I'm working on a daylight scene and I'm want to know how to create various types of daylight (Except for overcasts) using Poser.   I'm exspecially interested in bright daylight lighting that's common with the summer day (without a haze).

BagginsBill envirosphere works great if You can use IDL

If you are just using the sky you might use the environment dome instead of the sphere.

Will you be using a skydome to provide additional lighting to the scene.  As meatSim posted, BB's envsphere is an exceptional prop which can add considerable ambient lighting  when used with IDL.  Provided that you are using one of the most recent iterations of Poser.  I normally render such a scene with 1 infinite light set to white or slightly yellow at a low intensity depending on the image used on the dome.  Then again, daylight can be at any time of the day, morning, afternoon, and early evening.

Quote - Will you be using a skydome to provide additional lighting to the scen

Yes I'm using BB's Envirosphere (dome) but I haven't been able to achieve that bright sumemr day look.  I'm not sure where I'm going wrong with it or if the model is having an effect.   I'm using Streets Of The Mediterranean from daz3d.com and I've been un able to create a similar sunlit scene in Poser.

I have tried everything except for  scaling down the dome (which I'm trying now).

i dont think you want to scale down the dome.. what images are you using on it?

that daz render is very detailed, but the sun shadows are wrong.  they need a blur radius such that the shadow on a wall becomes progressively more blurred the farther it is from the object causing the shadow.  do this with a ray-traced infinite lite co-radial with the sun's position in your hdri-dome.  the render below demonstrates the shadow-edge blurring, which one can confirm by going outside on a sunny day near certain building configurations.

Missy Nancy

I'm definitely not getting any bright lighting like that. But your comments helped me to solve another problem I was having with shadows.  I wasn't using a ray-traced infinite light.  While the depth map shadows worked fine with the primitive square as a floor, it doesn't work well with this particular city model.  The depth map shadows seems to haze the scene and the ray-traced shadows fills the scene with more light. 

I'll play around the wthe depth map settings  to see if there is a setting that I can use to have it function like a ray traced - light.  Thanks for your insight.  Hoepfully people will keep giving examples.  I'm moving from portrait and studko lighting to landscape lighting. I know I'll pick up some really good info.

Forget depth mapped shadows.  Really.  They are useless if you're looking for realistic lighting.  In fact, they're useless full stop.

Also, keep in mind the contrast on a bright sunny day seems to be really harsh, so things in shade always seem very much darker by comparison. 

Quote - Forget depth mapped shadows.

I actually like depth mapped shadows but, they definitely aren't producing what I need in this case where the ground of the city isn't catching depth mapped shadows and is resulting in overcast lighting.

Is there a way to configure a material node to capture shadows differently?

Quote - > Quote - Forget depth mapped shadows.

I actually like depth mapped shadows but, they definitely aren't producing what I need in this case where the ground of the city isn't catching depth mapped shadows and is resulting in overcast lighting.

Is there a way to configure a material node to capture shadows differently?

It's interesting: you specify a lighting type that requires ray-traced lights, but you want to use depth-mapped lights. Depth-mapped lights went out with the rumble seat. Use extremely sparingly, if at all: they may have some extremely limited uses... but for anything realism, it isn't going to happen with DM shadows. Shadows require raytracing to look like shadows. Have a look at what BB's said about depth-mapped and shadows. Then stop using depth-mapped altogether.

With the newer versions of Poser and IDL, you can get what you're after. You'll soon be putting depth-mapped shadows with refl_lite_mult: useless icons of a bygone era.

RobynsVeil

I don't have a problem with using the ray-traced lights.  I'll use what ever gets the job done.  My curiosity comes from the fact that depth-mapped lights will cast shadows on one model but not on another.  I want to understand why that is the case.

Hi perhaps the OP should Consider P2LUX for realistic outdoor lighting.

Cheers

Quote - RobynsVeil

I don't have a problem with using the ray-traced lights.  I'll use what ever gets the job done.  My curiosity comes from the fact that depth-mapped lights will cast shadows on one model but not on another.  I want to understand why that is the case.

 

I don't know the answer but I can tell you it's a well known shortcoming of DM lights.  In large scenes they often behave strangely.  Even if you hike up the Shadow Map to a ridiculous size you'll never have anything like accuracy with them.  

The only upside (if you can call it that) is they (usually) render faster than Ray Traced.  Great if you want to sacrifice quality for speed but I can't see the point myself. 

Depth map shadows are maps generated by the renderer.  They have size.  If an object fall within the size and shape generated by the algorithm, it's hit by the shadow map.  If the object doesn't fall within it, it's not covered by the shadow map.

This is a very simplistic explanation of a long and complex discussion I had back in the early P5 days with a friend who had a good deal more CG experience than I did.

Quote - Hi perhaps the OP should Consider P2LUX for realistic outdoor lighting.

 

 

 

Cheers

Only whyle sleepling ;)

Quote - Depth map shadows are maps generated by the renderer.  They have size.  If an object fall within the size and shape generated by the algorithm, it's hit by the shadow map.  If the object doesn't fall within it, it's not covered by the shadow map.

This is a very simplistic explanation of a long and complex discussion I had back in the early P5 days with a friend who had a good deal more CG experience than I did.

Thanks.

Hey Miss Nancy

That's a great scene! Can you tell me where you got the modified Sponza Atrium? I've never seen it with the flags-looks great. I can see you mentioned it on the image-but I cannot read the tesxt.

That's also really great advice about putting the infinite light co-radial with the sun's position on the HDRI!

Quote - that daz render is very detailed, but the sun shadows are wrong.  they need a blur radius such that the shadow on a wall becomes progressively more blurred the farther it is from the object causing the shadow.  do this with a ray-traced infinite lite co-radial with the sun's position in your hdri-dome.  the render below demonstrates the shadow-edge blurring, which one can confirm by going outside on a sunny day near certain building configurations.

Here:

http://crytek.com/cryengine/cryengine3/downloads

Quote - That's a great scene! Can you tell me where you got the modified Sponza Atrium? I've never seen it with the flags-looks great. I can see you mentioned it on the image-but I cannot read the tesxt.

Holy Photorealism, Batman, er...I mean Superman...er...Mr. Kent!  I didn't read the fine print, because I thought it was a photograph! :thumbupboth:

Envirosphere for the sky, IDL and a single point light as the sun.

looks good, joe.  I also used those two as lite sources.  incidentally, the wall hangings/banners demonstrate why poser has texture filtering, which kills the fabric moiré fx.  normally we'd tell users to turn off texture filtering to avoid artifacts.  depthmap shadows are sometimes needed, as mentioned by stefan, to get smooth shadow edges from heavily smoothed objects.

Quote - Here's a PP 2012 render for comparison.

Envirosphere for the sky, IDL and a single point light as the sun.

Does the point like work better for creating daylight than the infinite light?

oops.  I mean point light.

They are both about the same except you can set inverse square on point lights, which means there is light falloff with distance.  However, the sun itself is so brilliant and falloff is vast, there is no need use this feature for outdoor scenes.

A point light, if it works correctly, should create different shadows than an infinite.  Shadows should be cast radially from the point light.  This means the shadows shouldn't be parallel.  But an infinite, which models something so far away as to be infinite, has no appreciable difference in distance between objects and the light source angularly as well as radially.  It should cast parallel shadows.  You could probably get a similar effect with a point light really, really, really far away from your scene, but that seems like more work than it's worth to me.

Just to say, if your problem with raytraced shadows is the grain of the blur, up the samples on your shadows.  It doesn't slow the render much, but can make a huge difference.  The default is 19, but I rarely work with anything lower than 64.