Just curious what your thoughts are as to what makes for good lighting of a (Poser) scene. I have played around alot with the lights in Poser and have had some success, but I do not think I ever stopped to look at the question of lighting from the perspective of the folks looking at renders. What I think makes for good lighting of a scene may not be what others think. So I am interested in hearing your thoughts/comments on this. Rob

Most Poser renders tend to be flat because the lighting is flat. A good lighting set up, whether it's for a temple or an attack of a space zombie or whatever else you're working on, provides a sense of depth and texture through the means by which it creates shadows -- and we're not talking the kind that a figure casts on the ground, but the ones that comes from bends in the body and folds in the clothing. Colour -- if every light you use is the same colour, you're not giving the image a chance to work. The best lighting uses a main light in one colour, and a secondary light in a contrasting colour -- like, say, your image is at night -- you want your main light to be a soft blue. If you come around to the other side of your figure and hit it with an equally soft orange, the blue will really punch out. Things like this can make a set up really work, and the lights in Poser aren't that difficult once you get a few key concepts in place.

Attached Link: http://www.digital-wax.com/download/glowball.zip

I'm a big fan of global illumination. Its the only poser lighting style that looks good to me. Colored lights just look overly saturated IMHO. And as far as GI lighting goes, my favorite in the whole wide world is the set I made, called GlowBall. You can DL it at the link I provided.

practice

Shadownet, Lighting serves many functions. First, you must decide what your image is supposed to DO, then you'll know how to light it. Light indicates environment. Stark neon with bleak shadows? The viewer is on some mean streets. Greenish shifting ripples with vague shadows? Underwater at a particular depth. Orienting the viewer is a good thing. The environmental clues can be social or temporal or spatial, but lighting helps fix that point. Light indicates mood. There is a lot which can be done with the psychology of color. Red and yellow are danger colors to western eyes (used for signaling flags among other things). Red and yellow and black explosions make a viewer nervous. Blue is a hard color to focus upon, and the eye might linger more rather than jump around: blues, purples, greens are recessive, calming colors to our eyes. A soft purple glow is probably not dangerous... unless you are about to be ensorcelled by a maiden's smile. Colored lights should be used sparingly unless you are going for the impact. Contrasting colors on alternate sides will give a figure depth, but if all your iamges use that technique, it becomes a cliche and not a tool. Decide if you are being playful or aggressive or whatever with your image, and choose colors to further that goal. Light guides the eye. YOU determine what the viewer sees in your image, and what the viewer sees first! The direction of travel of the eye is well-documented. Example 1: You fill a cave with all the golden items in the Marketplace and use global lighting so that the viewer can see them all in radiant glory. The eye takes in a glittery mess and jumps away. If you had used a spotlight or one of the torch/candle props and upped the lighting, you could have the viewer see your hero isolated against the dark and the trail of sparkles leading directly to the gleam in the old dragon's eye. Uh-oh. The pinpricks of light on all the treasure and the dragon's scales add textural richness, but diminishing the overall light level means that you control what is seen and when. The eye goes to the area of greatest contrast first. This is almost always a contrast of light and dark. It can be detail, it can be focus, it can be color, but it is usually light. If you have a bright happy outdoors scene, you don't want dark shadows. Black ambient color in the shadowed skin of healthy people makes them look deader than a victim in a shooter. Use a global or HDRI setup to get the effect of natural bounced light and perhaps color it a bit if the surfaces which would be reflecting the light warrant it. If your figures are against red rock bluffs or floating in a turquoise pool under an even bluer sky, their skin will be picking up a bit of that color. Noon at a marble-lined manor-house? White light. Good lighting is effective: it reveals as much of the scene as you wish to reveal, directs the viewer's eye, establishes location, sets the mood, conveys the message. The use of light and shadow defines the world you create for the viewer. Carolly

Glad to see this thread gettings some comments. It will help me out. I appreaciate everyone who has taken time to reply so far, in particular Carolly and Sean because their comments are more along the line of what I am looking for. Also, what annoys you about lighting - that is what makes it bad. Like scenes that are too dark that you can not really see what is happening, or maybe scenes that are so bright everything seems to have that "burned" look??? Just trying to get a better feel for what folks consider the general does and don'ts.

I find picking colors used in the background and scene help make a more natural light. I think that is how HDRI lights are put together, not sure. I find too many lights are a waist of time. 2 or 3 well placed lights work better, with one properly adjusted shadow cam and settings. This also gives you room to add extra lights for lamps and stuff without taking away the original effect. Yet still keeping the proper shadows that happen with multi light sources. Lets face it. No matter what you have in a scene, or how much time you spend on the render, it still needs well thought out lighting to make it work.

this is a sample of that free glowball lightset

heres another render with the Hrdi lighsets using a variant that i made....

Thanks Beryld :O)

Bungle1, not being argumentive okay, just trying to understand things better. What makes global lighting good in your opinion? You posted two examples of global lighting to illustrate a point, but I would rather not guess at what it is about this kind of lighting that appeals to you. Global lighting is obviously a lighting technique that appeals to a lot of folks, you being one. Therefore, there must be aspects about it that make for that appeal. That is what I am trying to learn. So, what is it - in general - about the global lighting approach that appeals to you. Thanks. :O)

Get this book: http://www.3drender.com/light/index.html

The concepts of artistic lighting are as old as art itself. Don't limit your studies of light to Poser. Many different media address the same ideas. (Personally, I learned a lot about lighting from photography.) Also lighting is as much about personal style. Find what compliments your style and then learn how to replicate it in Poser.

