Hey all.  A quick search through the manual didn't help, so I'm coming here.  Rendering a scene without actual Poser lights.  Using IDL and self-illuminated one-sided squares as meshlights.  Ran a test render, and the lighting came out great, but I now need to adjust my camera FStop until I get the DOF I need.  Wondering, hopefully, that there is a way to simply reuse the Irradiance Cache for IDL so I don't need to run through the indirect lighting calcs again.  Possible?

no

Quote - no

Thanks.  Yeah, I pretty much assumed so and just rendered ran it through again.  Not a big deal, but in an unbiased renderer, it's something useful that could be possible, and would be a great time saver.  Although not sure if DOF changes the illumination solution enough to require a complete recalculation anyway.  So may have not even been useful in this case.

whilst I don't know if there's some way to re-use the IC data via some script as there is with carrara, ISTR bill said FFRender calculates it differently amongst several renders of an identical scene, so it would save time for that.  but IDL could change quite a bit with non-identical scenes (animation).

Quote - whilst I don't know if there's some way to re-use the IC data via some script as there is with carrara, ISTR bill said FFRender calculates it differently amongst several renders of an identical scene, so it would save time for that.  but IDL could change quite a bit with non-identical scenes (animation).

Yeah, it wouldn't work for animation, unless it was only camera translations through a scene, but not with animated characters or figures in the scene.  In the case of animated figures, the IC data would certainly need to be recalculated every frame.  It could be saved and reused, however, in situations like a camera fly-around on an otherwise static scene.  Like can be done in Carrara or 3dsmax or whatever.  Good observation.

I just posted this to my gallery, but I might as well see if I can show it here in this thread.  It's resized to almost half it's original size, which you can download and see in full.  Or go to my gallery to see enlarged.  Hope it works..

So this is my first stab at rendering with Firefly in Poser 2012, and I have to say I'm pretty impressed with it so far.  Thanks, of course, to the shader gurus around here who made multi-layer SSS a reality finally in Poser, and for IDL working as expected.  I really didn't have to do much to get realistic area lighting out of a studio scene.  Basically positioned two different single-sided planes in the scene with normals facing the character.  One to the right, and one above and to the left of the figure, removed all the standard lights completely, and turned up the ambient value on the two planes till they lit the scene nicely.  Worked out well for a quick and dirty studio lighting setup.  I'm really actually enjoying Poser now, and may find myself exporting scenes to other render engines far less.  Very impressive.  My hat is off to the developers so far.

The image attached here were not postworked in any way other than to composite the two seperate renders into one big image, then save as jpg for upload.  You may need to view full size to see all the details.  In fact, I'm sure you will.

Wow, really love the soft light. That's just two planes? I've haven't been able to get a decent light emitter yet ;).

Laurie

Quote - Wow, really love the soft light. That's just two planes? I've haven't been able to get a decent light emitter yet ;).

Laurie

Yeah, just two single-sided planes.  I would send you the PZ3 file to examine if it's legal to do.  Not sure about what we would need the same for you to see it correctly, but I'd be more than happy to do that.

Just be sure there are no other lights in the scene.  In  this case, I completely removed all the lights on the Poser "light orb", and worked on fixing the cameras etc. in wireframe mode so I could still see what I was doing. haha.  I set the IR Cache to about 52, then the Indirect Light is ticked, and set to something like 40.  Then scene gamma correction is on, and set to 2.2.  That's about it.  Oh, on the planes, I shut off everything but  the ambient, which on one plane is very light blue, and the other a more yellow tint, but closer to white.  Increased the ambient value on both planes to something around 3.5.

Hehe..I'll try that. The last time I tried using an emitter I got a blobby mess ;).

Laurie

Oh, and another thing in the scene is that all elements (figure, planes, and cameras) are contained inside a "room", with walls and ceililng.  There's no real important materials on the walls, floor, or ceiling.  Everything is basically a diffuse white color, with little or no specular values.  I scaled the planes so that the one to the right is about 400% it's original size, which is about half the height of  the character,  set back about 6 feet from the character, and the upper left plane is about 200%, and set about 15 feet away from the character.  I'm guesstimating these distances from memory right now, but it's pretty close to what I recall.

