Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: Minitut - Dramatic light and shadows for portraits - NO NOSTRIL GLOW

bagginsbill opened this issue on Feb 09, 2006 · 68 posts


bagginsbill posted Thu, 09 February 2006 at 11:52 AM

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=2573899

Over the last few days there was a discussion (see link) around getting rid of nostril glow. Since I was asked for more information on how to do it, I am posting here a mini-tutorial. Step by step I'll show you how to get really good shadows on a closeup portrait and get rid of nostril glow forever!!

I'm posting again at top level because I bet some people missed it, so this will get it noticed.

There are nine more steps, so please try to wait for the next nine posts before asking questions, which I will be delighted to answer.

This tut will focus on infinite lights. Similar techniques will be needed for spots. IBL and point lights will not be covered here.


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bagginsbill posted Thu, 09 February 2006 at 11:54 AM

Add your figure. Select and use the face camera. Orient the camera - I've chosen this perspective.

Tip: Check your Focal length. Too small and it distorts the figure. I like 150 mm.

Now delete all your lights.


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bagginsbill posted Thu, 09 February 2006 at 11:57 AM

Add a light. Select the light properties. Check the "Infinite" option. Edit the Shadow Min Bias: set it to .1

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bagginsbill posted Thu, 09 February 2006 at 12:00 PM

Switch to the light parameters. Set the shadow map size to 1000. Set the xrotate to -20 yrotate to 10 zrotate to 0

You can use other orientations, but try this for now.

The light should be red,green,blue all at 1.0
Intensity 100%

Render.

Look!!! No nostril glow. But the shadows are fuzzy and indistinct. We'll fix that next.


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bagginsbill posted Thu, 09 February 2006 at 12:04 PM

The thing poser does wierd is that it sets up the generation of shadows by using an extra camera called a "shadow cam". Before rendering your image, it pre-renders from the point of view of this camera, marking all the spots in the scene where light falls or doesn't fall. Because the camera is looking at so much more than the face, it is wasting information that isn't needed. We want it to focus on the face and neck.

So for now, right click on the camera selector in the preview window and choose the shadow cam. Don't worry about what number it is. I don't know why poser starts numbering from how many were in when you started poser. For me, there were three lights in the beginning, which I deleted. Anyways look through that camera.

Also, select the camera in the parameters window.

You should see something like my image. If your figure is not in the center of world space it may look different.

IMPORTANT: There is a wierd bug regarding shadow cams. After inserting a light, they do NOT show what they are actually looking at until you do at least one render. That's important!!! Whenever you add a light, before trying to work with the shadow cam, do a quick render. Even if you render nothing, it will "set" the camera properly.


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bagginsbill posted Thu, 09 February 2006 at 12:08 PM

Now comes the non-intuitive magic. We need to scale down the camera!

For my picture of V3 in default pose, scale=12% works good for the head and neck.

Now as soon as you set the 12%, the camera will show a closeup of her feet. I don't know why, but the camera zoom always moves the camera to point at global coordinates 0,0,0. We need to adjust that.

For my figure, a yTran=510 works well. Sometimes you move xTran a little. Just get the portrait part of your figure completely in the image.

We want to make sure the area of interest is as big as possible, without leaving anything out. If you zoom too far and render, you will see the shadow mysteriously cut off at an arbitrary point. That means that your face camera can see something the shadow camera doesn't see. If that happens, scale up a bit and recenter the shadow cam.


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bagginsbill posted Thu, 09 February 2006 at 12:09 PM

Now switch back to your face cam view and render.

This is what I get. Nice clean sharp shadows. No light in nostrils. Teeth get some light but have a nice shadow. Good shadow under the upper eyelid onto the eyes.


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bagginsbill posted Thu, 09 February 2006 at 12:11 PM

Let's add another light for a dramatic backlit effect.

Add your light. Set it to infinite. Set min bias as before to .1.

Set the map size to 1000.

RGB 1.0,1.0,1.0
Intensity 100%

The orientation should be close to opposite the camera. Here I set yRotate to -160.


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bagginsbill posted Thu, 09 February 2006 at 12:13 PM

Now we want to adjust the shadow cam for this light.

