Hi - I've just had Vue for a couple of days, and am still working through the manual (haven't reached the 'lights' section yet!). But I've got a slight problem. I noticed that my poser renders were looking much better than my Vue renders, because all my Vue stuff was too bright. I still haven't found how to dim the intensity of the lights in Vue, but as part of the experiment I ended up deleting every single light, including the sun - and the scene was still perfectly bright! I'm guessing this is something to do with 'ambient' atmosphere light, or some such? But however much I mess with sliders and settings, I haven't yet found a way to get a perfectly dark setup, so that the only illumination will be from the lights I put there. Tips, please??? John

John, you first have to understand how lights works in Vue. Except directional light which always acts like the sun, you can configurate the power for spots and point light. Read about lights page 78 of your User Guide. You can make the sunlight more or less bright in the atmosphere editor. You can give a grey or black color to your spots and point lights, you can enable or disable shadows etc. Without seing the scene I cannot tell you more yet. If your question could be more clear? Guitta

If you want a really dark setup, choose the BLACK BACK atmosphere, cut the sun off, tint the ground in black and create your own lights with spot lights ONLY!!! Guitta

Hi John, I had the same problem with Vue and its lighting set-up as well its much different to Poser but it's so much more controllable. What I do now is all the posing in Poser then bring it into Vue for lighting and everything. Take yourself along to the Vue Freestuff and hunt out this set ATMOSPHERES FOR VUE 4 by AUDITY It might be 2 or 3 pages in but they are great and it has one called Still Life Black which has no lights no sun and no fog so it is very much like a Poser layout, which allows you to put your lights in as you want. Good luck David

Hi, Guitta - actually, you answered my question enough to get me moving again. I had a couple of directional lights in there! I've used your advice to get everything black, and switched to all spotlights. As you can see, my latest results still need more work, but there's an improvement... I'll just have to devote some time to studying 'lights' in the manual, then do more experiments... I'll get there. Thanks! John

Thanks for the tip. David. I'm off to look for that stuff now! john

LOL John, the imae is funny. Good luck. Guitta.

LOL i like the effects you have on the lockers, looks like water is close by, for the mirror did you use the mirror surface in Vue? Nice David :)

Thanks, guys. I have another render baking at present, and I think it might finally give me the image I want. The mirror is a cheat, because I did it in Poser before I got vue, and poser doesn't do real reflections. So it's actually just a picture pretending to be a mirror. For the water on the locker, I used a watery gel on a blue spotlight from that side. I've also set a couple of the lights as 'volumetric' and clicked the box for them to show dust/smoke in the air, hoping this would look like steam - I think it works, a little... But I have a lot to learn! I also tried using some genuine fog, but that just made everything look washed out. I think it's probably best for wide open spaces. This is fun! John

Hi Murphy,

Your results are very good. The first time I imported a POSER model in VUE it looked like dead meat ! LOL !

Here is an example of how to light a POSER character in VUE.

The first thing that you should do is reducing the nasty ambient lighting. In the light panel of the ATMOSPHERE EDITOR, set the light balance to 80 or 90 % sunlight. Leave a little bit of ambient light, otherwise there will be too much contrast in your final render. For indoor scene I always set fog and haze to 0%, I also delete the sun so I can start with a clean work space.

The picture above is an example of a VUE light set-up. The model comes straight from POSER (it's DAZ's Stephanie with a custom texture and DNA separates clothes). I didn't change anything on it. The VUE scene was rendered in "broadcast quality" (no post editing).

I used a classic lighting method : key light, fill light and backlight.

The KEY LIGHT (in yellow) is a quadratic spotlight with a 50% shadows density. This is the direct light source : it create the main shadows and the tone of the scene.

The FILL LIGHTS (in green) are very soft quadratic pointlights with no shadows. With shadows they would destroy the reality of the lighting. The power of these lights is very low (15-20) and they have all different colors (bright yellow, cream and soft red). These lights create a soft ambience, a "global" illumination, without disturbing the key light. As long as they are not noticeable, you can place them wherever you want !

The BACK LIGHT, a point light with no shadows, is very important. With it you add depth to the scene and separate the model from the background. You should put it in the light cone of the key light, otherwise the scene will look strange.

This method works best for indoor scene, but you can try it for outdoor landscape :
Keep the sun, but reduce it's shadow density to 40-50% (you'll never see shadows with 100% density in reality ! it's an abstract 3D concept). Reduce also the light exposure (i.e. -0.50). Then use key, fill and back lights to give more depth and sharpness to the objects in your scene or to direct the eyes of the audience on one important element.

Sometimes more than 10 fill lights are necessary to create the right atmosphere. One of Renderosity's most talented artist (Carles P) used 90 point light for his "backyard" picture ! and the result is amazing.

On other softwares (C4DXL7, Lightwave 7, Studio Max, etc...) "radiosity" does the job for you, but where is the fun ? I never use radiosity in C4DXL7, it takes hours to render and doing the light setting myself always produce more "creative" results.

Hope this will help you,

:) Eric

Morphy (and not "murphy"!), one other trick :

give reflection to the eyes of your character, otherwise they will look dull and dark. Open Vue's MATERIAL SUMMARY, and give a 10% global reflectivity to the iris, the pupil and the eyes white. The eyes of your model will be more realistic and "shiny".

Eric

Awesome lighting tips here! Thanks! :)

Eric i've saved this page so i can re-read it whenever i want to refresh my mind, thank you, this reminds me very much of photographic set lighting when i did some studio work years ago, some studio photographic books are absolutely packed with bits that can be used in Vue, Key Fill and Back lights are the basic lighting techniques of studios that work so well. We can learn a lot from photographic books. light is one of those things that if you get right no one realy notices, but if you get it wrong ouch it stands out a mile. thanks for your lighting tips and everything else. David

Wow, Audity ! Your model looks awesome !!!

Eric, your image looks great. I love the textures and the light:-) Guitta