Again, thanks to one and all who have responded. I also appreciate the tips and the links to more info on the subject of lighting. I think though my question is not being understood. Like many others here, I have made a study of Lighting. Look at it as it applies to other media as well as Poser. I have some idea as to how to reproduce those effects in Poser, etc. I even have some understanding of the classical thoughts on lighting. All of which is very useful and good to know. But what I am asking is What makes lighting good for you? When you look at a render - all these other technical issues aside - what things make lighting good to you and what makes it not good. I know how you light a scene can very from one scene to another, but there is something - maybe a certain kind of lighting or something - that appeals to you as a person. This is what I am curious about. Do you like dark moodily lit scenes where details are hard to make out? Or do you prefer globall lighting scenes because you can see all details clearly? I am getting some good thoughts on lighting but most of these are of a clinical/technical nature. I am trying to understand the human aspect, the personal side of looking at a render. And in this case in particular, Lighting and what makes it good and not so good to you. Not what the text books say.

shadow, I'll take that question about GI lighting. What makes it appealing is that it overcomes poser's natural tendency to render images that are too dark and overly saturated. take a poser render in photoshop and you can work wonders just with levels and curves. postwork is still needed with GI lighting, but it gives you a better starting point and end result.

One of the most most important things for me is that the highlights and shadows match the supposed light sources. If they don't, it screams FAKE. One of the many reasons that I detested Toy Story is that they didn't think through the lighting issues. Somebody spent and billed 9 months work for the shader on Andy's hair... but not one person considered where the light in the kid's room was coming from? The main promo image has the bed and all the toys. 11 separate light sources if you look at where all the highlights are. Lovingly rendered. The huge picture window showing bright daylight outside is not a lightsource? Bullshit! Somebody blew it badly. The light from that window would have cast shadows even if it didn't make neat pinpricks. Fake. Fake. Fake. When the viewer is snickering, she isn't absorbed in the image or the story. I have complained many, many times in this forum about painted-on highlights, especially on commercial textures. Look at the image above as a typical example where the eyes don't even have the light from the same direction, and the cloudy evenness of HDRI wouldn't leave highlights like that, anyway. Why should I buy a texture and have to take it into PhotoShop to remove the highlights? It is either that, or try to match my scene lighting to where the texture artist placed the eye highlights... and if they are on flipped irises, that is impossible. At best. There is a wonderful old man texture in the Marketplace that I've looked at several times, but the glow on the skin is directional (the flipping in her promopics show it clearly), and I don't want to be tied down OR to have to repaint it. The textural is photo-real... but only if the room lighting matches it. When I place my room lights, I want all the highlights and all the shadows to conform to that lighting. Interior scenes with controlled lighting are more critical. Outside, bounced lighting offers a little bit more freedom, but sunlight is often so strong that it overrides all else. For bad lighting, I can point to outdoor scenes where the figures are throwing 2 or more shadows on the grass. Unless we've been transported to Tatooine, we will only produce one shadow under strong sunlight. Eye highlights in the front and sun in the back is a bad combo. Painted highlights on hair is also problematical, but not as much as in the eyes. Hair is wispy and translucent enough that it might be catching the light. Besides getting the direction of the highlights and light sources to match, one also needs to consider the shape and strength and color of highlights. Remember childhood cartoons where the highlight in the character's eye was shaped like a 4-paned window (typical 1950's house). Fine for indoor scenes. Stupid outdoors. The triangle or teardrop shape is a lot more forgiving when characters are moving around from scene to scene. All we have to work with IS light. Little photons go splat against the backside of a pice of glass, and we need to make them look like desert (harsh, clear, strong definitions) or foggy dene with will-of-the-wisps (indeterminate glow). With good lighting, the scene looks real enough to step into... with no niggling sense of falseness... no matter where in the universe we are taking the viewer. All of this, of course, applies to realistic scenes where we are portraying 3 dimensions. Cartoons or decorative pieces have their own parameters. Carolly

I'll also offer a personal viewpoint, since I think that is a part of what you are asking. My best-known piece, a watercolor, uses indeterminate lighting because it is set in the space between reality and surreality, and sunlight might anchor it too firmly in this world. I prefer, however, to use strong lighting. My best photographs are backlit, silhouetted, f-stopped down 2-4 times, or otherwise dramatic. Long, raking shadows... yum! When I discovered scratchboard a couple of decades ago, I was ecstatic: I could just use light to shape things. This was my first scratchboard piece. There is nothing in the scene... only the play of light on the boundary between figure and ground. Whether you are shaping something with words or with light, there is something magical in the very act of shaping it. Carolly

Zarabanda, thanks for commenting on the GI lighting. I did not really understand the reasons why many folks had made the jump to Global Lighting, and this helped to explain some of it. Carolly, what can I say. You are ever a wellspring. You have such a great way of putting things in perspective. Your unicorn speaks to that. Thanks a bunch. :O)

Carolly - as happens all too rarely, your words have inspired me enough to want to check out your gallery for further enjoyment. Eek - there's nothing there! Crime! Love the image you posted, but I'd quite like to see more of your work. Any danger of you uploading some stuff? Cheers, Cliff