Remember: DO A QUICK RENDER FIRST. Otherwise you will be wasting your time.

Here I'm looking through my shadow cam lite 5 (actually the cam for light 2 - still with me??)

Adjust scale and ytran as needed. For me, the backlight worked at 13%, ytran=510.


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bagginsbill posted Thu, 09 February 2006 at 12:14 PM

Now render. Notice the nice ear shadow. If you have a blinn node in your skin material like me, then you'll also get this nice shine on the side of the head and neck.

This concludes the tutorial.

I DON'T WANT TO SEE NOSTRIL GLOW IN THE GALLERY AGAIN, OKAY!!!!?!?!?


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KarenJ posted Thu, 09 February 2006 at 12:39 PM

Great stuff, thanks for posting. What kind of render time did you experience with the above shot?


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spedler posted Thu, 09 February 2006 at 12:40 PM

Great tutorial, thank you. One question: what are the pros and cons of using your technique with depth-mapped shadows vs. ray-traced shadows? I've tried your test set-up with both and seem to get better results with eyelashes using ray tracing, although the shadows on the eye itself and the teeth seem better with the depth-mapped version.

Steve


bagginsbill posted Thu, 09 February 2006 at 12:43 PM

1 minute


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bagginsbill posted Thu, 09 February 2006 at 12:54 PM

Spedler - there are situations where the raytraced shadows may work better, but I rarely find it to be so. This image, which could probably be fixed by tweaking parameters, shows an improvement of detail on the eyelash shadow, but does a bad job on the eyelid crease and the teeth. Plus, this render took almost 5 minutes.

The neat thing about depth mapped shadows is that you can calculate them once and just reuse. So my workflow is much improved by them. Position my character, props, and lights. I turn on the "Reuse Shadow Maps" option in the render menu. Once created, the shadow maps get reused in subsequent renders so it saves a lot of time. I can then change materials, light strengths and colors, and camera position, without having to recalculate the shadows. If I'm using the raytraced shadows, I experience the extra calculation time associated with the shadows on every test render. Of course, you could turn them off, but if you are trying to get the lighting/mat/camera angle just right, it slows you down.

So given the somewhat bad results and the increased times, I choose depth-mapped 99% of the time.


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Bobasaur posted Thu, 09 February 2006 at 1:04 PM

Does the "Reuse Shadow Maps" option work when rendering an Animation? If the subject is moving then the shadow would change as well.

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bagginsbill posted Thu, 09 February 2006 at 1:08 PM

Correct - you can't reuse shadow maps for animations. I don't animate so I'm unclear on whether it even pays attention to that option. It shouldn't. By definition, animated figures will require a new shadow map each frame.


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spedler posted Thu, 09 February 2006 at 1:53 PM

Thanks, that's useful.

Steve


operaguy posted Thu, 09 February 2006 at 2:12 PM

when animating poser automatically re-renders the shadow map, even if you have "reuse" selected.


3dvice posted Thu, 09 February 2006 at 2:27 PM

Thx, great tutorial, very helpful!

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spedler posted Thu, 09 February 2006 at 2:45 PM

Just a minor point, which is obvious really, but if you alter the light position you will have to realign the shadow cam. For example, changing the light's xRotate to -30 instead of -20 throws the shadow cam right off, and the radioactive nostrils come back. This can be fixed by re-adjusting the shadow cam position.

Steve


operaguy posted Thu, 09 February 2006 at 3:01 PM

for an animation, you'd have to animate the shadowcam. I find that with sufficient bias and map size, under depth map shadows, the nostril glow simply is not a factor; it is taken care of by the tight settings. However, I DO zoom in on the shadowcam for other reasons. ::::: Opera :::::


odf posted Thu, 09 February 2006 at 3:04 PM

Thanks! This is very usefull information.

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mathman posted Thu, 09 February 2006 at 3:41 PM

Thanks for the tute, bagginsbill.


svdl posted Thu, 09 February 2006 at 6:03 PM

Clear, concise and very informative minitutorial. Thanks!

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visualgirl posted Thu, 09 February 2006 at 7:13 PM

Thanks for the tip!


