Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/softgood.ez?ViewSoftgood=5821

hey folks.. just thought id let you know that my new light set went up in the marketplace this morning.

its geared towards both the beginner and the advanced poser user - anyone can benefit from good lighting. a lot of you have been bugging me for a long time to write a lighting tutorial, well this is even better.

cheers,
-gabriel

what does the GI designation mean? What makes a setting a Pro Studio Spot? What do you mean by Special Effects GI? Thanks

GI = global illumination the poser renderer doesnt support advanced lighting effects such as raytracing, caustics, or global illumination (GI). however, there are a few tricks you can use to give the impression of true GI, and at a fraction of the rendering time (several hours) that goes with such lighting calculations. GI calculates the light thats reflected off of and onto objects within the scene from the light sources, giving a much more naturally lit look with soft shadows. many times ive rendered an image in poser with the GI presets and shown it to 3D professionals who were convinced it was rendered in a high-end program like lightwave. there are several intensities of these lights in the set, as well as a 'quickrender gi' light that renders in a much shorter time because it uses less lights (but also sacrifices quality and softer shadows). keep in mind that since these setups use a couple dozen lights, your renders will take slightly longer than with default poser lighting, but its well worth it. as for the spotlights, theyre setups of several spotlights (key lights, fills, etc) to simulate photo studio lighting. the special effects/spotlight enhanced gi lights are a combination of the gi effect and colored lighting/spotlights/intensities/light positioning to give some cool lighting effects. for example, the image rendered above (the faerie) was done using the dryad light. its done using a standard vicky texture (pink skintones), the lighting adds the green tone and luminescance. aside from faerie/goblin/fantasy scenes, its great for underwater as well. among the 27 lights youre sure to find something perfect for your scene, or to spice-up old poser scenes and re-render them. cheers, -gabriel

GI means global illumination. That's a good thing. Looks great Blackhearted! Personally, I don't have lighting problems but I DO take forever to set them up. These look like they'd be great for people who already know what they're doing with lighting as a short cut, and AWESOME for new users or those without much experience with lights. Once I can scrounge up some extra cash, I know what I'll be gettin' next.

clarification on the above: "at a fraction of the rendering time (several hours) that goes with such lighting calculations"... in programs with rendering engines that have raytracing/global illumination the actual render of a complex image can take from anywhere between hours to days. poser generally renders an image in a minute or two (because of its simple renderer). with the GI lights, it might take double that time because of all the shadow maps it has to render. i dont want people getting confused about my above post and thinking its going to take hours to render an image with these :) i think the longest render ive done in poser (and this was with 5 characters, a detailed backdrop, dozens of props, high-res textures, complex reflection mapping and 30 omni lights) took under 20 minutes at 4000x4000x300dpi.

I want to know what you are rendering with!!! A set up like you described would take me 4-5 hours to render in Poser. Hmm... what size shadow maps are you using? Even so that's really fast. I love the lighting presets. I immediately went and put them in my shopping cart and will be buying them in the near future.

my main rig is an athlon t-bird 1.2ghz, 64mb geforce 2 ultra and 1.5GB of RAM :) however - and this is going to shock the hell out of you - my second machine (my server) is an AMD K6 2/450 overclocked to 500 mhz. it has 194 MB of ram and a voodoo3 3500. it renders images almost as fast as my main rig - its only a few minutes behind. what does this tell you about the optimization the poser code desperately needs? however, posing, loading, switching views, etc are quite slow on the older machine. I think you need at least a PIII or better to get good performance from poser - anything slower and the actual scene setup takes forever, even if the rendering is almost as quick. my ex used the K62 for messing around in poser and never once complained about it though. i think your operating system has something to do with it as well - ever since i switched to win2k/xp i havent had poser lock up on me once. back when i was on 98/me i constantly had problems with it freezing on renders and when i tried to turn a morph dial. cheers, -gabriel

Looks good, Blackheart. I can second Blackhearted on the render times. I have three systems, [counting my roomie's 900 that I have access to] and using multiple light setups, full reflection mapping, and multiple figures, I've seldom seen more than a few minutes difference between my 450mhz and the 900mhz. And I've never had a render take more than 6 - 10 minutes in poser at a maximum. Big differnce seems to be that my 600 with a gig of ram will build and render scenes that my 450 won't load at all, much less render.

Ummm... 1.5Gig RAM??!! What??!! Windows98 can't manage more than 512Meg. What's the secret? Did that happen when you installed Win2k or did you get that much RAM to work before that and HOW?

Yup I'm totally freaked out by that.(I couldn't get 756Meg by any brand to work in Windows.) :) :) :)

Win98 SE has problems wth Ram greater than 1.5 gigs. It can get squirrely sometimes on 512 to 1 gig, but that seems to be a matter of the motherboard chipset and the BIOS moreso than Win98SE in particular. I haven't had any problems with 1gb on my Tyan board and my dual boot set up.