A Lighting Breakthrough in Daz Studio To Improve Indoor Lighting Scenes

welcome back everybody i t roy here with another video that i've been meaning to get to you all for a little while actually um it was kind of a lighting discovery i made early on uh and working on the latest installment of to be a keen now there's a good side to that which is i discovered this downside to that is i'd already spent some time redoing the lighting in my scenes that i got to go back and redo so if you're not familiar i'm a heavy user of ghost lights a lot of times i like the way they can help fill out a scene and add things without me worrying about reflections i really hadn't used point lights because i found them small and harsh and for so i would usually use a combination of ghost lights and some spotlights as well as some natural lighting complemented with ghost lights by natural lighting i mean more just typical scene lighting like this little lamp and stuff would be all lit up in fact let me go ahead and do this here so i can actually select things in my scene but then i perchance happened to put a lighting rig on one of my characters when those preset lighting rigs you can get in the dash store uh in a scene and i knew obviously that wasn't gonna look very realistic right cause it's a you know photo studio type lighting rig but then i just put it on to kind of see the effects and see what they were using kind of found it interesting and then i'm like well wait a minute what if i try to move these point lights to like where the lighting is in my scene and see where i actually get and it turned out that that worked pretty well with some adjustments so i did that for a couple other scenes a couple other environments and realized that this worked pretty well and all i would need is sometimes i won't even need one of my spotlights as a key light or a fill light or anything like that even for an eye light usually because the point lights are not ghost lights they will show that nice little reflection in the eyes that i like i wouldn't have to worry but if i needed to fill something extra out i could do that i could do just you know a simple mesh light if you're not aware i like for my mesh lights instead of using a plane or a sphere or something i prefer to use a spotlight because then i can easily position those mesh lights because if you change the size of the mesh light then you've got a whole lot of options there as a matter of fact you'll see an eye light here so we're going to go through this scene right here and i'm going to show you a few things first where we need to begin is tone mapper options i didn't do much with this until recently and then once i started to a few good folks in my comments chimed in and said yeah you definitely want to adjust tone mapper because daz is like default shutter speed and exposure value are essentially assuming that it's very bright daylight outside so any indoor scene you automatically want to take that shutter speed down and then consequently get that exposure value up um and you want to make some changes there of course you could do a whole lot here um you could do vignetting white point um all sorts of things one quick thing that you won't see in this scene because i found this out like right at the tail end of my work on the last installment of to be akin my visual novel was that this crushed blacks and burn highlights i had a commenter say that they would recommend setting those to zero and adjusting that in photoshop and i'm going to tell you right now we won't do it in this scene because i just want it to come out like you be able to see in the little title card here and match that but i've done that on some other renders unfortunately i keep forgetting i need to try to set it as my default tone mapper option here but you do that and it's amazing uh what uh what a difference it does make it comes out a little wonky you kind of gotta adjust your eyes but then of course if you do do good post work in photoshop or lightroom or what have you it'll be really easy to correct and fix and it does produce a more natural option there and allows you more freedom than in photoshop lightroom whatever you're using for that for your post work to really get something there so just a quick aside now going back here to shutter speed so i've lowered this to 40. if it's a really dark night scene i might even go down to 20. between 20 and 40s where i'm going to keep this usually like night scenes like this this is a rare one with 40 because of some values i already had just looked good but you you could take this down to 30 especially if you're outdoors at night you're going to take this down to 20 or 30 because as long as you get your lighting balanced remember there's you can fix this in uh post and even if the lighting is unbalanced if you're really good in photoshop you can still fix uh the lighting but to avoid having to do that especially for like me who does you know over a thousand renders per installment of a visual novel episode i try to fix what i can in daz to make my post work therefore easier and just more about you know color correction a bit i'm getting the tone and the warmth i want out of it maybe adjusting if i've got a bit too much kind of yellowish orange light but i want to make that slightly more neutral i can adjust those sorts of things that's more what i'm looking for deepen my shadows or lessen them that's what i want to save my post work for as well as the occasional poke through of whatever it is clothing hair what have you there but tone mapper definitely change this again 30 to 40 for indoor night scenes is really good in fact if you've got like a dark room even at during the day i would still set it to this there's no harm in doing that now again you'll want to make sure to