Indoda posted Fri, 10 February 2006 at 7:07 AM

Thank you for another great mini tutorial. Very useful.

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semidieu posted Fri, 10 February 2006 at 12:27 PM

Great ! Thank you !


mathman posted Fri, 10 February 2006 at 5:21 PM

bagginsbill, I was going well with this tutorial until step #6 of this thread, where you scale the shadow cam down to 12% and then move it up to the subject's head. When I tried this with the y-tran value suggested, the subject completely disappeared off the radar - of course she was still there, but the shadow cam had gone off in a different direction I guess. I've got two theories about this : (1) the positioning of the light associated with the cam; or (2) the units of measurement that I was using e.g. maybe I am not using Poser Units ??? Also, looked in the trusty Poser Reference Guide for some further enlightenment about the Shadow Min Bias, and the only description is as follows : "The Shadow Min Bias parameter specifies how far to shift samples towards the light source to prevent self-shadowing of objects." What on earth does that mean ? .... are you able to put this in more plain English ? thanks, Andrew


operaguy posted Fri, 10 February 2006 at 7:51 PM

working with the shadowcams is difficult. There used to be, and sometimes still is, a dial "zoom" that appears. For the life of me, I can not figure out how to make that zoom dial appear, yet once in a while it does! This is a deep mystery. Meanwhile, if it does NOT appear, you have to manipulate the thing with only the x and y axes, plus "scale". It is no fun. About the bias, LOL, I'd love an actual explanation as well. All I know is, the lower the better. I use it, but I don't understand it. ::::: Opera :::::


face_off posted Sun, 12 February 2006 at 4:22 PM

Attached Link: http://physicalc-software.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=20

Good tut Baggins.

Not sure if you were aware of this, but spots lights have a much lower less shadow map size requirement than infinites. For removing nostril glow, it's much easier to do if you use spots (you don't need to fiddle the shadow cams). Details above. Also, I totally agree with you - for production renders, depth mapped shadows are better than ray-traced.

Message edited on: 02/12/2006 16:23

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operaguy posted Sun, 12 February 2006 at 6:02 PM

Spotlight fan here echoing the sentiment. I would comment, however, that fiddling with the shadowcams has its own benefits: the closer in you zoom with the shadowcam, the smaller your shadow map can be and still attain similar quality results. This, in turn, leads to faster render times because the map is smaller. ::::: Opera :::::


bagginsbill posted Mon, 13 February 2006 at 1:38 PM

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2581364

I gave in to cheesy methodology. Follow the link and scroll down - I posted a material room hack you may find easier.

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Spanki posted Wed, 12 July 2006 at 3:36 AM

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2581364

Link above, translated to new format.

 

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R_Hatch posted Thu, 13 July 2006 at 1:03 AM

Also note that if your shadowcams are getting too out-of-hand, you have the following two options (could prove useful in animations):

In some situations, using both of these in combination may prove useful as well.


jartz posted Thu, 13 July 2006 at 3:17 AM

What renderer did you use P4 or Firefly?

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Ghostofmacbeth posted Sun, 11 February 2007 at 10:11 AM

Half of the time when I look through the Shadow Cam there is a blank scene. Does anyone know what is up or if there is a way to get around that? Some times I can get it back with a restart of Poser but not all of the time.



pakled posted Sun, 11 February 2007 at 7:36 PM

I discovered the nostrils have a selection in the Material room (P5), and I just use the 'bucket' to make them black..;) but I do everything the hard way.

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R_Hatch posted Mon, 12 February 2007 at 3:20 AM

GoM: whenever I see this problem, I click on the camera icon at the top of the preview window, and the shadowcam then usually pops back where it should.


Ghostofmacbeth posted Mon, 12 February 2007 at 10:20 AM

I will try that. Thanks



Tguyus posted Mon, 12 February 2007 at 12:18 PM

Interesting stuff.  Thanks for posting it Baggins.

One question: what are the advantages of this approach relative to just using object-based AO on the nostrils body part material?

