This is an image of my new lightset for Poser 4. I manually tried to extract the light from the background panorama. It consist of alot of lights placed very carefully around the panorama dome so it looks like the panorama is providing the light. You can look 360 degrees around you just like those quicktime panoramas. The background pic is slightly blurred to give the impression of depth of field. I used

http://home.no.net/dmaurer/~dersch/Index.htm

for the background picture.

If anyone has any suggestions or interest in this light set, please let me know and I'll put it online.

This render took 3min45 to render on a xp2200+ with 512 meg RAM.

Wow, Yes Pleas

yes very interested !!

Definitely. I'm always interested in good lighting.

Coppula eam se non posit acceptera jocularum.

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A good case for retrospective abortion

Yes I'm interested. Thanks

I'll let you know when the freebee will be available for download. Here is another render to show the shadow calculation. It almost looks like a radiosity render!

That looks REALLY good :) I have several scripts for Max that will do this sort of thing, putting lights on a hemisphere and takign the color/intensity from the texture ont he same hemisphere... basically it approximates liek you are doing. There is theoretically no reasont hat a Poser python script couldn't do the same.

I'm going to keep my eye out for this one!

Will this work for Poser4 and or Poser5? Looks like HDRI renders with BMRT or Rederman.

WOW!!

Goes to show what a little experimenting will do :)

Good point there soulhuntre, only problem is I don't have the pro pack, and I'd rather put the lights there by hand because I have more control over the overall brightness, brightness changes too, the lights that resemble the horizon are brighter than the lights that resemble the ground. If they would all be just as bright, the render wouldn't look as realistic. Anyway, what you'r saing is indeed a very good idea, might try that when my propack arrives!

You can play all sorts of games with luminance maps to drive the light brightnesses from the overall brightness of the pixels underneath them. It's all a lot of fun :)

Thanks for the tips soulhuntre.

This should be very informative. I can't wait!

I terribly curious: how many lights are in that scene?

You've got my attention.

-=shameless bookmark=-

... :0

Is it anything like the Global Illumination? ...and they call you SHADE Master?

Well, Shade, when we gonna see the lightset? ^_~ Just teasing. I'm a bit in awe, and at the same time doing my best to repeat the steps you took to create that, using a Panorama I created in Terragen...

Remember, kids! Napalm is Nature's Toothpaste!

Oh, and a further note... using a heavily gaussian blurred version of the environment map makes an outstanding reflection map that easily fits the scene...

Remember, kids! Napalm is Nature's Toothpaste!

It is very much like the global illumination freebee I posted earlier last year. Only this time I colred the lights and placed them more precisely according to the background picture. And yes I gaussian blurred the background a little to compensate for the ugly Jpeg compression. I made a ball in truespace first, textured it, imported it to poser and applied the lights there. Poser has a little bug that makes the ball look transparent from one side, this way you can look inside the ball and use all the viewports to pose your character for rendering. Once you render it the ball will be double sided and the camera has to be inside it to show your character. I am quite pleased with this bug, because it allows you to view your character from all sides, something tha twouldn't be possible if there was nog bug. Thanks for all the enthusiasm guys an girls. I'l post it as soon as possible.

Speed-wise, not much hope for us P5 people. Using Global Lighting, it took Production FireFly an hour to render this image at 1200x1200. I have an Athlon 1200 with 512MB RAM. Quality-wise another story, EXCELLENT!

It's all about quality, rendertime comes second, if I like to render something big, I'll just do it overnight, especially if the results are worth waiting for. I am really interested in the way Poser 5 would render my lightset, it might make a big difference with refelctions and higlights, is it possible to decrease specularity but increase reflection in Poser 5?? Thanks for the example nakamuram.

I'm interested in your light set Shademaster. It looks terrific.