adjust other things because like if you have a really bright sun trying to come in this can screw that up so you may have to come into your environment options and change some values there for how the strength of your hdri map but that's part of the setup process and again i can create these and have them set up so then when i get them in a scene there's very little tweaking i need to do you know you need to add some extra lighting to provide a bit better effect or to remove some horrible shadow effect or something depending on where i have a character in the scene but a lot of my work for me is done when i do this all right so now here you're going to notice a few things so we're zoomed in and then i'm going to take you around the room before we look at some of these specific values but we have this little thing here which is actually an instance by the way i instance all of my lighting as much as possible you can't instance point lights but you can instance a lot of other stuff including ghost lights and a lot of a lot of times which is really nice and i do that because you know usually i'm not going to want these lamps to differ in value if you did have something there same lamp but you wanted it you know maybe darker in one area say hey i'm going to mimic a 60 watt bulb and one and i want to mimic 100 watt one and another you would not want to do instances because instances will control the lighting there and then i've got my point light right up here and what that's meant to do is that is meant to kind of mimic this because this by default is not bright enough even if i wrapped this up very heavy it would not be bright enough for me wouldn't be something that i would really want to be able to do and i've noticed it kind of introduces noise because these things are pretty small now some things you won't have to do this on because some lighting actually has like a built-in ghost light right on top of there and if you have something like that you may not need a point light at all or you may not need as much something to note there but since this isn't it's just a little wick thing you don't want to get this too high you do want to do some amount but not too high point light is where we're going to control a lot of our lighting from there notice i've got the fireplace over there and that's a bigger plane which helps but i've got a point light in there as well i've got this and you'll be seeing this this is pretty much just repeated point lights and if we kind of get zoomed in to where they're at you'll notice they're sometimes a little bit closer but they're roughly just a little bit out and the reason for that is i've got to have them there but i've got to make sure they don't look like oh hey he just dropped a giant light see where nowhere near a candle thing but i also don't want to put like one right around each candle because that can look really weird and add too much too um and then up here because these things are out of sight uh i do have these lightly lit and then i've got a ghost-like kind of hanging down there to provide more because otherwise it's just shooting up so i've got ghost lights there i actually secret technique by the way if you guys are doing bedding at night and you've got some little thing over the bed that you can do it do a little ghost light there that's all i've got and it helps just even out the lighting a bit otherwise this tends to get pretty dark even with these point lights over here and then i even have point lights over on my smaller candles you notice those are a lot closer there right but i've got those there and that's pretty much the extent of it this was a daytime scene i might be doing some ghost lights set just right inside the window there to provide like some sun mimicking sunlight coming through i don't like to do it on the other side especially with these sorts of windows where i've got stained glass because you get a horrible effect it doesn't look good and introduces noise so i'll put it right at the edge inside and unless you're really up close it's going to be really tough to tell um so i've got these sorts of things here and then let's go ahead and pop into my camera view and take a look at what this looks like again refer to the title card if you're uh not a hundred percent sure because that is the actual render that we're going to have out of here and then i'm going to show you some values here and talk to you about a couple special things you're going to want to do with your point lights because if you do the default point light setting it's going to be too harsh too bright really a problem so notice here i've got the nice reflection in the eyes which is really nice obviously i've got i've got some light coming from that fireplace which is good but then i've also got some light coming more so on the side of her face as it should be the lights right over there now what you have to be careful of is like if we switch into perspective view is if this is going to be at all in the scene you have to be careful again you don't get it too bright there you can see i mean if you're really looking closely you can kind of tell what i'm doing there but it's nothing i think that really washes it out so much and causes a big problem no massive issue there which is really nice another thing you're going to want to watch out for with these brighter lights is what's your reflections from like shiny metals any sort of gloss element or something make sure you don't get a lot of noise here you'll notice this looks good but something to keep in mind now let's look at some values so let's look at the value of this point light we go to parameters and we'll go to all take a look here so i haven't changed color or anything you remember you don't want to change it there usually unless you're