Another portrait with my light experiments LF Character Tempesta Hair Bisquit

So far, all these renders look exceptional. @TheAnimaGemini, thank you for the shader recipe, it looks amazing. I'll pop it into my custom cycles Library folder.

hborre posted at 12:31PM Wed, 16 December 2020 - #4407739

So far, all these renders look exceptional. @TheAnimaGemini, thank you for the shader recipe, it looks amazing. I'll pop it into my custom cycles Library folder.

Welcome. You can tweak it on the Layer Weight node. The blend you can change in another value.

Great looking renders @ghostship2 and @TheAnimaGemini, and thanks from me too for that Emissive Shader. I'm definitely going to be playing with it.

Miss B posted at 5:08AM Thu, 17 December 2020 - #4407750

Great looking renders @ghostship2 and @TheAnimaGemini, and thanks from me too for that Emissive Shader. I'm definitely going to be playing with it.

@Miss B Thanks. Here I have another interesting shader variation for émissive. Make the actual emissive prop invisible In this picture La Femme has a gigantic Sphere over her head. But when you just want the light and effect, here is the shader to make it invisible. I think great for Sci Fi or Cyberpunk renders. I use here the big emission sphere and as rim light I use HDRI , dim it down to dark grey and block it with just a background prop. I actually love to use HDRI for Rim lights. Gives nice effect.

TheAnimaGemini posted at 7:34AM Thu, 17 December 2020 - #4407786

Awesome. thanks

Y-Phil posted at 11:08AM Thu, 17 December 2020 - #4407793

TheAnimaGemini posted at 7:34AM Thu, 17 December 2020 - #4407786

Awesome. thanks

Welcome. They are not perfect , but should do the job when you need some nice effects. For the HDRI rim light I use to plug in the texture coordinate in the reflection slot. This way I have only the reflection from the HDRI.

That's definitely an interesting way to set up a Rim light. Thanks from me as well.

TheAnimaGemini posted at 5:15PM Thu, 17 December 2020 - #4407732

In fact, your idea of an emissive shader, applied to the construct's background, creates a kind of Global Illumination. I've used it here, with Bagginsbill's Fog Capsule to create this atmosphere...

@y-Phil This looks awesome. Nice idea :) Mystic

Miss B posted at 8:43PM Thu, 17 December 2020 - #4407816

That's definitely an interesting way to set up a Rim light. Thanks from me as well.

I rarely use HDRI as full light. I think it gives me not enough control over my light and shadows in the scene. I use HDRI mostly as a small fill, or rim light. Blend it out with a backdrop or props , drop the strength and set up lights individually. It works great in Blender, now I have to convert this method seamless in Poser. Still some small problems to solve, because Poser behave different, but almost there. :)

@ Y-Phil: Try adding a Blackbody node to the emission color connector and you can create global illumination to the exact color temperature of your environment. The shader below is my setup for having different Kevin degree values for different lighting conditions. Combining the TheAnimaGemini node arrangement, I can control color temperature and modulate the brightness.

I would stay away from color temperatures around 1500 degrees, that is the color of candlelight and it does not render well as global illumination.

a wallpaper texture that uses a map to alternate between metallic gold and red velvet. A little on the weird side.

@Ghostship2 Looks interesting. Like it.

I am currently testing out some glass shader.

Testing out the Post FX in Poser 12. Mesh lights only for this so the image was a little dark and noisy. De-noised and exposure kicked up.

Wonderful render. Is that Russian Vodka?

hborre posted at 1:26PM Fri, 18 December 2020 - #4407893

Wonderful render. Is that Russian Vodka?

This is part of Santuzi78's billiard room. I think he's Russian.

Cognac. My wife translated it.

hborre posted at 3:40PM Fri, 18 December 2020 - #4407899

Cognac. My wife translated it.

I thought it was white wine so I colored it pale yellow. lol

@Ghostship2 Insane render. Did you find out some cheap tricks for the Post FX? I am still struggling with it. I find it blurs to much and remove details.

@TheAnimaGemini tricks for the noise reduction: 1) large renders (i normally do 1920x1080). 2) only use it on the most stubborn renders and only after LOTS of samples. This image is 70 samples (4900 samples). It worked well on this but I've had the same issues as you with it blurring things too much on other renders. Another version with a different camera position, sub d on the bottles and higher exposure setting (more than 3 on the FX setting)

It seems to use some algorithm to try to estimate what's a feature and what's noise, and adjust the scale of noise removal accordingly. The more noise, the larger the scale of the smoothing. Here's a render I did at super low quality (just 3 samples!) and way too much light. I hadn't meant to leave the denoise on, it was just a quick lighting test. But the effect is pretty interesting even if it isn't what I meant at all.... turned it into something like brushstrokes.

Since I'm posting that, here's something that came out how I intended, from the same set of models (by Nightshift3d):

@ChromeStar how many diffuse bounces and what kind of lights are you using for the second image?

@Ghostship2 Thanks. This is what I use too. Large render and a lot of samples. And if there are still noises, I use the FX.

ghostship2 posted at 10:39PM Sun, 20 December 2020 - #4407907

hborre posted at 3:40PM Fri, 18 December 2020 - #4407899

Cognac. My wife translated it.

