I've tried the tutorials listed in Renderosity, but was extremely disappointed. Sydd's tutorial only talked about lights, but didn't show how to create what he was talking about. Poser Arcana has some weird animated tutorials which won't help if you want to work while you read. 3D-CC's tutorials lack polish. Some authors would benefit from learning basic spelling and grammar skills, and a lesson in tact. After months of fiddling, I've come to the realization that lighting is one of the critical skills to master. Now I'd love to learn from someone who knows their stuff, and knows how to communicate as well. If you've found a good lighting tutorial, please share the information. Thanks.

ron - people who provide tutorials online do so of their own free will. they spend a lot of time writing them, and provide them generously without asking anything in return. its not nice to insult their spelling :) and syyd is a she :) i cant point you in the direction of a lighting tutorial, because i havent found one yet. i can, however, tell you how i learned on my own. do a search in freestuff for 'illustrender'. 2 light sets by snowsultan will pop up. install them. now load one of your scenes (the one with the demon and guy in the alley would be a good place to start) and one by one, go through the list of lights, loading each of them and noting how they affect your scene in both mood, shadows, depth, etc. itll give you an idea of what type of lighting works best with what scene. then, go to the light properties in the upper left of your poser interface, and play around with the lights. select a light, move it around. once a light is selected, you can use the morph dials on the right to adjust its intensity. the shadow dials are also very useful: there are two dials that affect the shadows in your scene, the Shadow dial and the Map Size dial. the shadow map size and shadow setting work together SHADOW decides the softness of your shadows: set to 1, your shadows are hard black lines, set to .5, theyre blurrier, softer shadows, etc now if you are setting them to a lower, blurry setting then you dont need a huge shadow map because you lose detail anyways - so keep it at like 400 and itll be fine, unless for extreme closeups if youre using hard shadows, a high shadow setting, then set the mapsize to 1024-2056 otherwise you get pixellation and jaggedness this is also dependant on the resolution youre rendering in obviously if youre only rendering a 600x480 image you dont need 2056 shadow maps play around with these settings, and learn for yourself by experimenting. the knowledge you glean from it will be worth a lot more than what little you would learn if you just went through a tutorial that told you step by step what to do. cheers, gabriel

Attached Link: http://Cyber-Fyber.bbay.com/CF-DLfiles/Lights-How-To.txt.zip

Try this one.

Don: "Page cannot be found." I did manage to find a good lighting tutorial ad 3DCC today. It's by the3dgm (I guess). Hey, this whole speech about "free and free will" doesn't always hold water. I think if you're going to do something to share with someone you should do the best job possible. And you should sit down and go through it step by step after you've written the tutorial. Approach the project as if you were talking to someone who needs their hand held step-by-step. (That's the safest way). If the author tells someone to do something, that step, and each step, should be illustrated with screenshots. The proper words should be chosen to illustrate the screenshots. Words and screenshots should be relevant to each other. The entire project should be proofread for spelling & grammar errors. The whole project should just make sense. I'm beginning to think I'm of the "older generation, with old-fashioned values." In my day, if I do something, it has to be good. It has to be worthy of being a gift if it is free. I'd never put poop in a box, and yell at someone because they complained of the smell. Most of the free stuff is not poop....but too many of the free contributors think the price of their gifts eliminates all other considerations such as quality and tact.

youre welcome, ron. youve certainly made sure that i dont waste my time posting help for people ever again.

You're being too defensive. You urged me to fiddle about and learn. I've been fiddling about for several months, and finally realized I don't know so many of the basics. So I am looking for tutorials that actually help. At the same time I am looking for intelligent interchange with people who actually care to talk, think, listen, and speak. It appears that many artistic types have a hard time with constructive criticism & communication.

Blackhearted : I agree to your last post. Another thing is, many people here ( as me ) are not from a country where english is the normal language. And if we try to help here or with tuts its sometimes hard to explain things in another language.

Instead of complaining about how bad someone's English is or how their tutorial lacks polish we should be thanking them for taking the time and quite evident effort in the case of language problems to put these together.I for one applaud the people who's first language is not english for struggling to write their tutorials in English, they could quite easily write in their main language and leave the rest of us to sort it out ourselves. Thank you!

I have to agree with Blackhearted and gang. It's a hell of thing to ask for help while dissing the very people that could help you. I, for one, applaud the tutorial writers. It's a difficult thing to write a tutorial that everyone can understand, more difficult than you think. When I was writing up my Pepper's Ghost one, I had to step back several times and wonder if it wasn't too advanced for those who would be using it. Still not sure if I did a good job on it or not, but I tried.

There is the language barrier as well, but the main thing I think is that the tutorials assume, and rightfully so, that you have read the manuals or at least read the section for which the tutorial applies. For instance, in the lighting, tutorials are generally targetted at where lights should go, and how to get the most out of the settings, not how to use the Poser light system which is in the manual. I have read through Syyd's tutorial and found it very informative myself.

So before you go complaining about these nice folks who have offered their time, effort (and even money for hosting), for nothing in return, think about whether you'd rather have a tutorial free world, because no tutorial is perfect, but they serve their purpose, to help all of us be better at what we do and they are the effort of some very nice and very giving people.

Stepping down off soapbox now...

Again, if you're going to do it, you may as well do it right. If English is not your primary language, then you could ask your English-speaking friends for input and suggestions for improvement. If you're new to producing tutorials, then you can use this as a learning experience. Invite constructive feedback, then go back and improve your product. People can show their gratitude, but still want something that does the job. I'm looking for something that works. I already tried some stuff, and it didn't work. I don't want someone sending me back to the stuff I already tried.

