I am very busy with work today and can't post extensively.

Here is the short answer - stop using bullshit skin shaders. Those suck. They get darker when you enable GC, because they are designed illogically with compensations in them that have no reason to exist, and behave very differently when you switch to linear rendering. (Which is what you get with GC enabled)

If you would practice with simple props and simple materials, you'd learn how to light.

Right now it's like you're trying to learn to play a piano, except that you're listening through a device that reverses the low and high notes and plays every note backwards.

The shader you're using is one that has "compensations" built into it - the sort of thing that Poser users have been doing for years. These compensations are to make dark things bright and bright things darker - bringing things more into balance. They were also designed specifically to look sort-of OK when EXTRA lighting is used.

In other words, you're in a cock-eyed world where there are no straight lines and turning left points you more to the right. In case you didn't realize it, this cock-eyed world is what people have for years been doing and it is wrong and it is why people mistakenly think that lighting is hard.

Now I could tell you to use VSS, but then we get more complicated. You want to learn lighting? Then messing with skin shaders at the same time is a distraction. Stop it.

Learn to light some simple props with simple shaders. Note that I don't mean stupid shaders. For example, a shader that has no specularity is stupid. Nothing in the real world behaves that way. But there are tons of props that are configured that way. I bet those rocks you're using are configured that way.

You're not going to learn lighting at all if you fail to recognize the most important thing about renderers. The colors you see are decided completely by the SHADERS.

If you use bullshit shaders, you get bullshit, and it does not matter WHAT you do with the lights in that case - you will fail.

I'm sure others can help with more specifics on the shaders , but I'm suggesting Diffuse (using color texture) + Blinn (white) and you enable GC.

Then experiment with the lights.

 

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)