doing like some cyberpunk really unnatural neon type thing you want to change your temperature there i got 3500 so it's definitely darker now true like candlelight would be close to 2000 2500 i believe and daz is always a little off so it might even be a little bit lower um but i'm not a big fan of my characters literally looking like they're walking around an orange martian surface so i always have to fake it a bit here and keep it a little bit more white balanced there and then over here i've got this set to 300 000 um which is again with my tone mapper i can bring it down to something a little bit more reasonable you notice the sphere i've got this at 75.75 i've got it set to sphere instead of point and i've got it two-sided now why do i have a two-sided let me go ahead and turn that off see if we'll get our effect here sometimes i have to have it closer all right this one's not too bad but if you get it a little too close to like another light source you'll actually get like a really weird like black shadow where it kind of goes in and you can really have a problem because of course what you see here may or may not be the size i mean if i crank that up to 150 it's actually going to take up more space than what you see there um i like to keep these between 25 and about 75. sometimes you might go to 150 if it's really big remember the larger your light source the more diffuse it's going to be softer the shadows so especially with like female characters you kind of want these a little bit larger if you really want dramatic effect especially for males you can make this smaller get a little bit more harsh shadow a little bit more drama in there but you want to be careful with those harsh shadows on your females and we're going to go over back to our camera and take a look um so this is it now i could take this up to something like 450. i want to be careful because you know she's also kind of far away and we know if you actually know what candlelight does you know it's not going to be that bright you also notice i'm getting some a little bit of noise and from the brightness there that should even out but it's something i definitely want to keep an eye on so that actually doesn't look too bad it does look though i would say a bit unnatural for how far away she's standing from that in uh with even with the candles and stuff because if we let go to our perspective you'll notice me look at that right there's candles aren't going to do that so something to keep in mind you can be more generous with this lighting again if it's not going to be seen uh so that is something to keep in mind you know you can do more things otherwise i might try to like fill it in with a ghost light a little bit farther away or do a spotlight coming from farther up here down to or if i really wanted a certain effect now let's go and look through our eyelight which is all the way over here i was using it for something else i believe so if we do that for the i light get to see it yeah so i don't know where i think i don't know where it was i think it may have been left over from another scene but like for my eye light here it's pretty simple um i haven't changed much i do like disc for the geometry uh for this obviously i don't want two-sided on the spotlight and then i'll set this anywhere from 50 to 150 to 200 all depends on how far away from the character it is right because it's going to get a reflection so i don't want like 150 if it's really up close i want this small but not so small that it's creating like a harsh lighting effect because the smaller this is the more intense the light is going to be and you would adjust your lumen accordingly notice here 4 800 is all because again all i'm looking for not looking to light her with this this is labeled eye light it's not even a key light or a fill light i'm looking to get a reflection in the eyes if it's not gotten from some other place and then i've got my 5000 right here so it's a pretty low value because typically it would be pretty close in and i'm not looking for again anything but a nice reflection in the eyes the value of this will also be determined by how bright the other lights are in your scene if you have like 1.5 million lumen stuff 5 000 is probably not going to cut it it's probably going to look really faint and weak whereas if you have a lot of you know like this like a 300 000 or even a 150 or something you might even take this down to the default of 1500 because you again you don't want it for the eye light you don't want it to be providing actual light you just want that reflection go back to camera but guys i mean i don't need to belabor this point that is literally it with the point lights set to something we'll go back to perspective here with the point lights set to something other than the actual point and you set it to again i prefer sphere that's what was used i do use two-sided on this one or else you can get kind of some weird effects and shadow effects on whatever you're right around since you know i try to tie this to a natural light source then make sure to size this up appropriately there you go that's it you don't play with intensity although you could don't have to do a whole lot else and then i'm just going to augment it with eyelights and some ghost lights where i might need them in special places right because ghost lights aren't going to provide any reflection or anything they are going to kind of fill in my lighting so they can be used almost as a fill light where you don't actually want to put a fill light final thing let's go ahead and look at the candelabra instance here and let's go to surfaces because that's where this is going to be it's going to be under our flame so here i left the emission color i probably could have set this uh to white but i