I am slow and dense. This is how I learned lighting. Maybe it will help you.

Load your favorite character. Turn on Ground. Delete all but one of the lights. Turn it into a spotlight (white to start). Use Point At function to aim it at the head of your figure. Select the light and start at the top of the dials, seeing how each affects the lighting. If you want a more distinct display of the effects, set a vertical plane (medium or dark color) in the middle of your scene.

Except that you have to move the light more leftward and back than you would expect, the Poser light moves are pretty straight forward. (Be sure you have Cast Shadows and Anti-alias set on Render Options).

When you feel like you have the single spot nailed, and are tired of the "dark side of the moon" effect in the shadowed areas, make a new light (blue is good), change it to infinite, turn off Cast Shadows, and crank down the intensity to 50% to start. Move it opposite the original spotlight and aim it somewhere lower on the figure to fill in the shadowed portions and make them more visible.

Then....

Add in a sphere from Prop Types and resize it to 10%, setting it back (z trans) to -5 to start with. Fire up the Depth Cue and go make yourself a nice cup of tea. Then play around with moving the ball, rendering, repeat, until the many mysteries of "too much fog", "too little light" are revealed to you.

When you have these three elements under your belt, you will pretty much have a handle on Poser lighting.

There are all kinds of fancy things to add after that, of course, but you'll have some idea of how to control the effect.

And, you might consider that language is managed on the other hemisphere of the brain from artistry and mathematics and music, so it only stands to reason that for the truly artistic, words, as a whole, are a "second language."

Myself, being a less-artistic left-brainer, find the spelling in this forum to be one of its main delights.

(the picture is Muscle-Bound Mike, Edo texture, Eric Pose, one spot, two infinite lights, and depth cue on. No post.)

eng

Blackhearted, I've also had difficulty getting the essentials of lighting from the several Tutorials I've checked, some things are tougher than other for some people :-)) - but I appreciate both your and ENGELKEN's suggestions on what areas to play with to catch on a bit better. I'm in the middle of "porting" Poser (and all my other apps) over to my new computer, and won't be able to try it for a few days, but I've printed out this page so I can try them out them. Many, many thanks!

Attached Link: http://Cyber-Fyber.bbay.com/CF-DLfiles/Lights-How-To.txt.zip

ronknights- Had server probs at site. Try URL again for Lights Tutorial. If you cannot access it still, send me a Forum Message and I will Email you a copy. It is not the final word on Lights, but there are some very useful tips and tricks therein. BTW- I tend to agree with you on the literacy issue. As for non-English speakers and writers, they can post a best-they-can translation and include their native language version as well. Some folks can translate or get it translated if need be. When I read a lot of misspellings and grammatical bloopers, it makes me wonder if the free or for-sale item was made with the same inattention to detail and quality. I guess I am an old fogey, too, with old-fashioned values... -Don

Don, For some reason that link still doesn't work. Were you trying to send me directly to a zip file? Eng, Your explanation looks good. I have copied and pasted it into MS Word so I can print out and most likely pursue it tomorrow. I confess I've had a few rough months, and have decided to lubricate things just a little with a 6-pack of Coors Light. I don't do that often, and most likely won't get the second beer finished before I am blissfully asleep. Be patient with me, people. I am likely one of the slowest people you'll meet when it comes to some of this computer stuff. (Poser, FrontPage, Dreamweaver, etc.) On the other hand, I once made a living from providing excellent computer technical support. I'm now in between jobs and thinking of finally getting into "Human Services," which is what I had planned 33 years ago.

I just wanted to let you know that I had already tried fiddling about with lights, and just got more and more lost. I just can't seem to tell what things affect others, or even what looks good. Part of the problem is most likely my crappy monitor. I can't adjust that at all to take me out of the shadows. But we'll be lucky to get a larger monitor for Christmas. I want to create some excellent artwork and give it away for Christmas presents. I have had my eye on one particular Hewlett Packard model that does double-sided printing, out of the box.

It's been my experience that there ain't no shortcut when it comes to lighting. It pretty much sets the entire mood of your render. I typically invest around 30-50% of my time setting up the lighting to capture a particular mood. I've tried using presets but end up fiddling with them so much that they no longer resemble what they started out to be. You might also try looking for some photography tutorials to learn lighting basics. I usually begin with my main light source. Where do I want the light to come from? Then start adding additional lights to fill in areas that need additional highlights or color. As for the lack of quality in tutorials you mentioned, you might volunteer to help edit some of them.

http://Cyber-Fyber.bbay.com/CF-Pages/CF-Lights.html This'n worx. DL one of the free light sets. The Tutorial is inside with a relevant JPG. 3Don

OK, I'll check that one out a bit later today. Now tell me about saving lights? If I make a set of lights, and save them... Do I save the whole set in one action? Or do I need to select each individual light and save it?! See, a really dumb question?!

the whole set is saved in one action

OOOH, so no wonder some of my saved light sets looked too dark?!

Here's a good example of my confusion. I'm using the Virtual Studio (another great freebie!). It has 3 spot lights. The creator says maybe we should get rid of one spotlight. No matter what I do to fiddle with these lights, Vicki always comes out looking "bleached," while Mike looks decent. So what do I do?

Here's how I'd do it. Try to isolate which light(s) are causing the problem. If you can identify your primary light source, turn all the other ones off (for now). Start with adjusting the intensity of the primary light until it you get it the way you want it. (you might also try using the "texture shaded" document display to give you a better idea prior to rendering). Then begin to bring in more light to "color" the rest of your image.