operaguy posted at 1:27PM Wed, 30 January 2019 - #4344757

Thanks to Blackhearted and Glitterati3D for guidance on rendering with Superfly. I already had a failure! Reproduced Glitterati3D's lights/settings exactly, and it looks awful. I am doing something wrong. I don't want to hijack this thread, so if I continue my attempt to figure out SF, I'll start a new topic here.

:: og ::

I made a Basic area light setup similar to how I usually render all my images. There's also a 4-sided backdrop in there. The floor is slightly reflective, you can easily change it to just a flat color/grey, or apply a clouds shader to it to give it the look of a traditional backdrop:

Superfly Area Light Setup

I move the lights around depending on the camera angle and pose doing lots of fast preview renders until I get a nice flattering lighting setup, then I render the large final render, after which I'll go over and Area Render any problem areas or eyes, etc.

Really there's no mystery, all you need to get great renders out of Superfly is practice and patience. I don't just click a light setup and hit render, I'll tweak the lights and move them around sometimes rendering upwards of 50 preview renders until the light falls exactly the way I want it to. And I'm not even a very technical guy, just stubborn and persistent and I'll poke and prod at things until the results are the way I want them to be. Incidentally every single thing I used in my promos I made available in my store, from the exact lights to the exact poses. The presets in Superfly Studio are my gallery render lights saved as a preset. The props and things I plan on putting in freestuff.

The cool thing about Superfly and area lights is that you can apply most traditional photography principles to it, and vice versa - if you don't typically pay attention to lighting during RL photography you certainly will after spending time setting up lighting in Superfly. If you just google for any softbox tutorial you can apply that exact same knowledge to a Superfly render setup and get predictable results.