found that this helped uh with the 3000 kind of make it look a little bit more uh yellowish and uh natural for candle flame otherwise it just looked white even if i took it way down and then my luminance here one thing i've changed is now for luminance i will usually use watts so that i can control this two ways so i can put in my watt roughly and then my luminance value to control how bright this is you notice there's not a lot i'm doing here this is 150 it's a little bit brighter than you know might do 100 or something but i usually keep this between 50 and 150 and the luminance at 1500 sometimes i'll put it at 4500. but guys that's it um so i've placed i honestly if we look around i'll go ahead and turn off irate preview so we can smoothly look around i've placed these little candelabras and stuff where i thought they would be needed i've actually placed those up in the ceiling too where i thought they would be and then these candles kind of came with the desk and i thought well i'll leave those but i've put those there for very specific reasons because i have gotten to be a little bit better about trying to block out where my characters are going to be right like i knew when they needed to talk they needed to be a specific place like if they were over here it's kind of no man's land not really great they'd have the light behind her there's really not much because that's not going to be super bright in most cases the other lights are going to be here or way over here so they won't be casting a lot i kind of know where i need to put my characters i put this one here to get a nice reflection on the table table's position there where they get the fireplace light is a nice backlight or if somebody's over here their eye is going to catch over there it's going to provide a bit of kind of nice little lighting and then i put this one over here so we can have scenes there and of course i put these two there so they're not too close to the bed in this case catch on fire but somebody could you could do your bed scenes and whatever and then of course i've got those in case somebody's writing and then my overhead lights really are just there to fill out that's all they are they're there to fill out um the scene now that is their entire purpose just to kind of fill out the lighting give me a realistic place to place some ghost lights so i'm not just shoving them up there and then if somebody you know we were to like pan up or something somebody'd be like wait where the heck is that light coming from i always want to be able to have a plausible explanation even if i you do have to augment your lighting as to where the lighting's coming from but try out those point lights again mix them with spotlights for a little bit more precise lighting on your characters and try to make sure since you're in full control in most cases of these scenes unless it's just outdoors try to place you know your lighting fixtures and things candles what have you in places that you know you're going to kind of want your characters to help out right there's nothing wrong with doing this as a visual novel developer i have to be concerned with continuity people aren't going to be just swapping out these things so i have to try to get these right relatively close and i can't update them too often if you're doing one-off renders you've got some more freedom especially if something's not going to be seen but use those and then occasionally again with some ghost lights to fill in because what you want to get is a nice natural looking effect you want to use shadows to good effect i've heard some people say oh well i know i don't need shadows in my renders no no no you need shadows shadows provide interest they provide definition what you don't want are harsh shadows on your females and you don't want weird shadows where like it's dropping down below the nose and creating this weird effect or it's a really strong one on one side of the face and the other one is just kind of casting something a little weird especially with ladies you need to be careful ladies need softer shadows males you can get away with the harsher ones but shadows are needed for your renders they help provide depth otherwise if you just got a bright light shining on something direct it's going to lose all sorts of definition remember these are technically 2d anyway even though you know we're doing a 3d scene what somebody's looking at is a 2d image of your render there and you've got to be careful with that but i hope that you found this helpful i'll do some more on lighting i know you guys struggle with it quite a bit as do i because it's always sometimes you just luck out and find these things like i did but this sort of lighting thing is really helpful and uh guys let me know what else you'd like to see in the comments down below i'll be trying to get to those uh and jumbling with everything else i've got going on but thank you so much for watching if you're new here like and subscribe for more content like this if you'd like to continue to see me pumping these out regularly you can help make that a reality by supporting me over my patreon page which a link should be coming up to it just a little bit of support anytime you can is really helpful the youtube ad revenue for a small channel like mine is practically zero so not a lot there and i'm happy to keep these coming but of course it does help encourage me when i know people are enjoying these and are willing to put a few bucks a month behind that as well but again thank you so much for watching it roy here signing off i'll see you guys again in the next video

Channel: IT Roy

Views: 939

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: CUb1hZE6mB4

Length: 20min 51sec (1251 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 16 2021