Thanks again... tguyus


jwiest posted Fri, 16 February 2007 at 6:19 PM

Great tutorial...I'll have to try this out sometime!  Thanks! :)

John


mickmca posted Mon, 07 May 2007 at 8:32 AM

I got tripped on the cam scaling too. As near as I can tell, Scale and Zoom are "the same thing." Nothing is really the same thing, of course, but they seem to do the same thing. It's possible that "existing" lights (the original 1, 2, 3, even if you changed them to spots) get shadow cams with Zoom and Pan, but new cams get the more primitive Scale and Trans. How do you tell an "original" cam? Its name is Shadow Lite # Cam rather than Shadow Cam Lite #. (Yes, I too wish I was making this up.)

And a potential cause of PanY whacking the camera off into some X: It wasn't PanY but PanX. Poser has a tiresome habit of presenting dials in whatever order it feels like, and when you are doing something like this, where you make "the same" adjustment to three or four things, it's a real PIA. My spot 1 shadowcam has Zoom, PanY, and PanX for controls, in that order. My spot 2 shadowcam has Scale, transX, and transY, in that order. After I moved cam 1 up to the face, I went to cam 2, dialed the second dial, and boink.

BTW, with Sydney G2, the first step -- fixing the shadow settings -- did nothing for her nostril glow. Not sure why. However, adjusting the shadow cams worked great. It fixed most of the nostril glow. I still see "light artifacts" that puzzle me, though. Some nostril glow bits (inconsistent and discontinuous) and light on her neck which should be in shadow. I'm suspicious that the IBL is causing them, so I'm running another render without it.

I have a theory question that's bothering me. I understood that the view from the shadow cam is a Light's Eye View of the scene, and I can see how Zoom and Pan would move the port around on the pane of the light. But they don't appear to do that, they appear to move the camera around on the X,Y global axes. Which is it? Is it Panning or Transforming. It looks like Transforming to me. The theoretical question: Does it not matter?

M
PS: I just did some testing and Yes, it does matter. The "Scale" shadow cams do indeed move according to the x,y coords rather than panning. To test this, move the camera slowly and watch whether what's visible in the center changes. With "Zoom" cameras the pane frame reveals new territory, but the plane stays the same. When you move a "Scale" camera across X, it behaves like an orbiting camera pointed at the scene -- which is wrong, isn't it?


DarkEdge posted Mon, 07 May 2007 at 8:47 AM

An absolutely awesome tutorial Bagginsbill! 😉

My question is, when would you have to recalculate a shadow map (ie; can't reuse map from previous render) other than animating? From what I'm understanding is that if I alter the strength, I don't have to recalculate. If I move the position of the camera, no recalc. If I move the light, recalc.
I'm just trying to make sure my head is wrapped around this properly.

Thanks again for your tutorial and time that you've spent on this.
Regards

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mickmca posted Mon, 07 May 2007 at 9:23 AM

Regarding the light artifacts:

This is Syd G2 with one active light. IBL off, Fill off. As the shadows attest, the light is off to her right, a bit above her head. The light's shadow cam has been adjusted and Lo, no nostril glow. However, the left side of her nose is being lit by... what? and the area of her neck in shadow has a stripe of light across it from... where? Apparently this is not the same problem as nostril glow. Does anyone have any idea what it is?

M


mickmca posted Mon, 07 May 2007 at 10:35 AM

The light artifacts are mesh-dependent? I just put V3 into the scene, turned on all three lights, and rendered. It looks just fine. Same with Steph. And with Jessi, Ok too. So it's got something to do with the Sydney G2 figure. Arggghhh!

M


bagginsbill posted Thu, 10 May 2007 at 1:25 PM

Apparently in P7 they change "Scale" to Zoom and XTran, YTran became PanX, PanY. Whatever they're called, I believe those dials work the same as P6. Are you using the parameter dials, or are you spinning the camera controls on top of the pose preview window? They work differently. The camera controls on the pose preview don't work right for shadow cams - they seem disoriented to the actual camera. If you stop and think about it, that makes sense as the camera is not actually free to move or rotate. That would involve moving or rotating the light, which if you try it, you'll see the camera moves with it.