In P5 Materials, you can adjust both Specularity/Hightlights and Reflections. You can adjust Ray Tracing in the FireFly Renderer, as well. It is ironic that you have performance (P4) and strive for quality, while I have quality (P5), but crave performance. Still, I would love to try your new lights. I just cannot say no to better quality.

Shademaster, For comparaison I rendered the same image using the P4 renderer. Render time was 20 min. I was afraid to try this at first, because P4 is slowww... with Dynamic Hair. Quality is close, FF did a better job with the hair. P4 did a better job with the displacement maps on the socks.

I think the P4 render is much sharper. The P5 render is blurry in comparison.

I see almost no difference betweeb the 2. Might be because there are no reflections visible. If you would need to highlight the sun only that would be noticable. By the way, I saw that Poser 4 CAN render reflections! I rendered a big white ball and it reflected the environment correctly! Only vagually but noticabel! An other thing I noticed was that my renders only have 1 shadow and not a lot of weak ones like most global illumination lightsets have. That is probably because the sun overrules all other shadows. Anyway, it looks good and I never thought Poser 4 could do something like this!

here is an example, look at the square, it gets reflected too.

Ooooo!! Neat! Will you make this light set available somewhere? I want to purchase Poser5 now that the EULA issue is resolved and am having trouble doing so, due to shipping arrangements for where I live in my out of the ordinary situation. CL is trying to work with me, or claiming that they are. It usually take 3 or 4 emails to get one response from them over a couple month's period. Even then, it took an IM to kupa to finally get a response this last time. roll's eyes They've had a lot of concerns and they have a small staff, so I'm trying to be understanding, but this is becoming ridiculous. It would be nice to have some quality light sets for P4 in the mean time. I would purchase them even, after a demonstration like this.

Mab, its a busy time marching in the bug parade. You may want to see what some of the issues still are in the SR2 public beta forum before you get your copy of P5 to see if they will affect you. I wish I would have waited until the final release. Its been frustrating to say the least.

Hehe, Lapis, yeah, but I gave my word publicly that I would purchase P5, despite any bugs or my assessment of how well it works if the EULA issue was resolved. I know no one cares that I made this statement, but I'm bound by my word anyhow. It was my silly way of expressing how deeply I felt about the P5 EULA issues and their need to be fixed. I can't follow through, though, if they make it impossible for me to purchase it by not getting back with me. In the mean time, I am very interested in Shademaster's light set. :o)

thanks mabfairyqueen

That is one hell of a light set. You are obviuosly a rare person Mab. You have my respect. Have you suggested a carrier pigeon to them. With the manual it could be a little heavy though, so maybe a carrier vulture could get a copy to you Best of luck.

My P4 Render looks sharper because I uploaded the 1200X1200, by mistake. The P5 was reduced from 1200x1200 to 900x900 before uploading. Global lighting has 22 lights. How many does the new set have? Will you consider releasing a P5 version with fewer lights, pleaaase?

I am sorry but I don't have Poser 5 yet. I am considering to buy it anyway so there will be a Poser 5 version eventually. A while ago I made a Global Illumination lightset for Poser 4 (in free stuff) that has 23 lights. It works the exact same way as the Poser 5 Global Lighting. Just download it and see for yourself, it's excatly the same. The new lightset has around 40 lights with different strenghts, lightmap sizes and colors. I'll let everybody who posted on this forum know when it's for free download.

That looks just great! I'd like to be notified. PLEASE!! Thanks in advance. Larry F

shademaster, add me to your notify list. I dieing to try it out. zach

Put me on that list too man. Very nice looking light set. Hopefully it won't cause a C exception in poser 5 though as some light sets do.

Hmmmmmm....C exceptions...I am allergic to C exceptions. I think they where caused by a lack of RAM. When I put an extra 356 mb of ram in my pc it didn't have those errors anymore. By the way, Ram isn't very expensive anymore and you can't have enough of it (just like cake)

It's an issue with the beta service releases. All light sets I have worked fine with P5 out of the box, but after installing the service releases, a select few are troublesome. But you're right, you can never have enough ram :)

I noticed the same thing GraphicFoxx. Now many if not most of my light sets bring out the dreaded c exception. Still a ways to go with the beta testing.