Maxxx - the thing I first noticed about the renders above was that the specular on her face is quite dazzling.  Can you tell us how many RT bounces are you using pls?

Hi, Paul!  Here's the render settings I used for this scene in Firefly:

Raytrace Bounces: 3

IC: 52

(Indirect Light checked)

ILQ: 40

Pixel Samples: 8

Min Shading Rate: 0.3

Under Exposure, I have Gamma correction set to 2.2

Post filter is gaussian.

Looking at the mat setup, the skin has no "real" specular.  It's all via reflection.  There's no lights with specular values, its all just props with Ambient value set high (in this case as high as 3.5 for the planes.)  Diffuse and Ambient colors on the planes are identical, if that makes a true difference, I don't know.  The entire scene, as mentioned above, is "staged" inside a room prop.  I've done nothing special with the materials of the prop except to make sure the diffuse color was white.  There's no values on any of the other properties.  So in essence, it's a white matte material.

That's all I can think of, looking at the PZ3 now.  I didn't tick or untick any parameters on the objects in the scene.  The room's parameters, as well as the figure have light emitter ticked, but all this does is include or exclude them from the IDL calculations.

I'm running the 64bit version of P2012 on a corei7 pentium. 

On a final thought, I made sure there was absolutely NO Occlusion on any of the objects or materials.  Meaning, stay clear of AO when rendering with IDL. You don't need it, as you probably already know, and it just muddles up the light calculations.

Quote - When I am working with IDL only scene, I keep a light with diffuse and specular set to black.  That way I can see what I'm doing and it doesn't affect the render

Good call.  I'll try that.  I simply removed the lights all together because that was my workflow in other apps when using GI, and I just wanted to follow protocol.  It worked, but as long as having the lights in the scene won't affect the render, it will be easier than working in wireframe or Hidden Line.

I really think the whole key here is to use linear workflow.  IE., Gamma Correction for the entire scene MUST be 2.2.  Other renderers use multi light bounces for real, Poser isn't working this way that I can tell, so you simply must incorporate linear WF via GC to get reasonably similar results like this.

Will this kind of setup work for all scenes? I haven't tried enough yet to see if what I've been doing is going to work for all types of global illumination needs, but I don't see why not.

My renders are nowhere near what Maxxxmodels is doing, but here's an experiment inspired by him. I made a 'room' of sorts with walls that emit fair amount of ambient light. Then I put in a low energy spotlight with high specular front left, and another specular only light for right rim.  I got some shadow artifacts on her front (tummy area) I'm just starting to figure ot what caused that. Whether my settings are too low, or if there's some sort of a shadow that is meant to be there... hair maybe?

Yeah, you have some blue on the face and toes too ;). Are you using SR 2.1?

Laurie

I installed it around January. I know I installed at least one SR, but i haven't followed to see if anything new came out in last few months, and don;t remember what sr it was at in January.

I'm doing render passes, without the lights (turned off, not deleted) and IDL emitters only, there is no smudging.  Also, I'm raytracing. Light passes are still rendering.

Edit.. also, no occlusion on the lights.  I'll post render passes side by side when done.

Render settings attached.

The SR 2.1 fixes a lot of the blue areas people were getting before the update, especially around the lips and nostrils ;). Might wanna look into it. It's only been out since maybe the end of April or so? May? Something like that...lol.

Odd that emitters don't make it blue but lights do? Very strange...lol.

My version is 9.0.2.21214

When I did separate render passes, for lights and light emitters, the blue didn;t show up. Here's a photoshop composite of render passes.  (I totally departed from Maxxxmodelz rendering style, but I kind of like the way this one turned out.)

OK, sometimes we (and I mean "I" is this case!) miss the obvious.  In order to get Maxxx's cool specular (reflections), you need to set the diffuse color of the emitter planes to white and the value to 1 (I had them at 0, and the ambient light does not reflect).

Also, using this technique, you can turn off shadows in the render settings (double this actually saves any time though).

BadKitten, the SSS mode has the effect of sucking the red from the light areas and redistributing it to the darker areas.  So areas like around the mouth, fingers, etc have a tendency to ggo a little blue.  There are some ways around this using nodes.

