in the Color Ramp has some very dark red in it. When the Diffuse is zero (no light) it selects the first entry in the Color Ramp. Thus - black becomes red.

Hang on.... referring back to the original problem, the issue here is that the two point lights that dasquid has in the scene are not illuminating the figure at all. The SSS issue is a red herring.

Quote - A screen capture of the set up, please. I'm betting it's something even simpler than shaders.

Certainly. It's worth noting that the wall the figure is leaning on is not lit either. It's only visible in silhouette against the glowing figure.

>> " If all lights are deleted and it's red not black, then it because of shaders - there is zero doubt.:

Unless I missed something, the initial render we have here wasnt done with deleted lights, but two points. If there's a wall there, I'm thinking it's possible the OP simply put them behind the wall (or something else in the scene) and hasnt checked their position in anything other than the top camera.

Just a thought.

Sorry I read the OP wrong. In my head I read "there is no bright light on V4 her entire body looks reddish" as an issue by itself, as in "despite the fact that there is no bright light".

I never imagined it would be difficult to put a bright light on V4, so I didn't think of that as a problem to be solved.

So - the red glow is shader. The fact that the figure isn't lit is just light bumbling.

Carry on.

Point lights always shine in all directions.

Are we talking about point lights here?

Sigh. There is so much material to go over if that's the level we're dealing with.

Noob lighting:

1) Start without shadows and without falloff. Find your light.

Inifnite lights don't need aiming - they hit everything.

Point lights don't need aiming - they hit everything.

Spot lights need aiming.

If you can' see your figure lit by an infinite or point light with shadows off and no falloff enabled, then you've got something bizarre configured and need to show us everthing. For example, you have your light shader set to black out all Diffuse and Specular. Stuff like that is extremely rare but I don't know what to pursue. There are literally thousands of ways to screw up a light, b ut usually people who have done something unusual mention these things. For example, using a gel image incorrectly.

Suggestion. Delete copyrighted figures and props and just upload the scene file with its lights here. Replace those with Poser primitives - which are free to distribute. Probably would save some time because you don't know what you don't know. Reading light settings is like being a pilot and knowing how to scan the whole instrument panel in a second or two.

Sorry got busy again.

I had to fall back on an older version of the scene and rebuild part of the scene. I still have tweaking to do here and there because the pose is not like the original and I am not quite satisfied with it. In the render you can see the effect I was trying to get with the deep shadows in certain areas on her body. I had originally wanted the shadows behind her as deep but i decided to make it easier to pick her out. I may still go back and make the original idea but i kind of like it this way too.

The version where i was having so much trouble may have been glitched. I say this because  while I was frustrated i changed the light in front of  her into a spotlight and no matter what i did i could not get the light to show up in preview. As I mentioned before i know that the light was not trying to shine through a wall or other scene bits.

Once I went back to the previous save the lights worked pretty much as i had intended them to. I really need a computer upgrade because  some renders take forever on this old box, at least it runs poser 7 well enough for me to do what i do when I can remember stuff. I am in my 5th year of college and time for rendering funtime where I actually feel like rendering something seems miniscule. I haven't done but maybe three or four renders in the past six months and I seem to be forgetting things that I had learned. I think I will have to find several of BB's threads and start reading and learning again.

Thanks for all the helpful ideas and advice everyone.

I really like the way you have lit this scene. I'd be interested to know how you get those shadowed areas. Are you using tight spotlights in this version?

By the way, it crossed my mind that your problem with the spotlight not showing up in Preview might be due to the OpenGL 8-light limitation. Perhaps you have a number of lights dotted around but not doing anything, and the one you were trying to set up was number nine? Just a thought. Of course this would still not explain why the render was coming out unlit....

> Quote - I really like the way you have lit this scene. I'd be interested to know how you get those shadowed areas. Are you using tight spotlights in this version? > > By the way, it crossed my mind that your problem with the spotlight not showing up in Preview might be due to the OpenGL 8-light limitation. Perhaps you have a number of lights dotted around but not doing anything, and the one you were trying to set up was number nine? Just a thought. Of course this would still not explain why the render was coming out unlit....

Glad you like it. What I did is this, pose everything the way you want it and then just take a point light and  set it in front of the subject and play with the Dist End dial.

I am actually using it in Sreed mode because Opengl  does some weird shit  making vertices shoot out of models for no apparant reason. Also  I did not have more than 6 lights in the problem one and three or four of those were turned off. In the last one I posted there were five with only two that were on. I think it was just glitched to beat hell, I tried to load the  scene again to see if it was some things suggested in this thread but Poser locked up trying to load it.

here is the scene from the side just for grins.