What the parameter dials do is translate the origin and scale of the shadow map itself, in other words imagine a plane suspended in front of the shadow cam with perpendicular alignment.  Now imagine a sheet of paper in this plane. You could change the scale of the paper, or slide it around the plane. This "sheet of paper" is your shadow map! You're not actually moving the camera at all with the PanX and PanY - you're moving the paper.

And regarding the shadow problem - I believe P7 is broken. This is one of the reasons I won't use it. At RDNA we've had discussions of several other bizarre new shadow problems that P6 just does not have. Perhaps you, like me, should stick to P6.


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bagginsbill posted Thu, 10 May 2007 at 1:27 PM

There is evidence that P7 no longer obeys the Min Bias at low settings - no matter how low you go (.0001) there is still breakaway - as if the shadow is offset a tiny bit from where it should be.


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)


mickmca posted Thu, 10 May 2007 at 8:24 PM

Both Pan dials (original lights) and trans dials cause terrible fisheye distortion at 10-20% scale, which suggests orbiting to me. The fisheye effect makes it simply impossible to fit the cam to the area included in the shadow map.

And IBL w/AO screws up the shadows beyond fixing, as my Miki pic shows, even if the "Light" from the IBL zones is black. I've pretty much sworn off IBL; it looks like abandoning P7 is more in order.

Mick


bagginsbill posted Fri, 11 May 2007 at 6:51 AM

Adorana posted mysterious bad shadows with IBL  at RDNA - she emailed EF and they acknowledged the problem. Don't know if the SR's address it.

Fish eye distortion is due to a low focal length on the camera. This is appropriate for spotlight shadow cams, as they actually are pretty darn close to the figure and have to be made wide angle to include the full spread of the light. If you narrow the width of the spotlight cone, the camera goes to a longer focal length. and there  is less fisheye. But don't worry about fisheye - you're not rendering the scene from that point of view - you're rendering the shadows and they are indeed fanning out in a cone.


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mickmca posted Fri, 11 May 2007 at 9:56 AM

Duh. I didn't think of the connection between the light cone and the camera cone.

I am wondering if the light artifacts (Monday 9:23 post) in the eF figures could be caused when by alignment of the normals. That scallop of light on Syd's chin really puzzles me.

The SR 1, in my experience so far, doesn't address any of the show-stoppers in P7 (like the knocking aside of a light when you click its globe to select it). Many of them were ignored in the service releases of P6, and some are left over from bug reports at the beginning of P5's life cycle. So I won't hold my breathe waiting for a fix.

M


conradkeely posted Tue, 22 April 2008 at 10:01 PM

 This didn't work for me in Poser 7.

In Poser 7, the shadow cameras do not have a scale parameter dial, they have a zoom parameter dial instead.

It would be nice to see a follow-up of this topic for Poser 7.


bagginsbill posted Mon, 28 April 2008 at 7:39 PM

Hi CK.

Have you tried ray-traced shadows? They're even better. I'm not using the depth-mapped shadows much lately.


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Vex posted Sun, 30 November 2008 at 12:10 PM

 Im trying to do this in Poser7 SR3 and when I try to raise my shadowcam I end up staring at nothing. everything but her heels are cut off. so I have no idea when im actually at her head or not.



bagginsbill posted Tue, 02 December 2008 at 2:32 PM

Quote -  Im trying to do this in Poser7 SR3 and when I try to raise my shadowcam I end up staring at nothing. everything but her heels are cut off. so I have no idea when im actually at her head or not.

I don't know why that would be the case. It works fine in all versions of Poser. Are you moving the shadow cam using the parameter dials? If you change your preview to the shadow cam, and also select that camera in the parameters, and then move the dials slowly you should have no trouble tracking where the camera is going.

Remember, though that the camera is not in its true initial position until you do at least one render. You don't have to let it finish - just get one started and then cancel it. Then switch to the shadow cam in preview and parameters, and move the dials. As you change the zoom, you'll have to keep tweaking the PanX and PanY dials incrementally.

However, this whole business is kind of not relevent to Poser 7 SR3. All the problems with ray-traced shadows are gone now. I never use depth-mapped shadows anymore. The ray-traced shadows are superior in every way, except one. They are really slow with highly complex trans-mapped hair. But the results are really worth using them. I suggest you get things basically correct in test renders, using depth-mapped shadows. Then - switch to ray-traced shadows and let-er-rip overnight with really good render settings.

