Have Poser 8.

Quesiton:

What is the best light set out there? The easiest to use to get the effects and shadows you want? Looking for ease of use to get that exact lighting and shadows you're looking for.

The best lighting is the lighting you set up yourself. It's not terribly difficult :o).

Laurie

I'm sure that is true LaurieA but I do see light sets for sale so it would seem to me that they help or add more ease of use or effects than the factory lights that come with Poser do. I find the lighting tools in Poser 8 cumbersome, non-intuitive and difficult to use. I was hoping their would be light sets that ease the pain and increase the gain.

I agree completely with Laurie.  Many lights sets currently available, either as freebies or for sale, are based under the old technology programmed into earlier versions of Poser.  That was a time when gamma correction was least understood in the 3D world and light sets were created to overcome those particular situations.  With the release of P8 and PP2010, those same light sets have become completely useless and out of date.  I am one of those that have given up using light sets and generate my own. 

Resort to raytracing rather than depth shadow, you will retain reflections and eliminate nostril glowing.  Learn to use IDL, Indirect Diffuse Lighting, in P8.  It simulates global illumination better than IBL, Image Based Lighting.

Baggins Bill has a soft studio lighting scene, it is an excellent start to learn from. http://sites.google.com/site/bagginsbill/free-stuff/tutorial-scenes

Then I have to agree with hborre and LaurieA. Lighting with GC and IDL is so simple there is no need for complicated lighting to acheive what ever your heart desires. Just think where you want lights and put them there.

I agree with the Laurie and HBorre and GeneralNutt completely. There is a thread on here that goes into the merits of IDL over old-fashioned depth-mapped lights. Worth a read: come back here if you have any questions. BB even includes a free light-set and simple scene (pz3) to help you along! What could be easier than that?

The best things in life are free. You will find, to your chagrin, that it's not uniformly true that you always get what you pay for. :blink:

That's great advice, and it definitely pays in the long run to read the tutorials, and do a lot of rendering yourself to figure out whats right for you.

That being said, I've been playing around with a light set called IDL studio by Colm over at RDNA and I like it a lot. Bagginsbill has something very much like it in his freebies, too. 

You don't need light sets in Poser 8. Make your own.

If you feel you really, really need some no-brainer solution, the various IDL sets over at RDNA may be worth a look.

I never understood why anyone would want to buy a light set even from my first day touching Poser.

There is no one right light solution for every possible situation, if there was, everyone would use it and there would be a plethora of renders that all looked the same.  A product is not going to produce 'stunning effects' everytime, no more so than you putting in lights yourself, the lights in sets tend to be set up for the way the product creator tends to do their preferred style of render.  Just my two cents.

That said, there are a number of good tutorials on the basics of lighting out there, that will help with leanring how to do it yourself.

The aforementioned tutorial scene from bagginsbill, there is one at RDNA for the basics of lighting, also one on outdoor lighting with IDL.

Once you learn the basics it is all just playing around.

they may buy lite sets because the default lites/shadows/render settings produce lousy renders, hence they're hoping if they buy something it will look better when rendered.

And will likely be just as disappointed when the purchased set falls short because they aren't using them with exactly the same camera settings/render settings as the vendor.

To each their own.  Despite having been given a couple of the 'better' light sets as gifts (Render Studio etc) I never use them, in the time it takes me to tweak one to my liking, I could have set up my own twice over and gone to get coffee from Tim Horton's while I wait for the image to render.

Hmmm timmy's, what was this thread about? I need to go somewhere.

Extra large, double cream, single sugar!  Bring me one back if you don't mind.  Oooh walnut crunch too...

I will stop derailing the thread now. 

Lights, right talking about lights.

Still learning about lights, actually. Materials and lights appear inexorably tied together. So, light sets created for pre-Poser 8 and pre-IDL might not give the best results because those technologies weren't on offer when the lights were developed.

But, to be honest, I prefer learning from something free and developing my own. The same goes for materials, which, as I said, are very much tied to the lights. And the renderer.

The best light kit is clearly one you set up--and understand--yourself. And the best way to see how a really good kit works (IMO) is to buy one, experiment with it, and save the best lighting-setups into the Lights Folder of your Runtime.

One hitch is that Poser 8 has changes to the lighting system that, while easier to use, makes the Poser 7-era "light studio" kits somewhat obsolete.

The one Poser 8 setup that I know works--and works well--is Colm's Render Studio 8 at RDNA.

The new, new thing in the Poser 8 Render dialog box is "Indirect Lighting." If you have any luck rendering figures with hair under IDL, I'd love to hear how you did it!

Quote - I never understood why anyone would want to buy a light set even from my first day touching Poser.

The only one I would even think of (and I have bought a couple of these) now that we have P7+ is one which reproduces studio lighting. (Rim, backfills etc.) On the otherhand, I can sort of reproduce the effect that studio lighting aims at with a white IBL, and two infinite lights.

My ideal light sets (these are outdoor):

1. Plain white IBL at 5%, infinite light at 40%, rendered in Poser Pro 2010 with Gamma correction 2.2. If you aren't using GC, double the light values.

2. As above, but with a skydome with diffuse at 0 and the dome texture connected to alternate diffuse. (This makes the dome immune to my lights.)

3. As above, but without the IBL, and render using IDL. This usually also involves changing the materials since a lot of older (and some newer) use alternate diffuse or alternate specular (or ambient, or translucent) which results in self-illumination.

If you are just starting out, try #1 above and then start adding lights.

Indoor lights, I tend to go for spotlights and pointlights with inverse cube fall-off. If you don't render with GC or hsv, linear fall-off looks a little more realistic because of the way the eye works.

p.s. I dunno what best lite set is, but easiest lite set is one inf lite (ray-traced) and bill's envirosphere with hdri.  enable IDL/GC/TM in render.  do not use AO (poser 8 and later).  use bill's lite meter.  uncheck "visible in raytracing" for trans surfaces.