I thought it was white wine so I colored it pale yellow. lol

Well Cognac is some kind of vine too LOL

@ghostship2 I'll check tomorrow, I gave Poser a lot of frames to render overnight. :) If I remember correctly, the lights are all either point lights or emissive materials, and diffuse bounces may be on the default.

@ghostship2 There are four point lights down in the pit, plus a sheet of lava which is an emissive surface (physicalsurface root node, emission strength set to 1 with a fairly bright image map attached). The eyes are emissive surfaces too. Then a pair of point lights out past the doorway (i.e. not in this room), you can see one through the portcullis and the other is behind the camera.

Diffuse bounces was only set to 1. Since you asked about it, I tried a render with it raised to 4. As you might expect, that fills in the shadows quite a bit. Light bounces around more, and gets to more of those places. In this case I like it better with the lower value. The higher value did reduce the graininess, probably just because there is more light.

ChromeStar posted at 9:09PM Tue, 22 December 2020 - #4408148

@ghostship2 There are four point lights down in the pit, plus a sheet of lava which is an emissive surface (physicalsurface root node, emission strength set to 1 with a fairly bright image map attached). The eyes are emissive surfaces too. Then a pair of point lights out past the doorway (i.e. not in this room), you can see one through the portcullis and the other is behind the camera.

Diffuse bounces was only set to 1. Since you asked about it, I tried a render with it raised to 4. As you might expect, that fills in the shadows quite a bit. Light bounces around more, and gets to more of those places. In this case I like it better with the lower value. The higher value did reduce the graininess, probably just because there is more light.

I'd set diffuse bounces to 6, make sure the point lights were on inverse square and then adjust the exposure down (post FX) after render to your liking. As is it looks like a video game render. No trying to offend just here to help!

Hmm, never played with the attenuation setting on the lights before. They were on constant which seems to be the default. I take it the inverse square setting causes the light to fall off more with distance? So instead of the corners being dark due to light not having enough bounces to get there, they are dark because the light has fallen off with path length. I will have to remember that.

I did have to triple the intensity of all the lights (which makes sense), could probably have gone even higher but that at least let me crank up the exposure without adding too much noise. Also doubled the number of samples. But I see what you mean. The eyes are particularly improved (do emissive materials in superfly attenuate at the inverse square rate too?). I tried the denoise again, and while it completely removes all the noise, even at 50 samples here it seems like it is erasing too much detail. Can't complain too much about the number of samples though, it was still only a five minute render with optix.

constant means the light never falls off. Inverse square is how lights look/work in the real world. Very bright when close and natural falloff.

Yes, you can attenuate emissive mesh lighting by adding a LightFalloff node to the strength connector of the Emission node as illustrated below:

Use the Quadratic connector, it attenuates the light, and control the intensity with the strength value on that node. That Blackbody node controls the light temperature in degrees Kevin, you can simulate different types of lights like candlelight to bright midday lighting. Depending on the temperature range, you can imitate LED, incandescence, halogen, etc.

@hborre I'm pretty sure mesh lights are inverse square falloff by default. If you make a square mesh light the same size as an area light you'll get the same light result.

You may be right about that. I was giving it some thought and my initial feeling tends to lean towards the emission lighting already emits as an inverse square. I'll find time to play around with those settings to see what conclusions I come up with.

This is the link to the online Blender reference manual: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/shader_nodes/color/light_falloff.html?highlight=light%20falloff

It explains the LightFalloff node and its settings. The Poser node does the exact same effect as described on the website.

@hborre looks like the intention of the light falloff node is so you can have mesh lights that don't work on inverse square for special effects.

That's what it appears to do. I ran a whole series of renders changing the smooth value combined with the Quadratic connector and found that you can modulate the light emission intensity without losing the source mesh light intensity. This is particularly helpful if you are placing an image on a prop or plane and want to control the emission without losing details on the image.

a winter fashion image. I'm guilty of being a dude who has bought women's fashion magazines in the past. Get in the checkout line when no one is around. lol

I won't tell. Very nice.

you obviously bought them for reference material. If a writer can lookup 50 ways to dispose of a body and no one bats an eye, than an artist can buy fashion magazines

ghostship2 posted at 10:20AM Tue, 29 December 2020 - #4408837

Wow... splendid picture

Santa was good to me this year and I found Poser 12 under the tree.(okay, not literally) Here's my first render with it

@RedPhantom dark elf? cool!

Was trying out the new principled hair shader. it works decent, but the thickness of the strands mattered. I couldn't go as low as I usually like.

wow! can you share that shader setup? I haven't messed with that node yet because of the tangent issue.

It's not a complicated setup. I just played around with some values until I got something decent. I don't know about any tangent issue.

I finally got the settings I was looking for: the base layer is using the PrincipledBSDF node, without specular, but with a mix of transparency and a working anisotropy in a second layer. Scene lit with an HDRi on the background node + a big area light.

Remember Apollo? Here he is with his textures adjusted for Cycles, wearing WildHairMale, also with a Cycles shader.

And after finding Poser 12 under the christmas tree...

WOW, Great images here folks!

WildManeHair. I beta tested that eon's ago. I used to have it but I can't find it any more, since I didn't have to pay for it, it was probably on some hard drive that crashed and burned. Nice to see Apollo again!