Poser 7 is capable of very good realism, but you can't be cheap about compute time. A really good render is worth waiting overnight for.


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bagginsbill posted Tue, 02 December 2008 at 2:37 PM

Here's a demo. Depth-mapped with the shadow-cam trick.

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bagginsbill posted Tue, 02 December 2008 at 2:37 PM

And the ray-traced shadow. By the way - the ray-traced render was still under a minute here. I spent more time adjusting the shadow cam.

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)


Vex posted Tue, 02 December 2008 at 4:03 PM

Well I'm not one to skimp on render time when I want something to look nice. even with RT shadows it was making her nostrils glow. I eventually gave up and used a different morph and the nostril glow stopped. So i think some of it has to do with the morphing.



Miss Nancy posted Tue, 02 December 2008 at 4:20 PM

can ya post a screencap of the bad shadowcam view, vex?
there may be a little-known glitch in regard to moving the shadowcam
in one of the preview modes.  I haven't actually checked to see if anybody
reported it.



Vex posted Tue, 02 December 2008 at 4:32 PM

 I'll try to replicate it in a little while. I did do the render before trying to move the camera around, and my main issue was that it was clipping everything out but her heels. Kinda how it does if you're to close to her face and you change the focal length, it starts clipping her face and showing you the innards of her head instead. except this time all i saw where heels. not even her toes or calves and up.



bagginsbill posted Tue, 02 December 2008 at 4:47 PM

Reduce the hither to move the artificial clipping plane closer to the camera.

If you have nostril glow even with RT shadows, it may be you are using a lot of IBL?

With IBL, you have to use ambient occlusion and enable raytracing.

The shadows from a directional light can only neutralize the light coming from that light. A complete shadow will effectively shut off a spot or infinite light, but that won't stop the surface from reflecting your IBL light.

Quite often people use too much IBL because they want to fill in the darkness. But the darkness is usually not the result of insufficient light. It is because you need to gamma correct your image. Once you start gamma correcting, you'll quickly realize you had the lights as much as 3 times too bright, trying to compensate for the dark areas.


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ice-boy posted Mon, 19 January 2009 at 5:01 AM

my.smithmicro.com/tutorials/1801.html
i think this belong here.
its a similar tutorial. but i noticed a new trick. a very tall object changes teh shadow cam. so if you have a tall box then the shadow cam is higher. and then you can scale it down even more.
now you can do it for a full body shot.

what do you think? 


bagginsbill posted Mon, 19 January 2009 at 6:55 AM

It is the same thing. In my case the "very tall object" was the figure, and the only part we are looking at is the face.


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)


ice-boy posted Mon, 19 January 2009 at 11:01 AM

yeah i know. like i said its good if you want a full body shot.


ice-boy posted Sun, 01 February 2009 at 12:17 PM

does this work in poser pro? i now was setting up my shadow cam and the shadows in the new render looked the same. no change.


bagginsbill posted Sun, 01 February 2009 at 12:56 PM

Shadow cams have no affect on ray-traced shadows, only depth-mapped shadows. Perhaps you're not using depth-mapped?

In any case, if you're interested in detail and in realism, depth-mapped shadows have no place for you. Use ray-traced shadows.

This is for people who have very weak computers and no patience.

Look at the original posting date - February 2006 - that is 3 years ago.

Computers, even if you have an "old" one, are 3 years farther than when I wrote this. That's about 4 to 10 times faster than 2006.


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)


ice-boy posted Sun, 01 February 2009 at 2:24 PM

i want to do very very blury shadows. and with raytraced i see a lot of pixels even with the best settings. and its a close up.

but i use ratryced shadows like 80% the time.


bagginsbill posted Sun, 01 February 2009 at 3:34 PM

OK, well yes it works in Poser Pro. There's nothing new about lighting in Poser X since Poser 6.


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)


vholf posted Sun, 01 February 2009 at 7:26 PM

thanks bagginsbill.

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