Waiting... waiting... drooling... waiting...

Remember, kids! Napalm is Nature's Toothpaste!

Me too me too. waiting waiting waiting.

hold on hold on hold on hold on

hehe

Hum de dum! waits patiently

Cmon Shademaster, we know you have a staff of enslaved genius gnomes hopped up on sugar beans helping you with this project. Just whip em harder.

Okay I will Lapis, but one of them escaped and he was one of the hardest working....hmmm....I seen him somewhere on TV together with a boy that wears glasses and goes to a rather 'unnatural school'. Wonder when he will be back...

Might never see him again, except on TV's Survivor. Do you think the kid with the glasses is his soulmate? Oh well, looks like the boss may have to pitch in afterall. That sucks.

This FireFly Render took 4 hours using your Global Lightset. Resolution is 1200x1200. Funny how the TOPS of the shoes are reflected in the floor. Also some strange shadowing things with the socks' refelction (bug with displacement maps?). Using P4 Render, the wall and floor are rendered in gray, with no reflections. This makes sense -- no ray tracing, no reflections. No C exceptions. No upskirts either.

If you increase the lightmap sizes by 4 times, the shadow resolution will increase and yield better results, prerendering takes longer too. Try that in the Poser 4 render and you will see upskirt shadows.

Just a note, I think the top portion of the shoes being rendered in the reflection is in fact realistic. The tops wouldn't show only if they were exactly parallel to the floor. Given their angle and the point of view of the camera, you would be able to see the tops reflected.

volfin is right, the reflections are correct. Only glitch I can see are the socks in the mirror. 4 hours.......that's way too long.

So, Shademaster...any word, my friend?

Remember, kids! Napalm is Nature's Toothpaste!

Here is my first word about the freebee. My host is building up a new website and he'll probably get it online in Januari or maybe later. I don't wan't to let you wait so long so hereby I ask you if there is anyone who can miss some webspace and host a 438 kb. file. It includes the complete lightset plus the dome and a blurred panorama background image. If anyone would be so kind to host this file for a temporary time I would be very gratefull! Sorry for letting you all wait so long. Thanks for all the interest. bye, daan pol

I can host it for you Shademaster.

YAY!

Remember, kids! Napalm is Nature's Toothpaste!

Thanks.

Need to know how you wanna arrange the hosting and stuff and if you would like me to host it. :o) You could email me the file and I could upload it and email you the link so that you can post it wherever under your name. That's how I hosted this other person's file.

Thank you very much mabfairyqueen! I'll mail you to files as soon as possible! Thank you very much! I am in holland at the moment and it's like 12 o'clock in the evening now so I'll mail them next morning okay? Thanks a lot!

I'm in Belgium, about the same time zone, so that works for me. hehe

I'll IM you my email adress, not that my email is any big secret, but I'd rather not post it directly in the forums. :o)

Allright people, Thanks to mabfaiyqueen this lightset is in Freestuff!! It's the exact same lightset that is used in the above example renders. Go ahead and show me what you can do with it!

WAHOOEY!!!! runs off to download it and begin rendering

Remember, kids! Napalm is Nature's Toothpaste!

An update about the now famous renderupgrade, I officially anounce: "Natural Lights for Poser". This lightset is so superduper extra ninja good! I worked on it for half a year to perfect it and make this product as easy to use as possible for the customer. A release dat is not yet set but I like to tell you that it is somewhere in July. Renderupgrade is so populair, people are selling it behind my back! http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=1282131 I hope to release it soon. Thank you all for your great support and suggestions. yours, Daan Pol

Great News! I can't wait. zach

Very cool man. It's something I'll be looking forward to.

Excellent!!!

Remember, kids! Napalm is Nature's Toothpaste!