tonyvilters posted at 1:41AM Sun, 18 December 2016 - #4292216

The simple trick is to remember is that:

• All colored maps should be loaded at GC 2.2 in the advanced material room.
• All Black and white maps should be loaded at GC 1.00 (Transmaps, Bumpmaps, Displacement maps and yes Normal maps)

Then remove all the old style "faking", (mostly that is to remove that light blue in the Diffuse color, and start with a single Infinite light set to 75% intensity inside a Dome)

• Then remember that we are 2016 now => and ALWAYS render with IDL set to ON and at 100%, and GC set to 2.2 in the render settings.

Yep, very good summary of the basics here :-)

I do this for 2 or 3 years already. My Skydome texture is connected to ambient only, (also to diffuse, but diffuse value set to zero, this is only to make the sky texture visible in the preview). So this skydome set to 0.6 ambient value basically emitts all the light needed (I also have Bagginsbill's light meter and gamma meter in my standard startup scene and only delete them for the final renders). Then a single infinite light which is my sun, set to white and intensity=60%. Crank it up to 70% if I want very strong sunlight impression. Of course the light is set to 'Raytrace Shadows' with a blur radius of 3 or 4. Then with these specifics set as standard in my outdoor startup scene, my standard render settings for scene development (and I have even done many promo images for content with just these settings) are like in the attached screenshot.

Me too I have never again used IBL lighting for at least 3 years, since introduction of IDL in Poser.

Prior to introduction of IDL and GC, Poser users (including myself since 2001) were used to use far too much and strong lighting in our scenes, to compensate for the missing indirect lighting and other flaws. But like Tonyvilters said, this is bad habits from the past and should definitely be changed according to our nowadays equipment (unless you are using an older Poser version without GC and IDL, of course). Back in those days, I could never have imagined lighting a scene with only ambient light from a skydome (set as low as 0.6!!) and a single infinite light (also set as low as 60%)... In those days we used to have 5, or 10 or even 20 light sources in our scenes, and it was common they were all set to ridiculous high ranges, sometimes even cranked up to 200 or 250 percent... Resulting in those redish tints and other colors, this is why Victoria 4 had even a blue tint baked in her texture shader by default (and she looks extremely bluish nowadays in a modern lighting setup, when loaded with her standard shaders :-) )

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Don't render faster than your artistic Guardian Angel can fly... ;-)

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