Quote - You can do the same in Reality. The reflection strength is controlled by the brightness of the specular color. The amount of "polish" of a specular surface is controlled by the glossiness strength. You don't have to micromanage the materials because they have physical attributes, something that you don't have in Studio. The best way to approach Lux and Reality is to avoid thinking of them as "3Delight on steroids." Using the 3Delight midset with Reality/Lux is a surefire path to frustration and bad results. You need to think like a photographer and work in the context of realistic materials. Once you do that the results will happen right away.

Please don't hesitate asking more questions if you need.

It's definitely going to take some time for me. I literally zero experience as a photographer (I rarely even use my phone camera), so trying to think like one is probably not doing my renders much good at the moment. I think the difficulty for me is largely that the render times are quite longer than 3Delight, so I don't tend to notice that I'm not getting the intended results until it's done a fair number of samples.  As for materials, that one will continue to be a bit of a stumbling block. As I mentioned earlier, subsurface scatter is something I can't seem to find an option for. Glossy materials don't appear to support it. In fact, it's one of the reasons I'm looking at grabbing Reality 3 when it's released for its dedicated Skin shaders. Another thing I'm used to doing (albeit largely to work with biased renderers) is being able to set a texture to full ambient so it's bright whatever the lighting (useful for things like Jepes' ThrowZ).

That said, there is one thing I'm very curious about and that's the "Load Shaders" option in the drop down. Does this only load ACSEL shaders made through Reality? I downloaded some Lux materials from the site, but there doesn't seem to be a way to integrade those shaders into Reality. It probably seems like an obvious answer, but considering the drop down has options which actually **specify **they're ACSEL, and that one doesn't I just had to query it.

> Quote - The lighting result of Lux depends on many, many things. Almost impossible to right down in a short comment. > > My first tip however, would be to replace the spotlights with small meshlights positioned at the place the spots are now. Spotlights give razor sharp shadows and with small meshlights you can 'steer' the softness of the shadows. > > Luxrender lights are very different from the Daz lights and you cannot automatically convert a Daz light into a Lux light. I know that Lux picks up pointlights, distantlights and spotlights but my advice is to avoid those. Use the lights that are designed for Luxrender otherwise you are selling yourself short. > > There is also no need to use 'houselights'. Simply disable 'Preview lights' in the 'Window' tab. That way you keep a clear overall lighting in your scene if you stil decide to keep using Daz lights. > > Not much, but I hope this will set you in the right derection. :)

I think my current problems are that by using the mesh lights Reality provides tends to push things to the opposite end of the spectrum. They appear extremely dim at render, and it's a lot harder to direct them so it doesn't interfere with the scene as you can with spotlights. Also, since the scale of the light directly affects the strength, it can be hard to balance it out. Striking the balance is probably Reality's steepest learning curve, especially since a lot of the focus is on the lighting. I've also found it extremely difficult working with the materials, as the options are far fewer than in Daz Studio. I'm used to being able to tweak all kinds of settings like subsurface scatter (sorely missed in Reality 2.0), reflection strength and more, as well as creating less natural elements using the pwShaders like plasma or fire. Moving from having so many options to having so few puts me a little out of my element.

The above render, for those curious, was going for well over 20 hours. It's still far from perfect, as one can tell from the amount of noise, and the skin and hair aren't particularly lifelike yet. I'm moving onto the later builds of Luxrender since they seem to be improving their 'firefly' removal by leaps and bounds, but it could be a while yet before I'm comfortable using it regularly.

Maybe someone here can help me work out a solution to my Luxrender woes. A trend for a lot of my work is bright, vibrant scenes. Ultimately I want to get the most out of Lux and Reality, but I won't deny that most of my work is still done using 3Delight because I have a genuine difficulty trying to get the same effects out of it that I can using 3Delight's shaders.

Firstly I have a hopefully simple question. Is there a way to get Reality to read my Daz light settings and convert them appropriately? I say this because no matter which light settings I add to the scene, they always default to 1.00 gain and 100 watts and need reworking in Reality. I've also noticed that the "House Lights" tag doesn't seem to work and Reality still tries to render them, so I have to manually disable any such lights in the Reality dialogs.

Secondly, and related to the picture, I could really use some help with skin settings. Sadly ACSEL shaders aren't available for a lot of the figures I currently use, and I can't figure out what Surface Fuzz is actually doing, since I can't see a difference between using it and not. The example image is a postworked piece I did recently. The post work process was identical for both.

The left represents 3Delights render. The right is Reality 2.0. Both use virtually the same lighting rig. Three spotlights, and one IBL (Daz's UE2 replaced by Reality's IBL). I used the same TIFF image for the IBL in both (though I note this also has to be done through Reality since changing the IBL sphere surface has no effect).

Any tips for getting a cleaner, brighter image?