Bagginsbill has said if you give each part a different SSS group number you don't have the problems with the blue lips and nose. At least I think that's what he said..lol.

I guess the SSS is trying to take the figure as a whole to do the scattering and doesn't do a good job? I guess making each part it's own SSS group would solve it.

Laurie

Thanks guys!  I didn't know about diffuse either... 
As far as SSS I'm just using what the character came with, I don't know much about SSS finesse. I wish I had more time to tinker with fine tuning render settings :(

Some testing results from this workflow....

Indirect Light Quality - the help text says it effects gather and AO quality, neither of which are being used using this workflow.  Maybe it can be set to 0?  From my limited testing, I couldn't see any difference between having it at 0 or 100.

Irradiance Caching - This slider greatly impacts the rendertime - in an exponential fashion.  The simplest scene with an IC of 100 will take a few hours to render (on my Dual core, 4Gig machine).  I can see why Maxxx is looking to reuse the Irrandiance Cache, since for setting 50 and up, it will take longer to do than the actual render.  IC uses the ray bounces, so the total time to calc indirect light will be based on IC * Raytrace Bounces.  I'm still running tests to find the best balance.

Nice renders here!

I still haven't figured out, how to use emitters, as the only light source in an enclosed environment, in the right way yet. My renders always end up as a splotchy-bloppy mess. Espec. on the walls.

Tho, I noticed, that the bigger you make the emitters, the lesser the splotchy-mess appears to be in the end.

in poser scene with IDL and shape-lights/ambient sources, posersurface can reflect light similar to specular reflection, in absence of any directional source.  bill has discussed this in some threads here and/or at rdna.  I don't know if he sells shaders in store here incorporating said node set-up.

Awesome discussion goin  on here.  Connie, for the blue around the mouth, I had the same issue on my initial renders.  I solved it by simply disposing of the innermouth materials, since I didn't need them anyway for my render.  But changing the group numbers also works I see.

As for speeding up render times.  I haven't messed around much to see what works and what doesn't to speed things up without impacting quality, but Paul (faceoff) is right about ILQ.  Shouldn't impact the quality in this kind of workflow.  The important thing is caching and SSS/reflection quality.  Both of which are real resource hogs.  I'm currently working with a beast of a machine... Intel i7 with with 8 functional cores @2.3GHZ/16g of RAM.  So it powers through some things that other machines might hang up on.  Unfortunately, that won't help some of you replicate these kinds of scenes, but I'm experimenting on my other machine too, which is a more simple quad core 2.2GHZ with 4g RAM to see what will be more workable.

Connie, the specular lights seem to detract from the realism in my opinion.  Not so much in your render, just overall and in general, which is why I like to not use Poser  lights, and have been doing these experimental renders with object/mesh lights as the only light sources.  Standard Poser lights aren't meant to replicate softbox (area) lights, like those we have in 3dsmax.  The results are less than realistic in some cases.  Depends on the scene, of course, and what look you are actually going for.  Since photorealistic result is the main focus of what I am looking to accomplish, I simply choose not to use them at all if possible for my scenes.  It wasn't possible to avoid them in earlier versions, certainly not in my earlier version, which was P6.  So I'm excited at the possibilities I'm seeing with PP2012. hehe.

A few more statistics....

The more bounces you have, the less light you need coming from the plane emitters.  So the light is not significantly diminishing between bounces.

5 bounces, IC 20 takes roughly the same render time as 1 bounce IC 100.  So in general, you are probably better off minimising the raytrace bounces and maximising the IC.  I think Maxxx was using 5 bounces 50 IC, which sounds like a perfect starting point.  In theory, 4 bounces, 60 IC (which slightly increased ambient from the emitters) might give a slightly better result.  Or even 3 bounces 80 IC could be even better again - given all 3 options should render in roughly the same time.  From a bunch of test renders, it was hard to see much additional render quality from 4 raybounces verses 3.

Also, my comment above about turning off Indirect Light Quality is WRONG.  Increasing this slider removes the blotches.  Indirect Light Quality slider does not appear to increase rendertime exponentially.  At least 50 seems to be needed to convincing renders.

