I'm eyeing Synthetic & Blackhearted's Proluma 2. Does anyone have examples of renders that DON'T use GND? I'm interested in seeing how capable the lights are without Blackhearted's shaders.

TIA.

Well I bought these yesterday myself and my renders look terrible.  I know I'm doing something wrong.  No matter what light I'm using, it puts black eye liner on all my characters.  It's got to be a simple setting. 

That's weird. To me, that sounds like something from a shader, not from lights.

timag
Yes that's what I was thinking but I'm tinkering with them now and it seems to be working fine but yesterday it was horrible.  I'll get them to work eventually.

Quote - Well I bought these yesterday myself and my renders look terrible.  I know I'm doing something wrong.  No matter what light I'm using, it puts black eye liner on all my characters.  It's got to be a simple setting. 

It could be the Ambient Occlusion setting adding an eye shadow that looks like liner. Look at the property panel of the lights to see if light based AO is being used.

Edited to Add: Wasn't there any kind of tutorial that came with the set. Blackhearted usually includes fairly comprehensive tuts/readmes

I noticed that there are more reviews on the site, and users are raving about the tutorials.

The way Ambient Occlusion works is basically, it blackens any surface that has other polygons near it, that are kinda-not-planar to the surface..  This means, on a flat or convex surface, like a plane or a ball, an object won't provoke AO on itself, but on the eye, yes the eyelash polygons will provoke AO on the eyelid.

I have this light set and have had no problems at all.  In fact the image that is rendering now uses the Proluma2 lights and will hopefully finish rendering sometime before Easter (well it seems like it renders that slow sometimes!).

Did you go under Render settings and turn off Gamma Correction?

It seems to be working for the moment.  My Poser 7 stops working after to many hours of rendering.  I have to re-boot my computer.

Well, I also picked it up... no renders yet, but it looked good and seemed like a worthwhile way to use my Render Rewards. :)

first, glad everyone's getting the lights to work nicely!  some nice gallery renders are starting to show up that feature proluma2. 

this is pretty exciting to see...and since we were shooting for a 'pose and shoot' product (ok ok--it's still POSER, we only were MOSTLY able to make it that way :)) we're also super happy to see that most of you are having an easy time with the lights.  however:

please feel free to drop me a site mail if you have any questions about the product or are trying to get it to do something unusual.  i'd ask that you please be sure to review the readme PDF that comes with the product--but am more than glad to offer support where it is needed.

finally, we still want to streamline the way the product works--making it even easier to use and more powerful at the same time.  since we are working on an add-on pack at the moment, feel free to drop a note if you think there is something that could be explained more clearly or if there is a particular type of lighting you are just dying to see.  Might just make it in there...Suggestions in general are totally welcome.

thanks everyone for your fantastic support--

-Synthetic.

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Synthetic, I noticed that your tutorial says not to use GC with Proluma... I'm not happy with that, because I think GC is the proper way to go. Anyway... can I get full advantage of the lightset by turning down the intensities while using GC?

hey b--

agree.  personally, i LOVE gamma correction in poser pro.....use it sometimes to get that very flat washed out look that i like.

however, there is the side of me releasing these lights to the wild hordes out there.  the ONLY reason it says 'no gamma' is to make things predicatable for the new user.  what i really mean is "if you want things to look just like the preset icons"--then please turn gamma off.

since you have a good grasp of what GC does--and understand how to control its effects--please do feel free to experiment with it ON.

caution: all of the proluma2 presets are set so that gamma on the HDR is affected by the output gamma in render settings.  to get correct results (hard for me to predict)--you may have to adjust the input gamma on the HDRs separately.  I'm guessing that you would set it up so that input gamma is still flat (1 i think)--this way you will get the same lighting quality from the preset, but the OUTPUT gamma is shifted.

lemme know what ya come up with--would be neat to see it.

-s/.

Thanks, Synthetic. Completely forget about input gamma adjustment. (Never done it, but I was aware of it.) Sounds like a good route to go.

you just pretend you are loading a new HDR image map.  click on that an then you can tweak the settings :)