I've recently started started to learn D|S. One thing confuses me: In Firefly IDL is easy to use but that doesn't seem to be the case in D|S. I've learned to create an IDL camera but the render quality i can achieve isn't even close to what i get from Firefly.

So my question is: How am i supposed to do to get good IDL results out of 3DLight??

UberEnvironment, although it has a learning curve.

You can also make an idirect light camera in shader mixer. If you do. remember to use raytraced shadows.

raytraced shadow on all lights, that is

I don't recommend using raytraced shadows on all lights. It will drop the render time to a crawl and create conflicting shadows in most cases. The general rule of thumb is to turn Raytraced shadows on the main light source and off (all shadows) on other lights. There are times of course one does want to turn them on other light sources but one should do it judiciously and with forethought. At night in particular, one might have a reason to have multiple lights with shadows but rarely in daylight shots.

I prefer not to use UE since i want full control. My experience is that ready-made solutions like this are generally very limited. I want to spend the time learning from scratch.

My question is rather if anyone here know how to get at least a basic shader setup (using the shader mixer) to get me on the right track.

List of Shader Mixer Tutorials and Recipes

can be found click above

Following is a really good free script for render presets. They are really great.

http://www.sharecg.com/v/57250/browse/8/Script/DAZ-Studio-4-Render-Presets

Following is some free UberEnvironment sets. I haven't tried these yet.

http://www.sharecg.com/pf/full_uploads.php?pf_user_name=glaseye

Must be registered to download these files but that's free too.

Hope it helps.

The shader mixer setup for an indirect light camera is simple.

Open shader mixer.

File New Shader

Choose Camera

Grab the Indirect Light (camera) brick from the Root Bricks > Light Category and drop it in.

Click Create

You now have an IDL camera.  The IDL will only show through this camera.  THe controls for the IDL are on the camera, pretty straightforward.  I recommend the first thing you to do is drop the trace distance down to something reasonable like 50 cm.