For my simple test scene, 3 raytrace bounces and IDL quality of 50 took about 5 mins.  Then with DOF on, it took 3hrs.  Then adding post filter 2 gaussian, the render took about 9hrs.

Quote - in poser scene with IDL and shape-lights/ambient sources, posersurface can reflect light similar to specular reflection, in absence of any directional source.  bill has discussed this in some threads here and/or at rdna.  I don't know if he sells shaders in store here incorporating said node set-up.

I think this is incorporated in the EZSkin node configuration I'm using now, via altspecular node plug.  It also uses reflection plug, but only to pick up "edge" rim lighting on the surface, it seems.  

Quote - A few more statistics....

The more bounces you have, the less light you need coming from the plane emitters.  So the light is not significantly diminishing between bounces.

5 bounces, IC 20 takes roughly the same render time as 1 bounce IC 100.  So in general, you are probably better off minimising the raytrace bounces and maximising the IC.  I think Maxxx was using 5 bounces 50 IC, which sounds like a perfect starting point.  In theory, 4 bounces, 60 IC (which slightly increased ambient from the emitters) might give a slightly better result.  Or even 3 bounces 80 IC could be even better again - given all 3 options should render in roughly the same time.  From a bunch of test renders, it was hard to see much additional render quality from 4 raybounces verses 3.

Also, my comment above about turning off Indirect Light Quality is WRONG.  Increasing this slider removes the blotches.  Indirect Light Quality slider does not appear to increase rendertime exponentially.  At least 50 seems to be needed to convincing renders.

For my simple test scene, 3 raytrace bounces and IDL quality of 50 took about 5 mins.  Then with DOF on, it took 3hrs.  Then adding post filter 2 gaussian, the render took about 9hrs.

I was just about to update my post confirming your initial finding on ILQ too.  Just did a render to validate that finding, and it turned out totally not like I predicted.  It does make a difference.

After being baffled for quite some time as to why I could not get reflection specular using this workflow, I discover the problem was that the reflection_lite_mutl box ticked on the skin materials.  Must sure this box is NOT TICKED if you want reflection specular.

Quote - After being baffled for quite some time as to why I could not get reflection specular using this workflow, I discover the problem was that the reflection_lite_mutl box ticked on the skin materials.  Must sure this box is NOT TICKED if you want reflection specular.

I should have simply posted a screencap of materials.  You would have probably spotted that much sooner.  Sorry, Paul.  I didn't even think about that when you were initially asking.

A quick render with studio softbox setup.  Same setup as the original, just tweeked the render settings for better IDL result in a distant camera angle perspective.  When the subject was close up in a portrait, lower IDL settings were OK.  For this kind of perspective, you need a much cleaner result, or lots of artifacting and blotchiness will show up on the white surface of the room.

Again, no real Poser lights used here.  You can actually see, in this perspective one of the two square props used to light the entire scene.  Rendertime for this, on my machine, hovered around 1hr, which really isn't too bad for the size of the original image.  It would have been done probably in 10 minutes, if not for the IDL calcs hanging up on the hair for a while.

I just don't see how you get specular with an emitter in Poser....lol. All these years I thought diffuse light and a specular ;). Not bad, not bad at all.

Laurie

Maxxx - awesome!

I'm starting to get some good results, so pretty excited by this approach.  Clarifying some points:

Light Emitting Planes - Set Difuse and Ambient color to be the same.  Set Diffuse value to 1, and ambient somewhere between 3 and 8.

Ratrace Bounces - 3 is enough, but if your scene is too dark, go to 4, at the cost of some contrast.

Gamma - Definitely 2.2 is the go.  1 looks terrible.

Raytrace Reflection node - Set the quality to 1 and the softness to at least 2.5.  increase softness to reduce oiliness.  If the quality is < 1, it gives a bump type effect, which really should be coming from the bump map.

Irrandiance Caching - You can get away with some incredibly low numbers here if there are no straight joined surfaces.  A value of 30 will give great results for some scenes.  Doubt you would need to go over 50.

Indirect Light Quality - More is better here - since it removes the splotchiness.  Go with 50 as a starting point and increase for the final render.

SSS - I have removed - it just doesn't seem to be needed for skin.  There is enough raytraced reflections from skin-to-skin to get the effect.  Maybe if you have back-lights it might provide some value.

I need to experiment with non-enclosed rooms - to see what effect not having all the walls for the light to bounce around in will have.

[OK, so the above is really just confirming the settings that Maxxxmodels originallt gave :-)]

This is really a great and informative discussion! Would like to see more details of your set up, like the skin shader and a screen shot if possible of those render settings being discussed. I save screen shots for later study.

Thank you for this folks! I'm getting a lot of tips :D

Laurie

Here's my first crack at HDRI with an environment sphere as the only light source, no diffuse or specular lights to speak of.  Got an environment sphere, mapped it with a decent HDRI panorama, added a gamma node to compensate for gamma output, and this is the result.  No postwork.  Saved as jpg directly from Firefly to here.

Fairly quick render too.  Even with the blurry reflections on the skin, it rendered on my machine in under 20 min.  This will increase exponentially, I can imagine, once I customize the character with hair, clothes, and other details.

LatexLuv, the skin for this is simply a material I ran through snargly's EZSkin script.  It allows you to specify reflection amounts, to drive the skin using reflection by a specular map, etc.  pretty simple to set up a skin for this kind of workflow.  Plus it does the SSS shader node setup for you, which could be tricky if you don't know what you're doing.  The only thing I needed to do after running the script, was to go into the material room and change  the reflection softness on the reflect node to 5.5, to give it a nice blur.  I also added an additional map to the translucency to give the ears some additional backwards scatter.

RayTrace Bounces here were only set to 3.  IC was at 55, and ILQ 40.  Increasing this would bring even better results I imagine.

Oh,  and I couldn't get Shadow Catching to work for this workflow.  Tried Baggins shadowcatcher also, and didn't work.  Anyone have tips to make shadow catching without using any Poser lights work for this kind of Workflow?

maxx, same IDL scene may render faster with envsphere/hdri than without it, assuming no transmapped hair.  bill's shadowcatcher works much better with hdri/IDL than poser shadowcatcher IMVHO, but may cause greyish cast to floor (see below), as noted by sparky et al.   bill's shadowcatcher calibration method exists, but unknown to me.

You guys didn't tell me the band was getting back together!

I posted a new shadow catcher that plays nice with 2012 IDL  + GC.

http://forum.runtimedna.com/showthread.php?66824-Shadow-Catcher-and-IDL

I did quite a few no-lights images since PP2012 came out. Few people asked questions so I didn't talk about it much, and then when my shader was put into EZSkin it just didn't seem worth explaining - push the button. grin

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2312762&user_id=374541&np&np

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2257747&user_id=374541&np&np

The specularity in real life is blurred reflection, and so that's the way to get it in Poser.

And it is true that light emitters still reflect light as well (imagine what a light bulb looks like when it isn't turned on - is it black? And so it does not stop reflecting when you turn it on.)

Don't use teeny super-hot sources if you can avoid it.

Thanks BB! We're a bit behind... sowwy  

at least I am....  Took that darn detour through DAZ studio... shudder

Quote - Thanks BB! We're a bit behind... sowwy  

at least I am....  Took that darn detour through DAZ studio... shudder

Heh...better you than me :P Did you fix ur blue problems Connie?

Laurie

There are certainly situations (camera position, distance, and homogeneous, even lighting) where you can hardly tell if it is used or not.

Other situations, it's the opposite.

This render without SSS is not even close to this.

Here's what I'm getting for the moment.. not saying it's good, just, here it is.
I used the 'light room' I made quickly. Just a big box with plain light emitting materials for each side.

Stefan's jungle props, and a stock character skin (dublin). I didn't try any character SSS tweaks, just trying to experiment with what I get by fiddling with light emitter settings and positions (and render settings).  

I haven't gotten too much into SSS in poser....

Quote - Heh...better you than me :P Did you fix ur blue problems Connie?

Not yet, I didn't get that far.  Thanks for asking.