Quote - ISF? Did I miss a discussion, or is this a feature of Poser Pro 2010?

Inverse Square Falloff (ISF) and Inverse Linear Falloff (ILF) were introduced in Poser 8 and are also available in Poser Pro 2010.

Ummm, I might have found it in P8 Light properties.

I did this render in 5 minutes 22 seconds on my laptop, which is not a snappy machine.

The artifacts on the wall about M4 are not Poser's fault. My geometry builder script that created this house is a little messed up. That's the end of a wall poking through.

Even the small room to the right reveals some detail and definition.  Excellent demo.

Quote - I think she means she changed them to IBL. Which is generally not a useful thing to do.

I bet the reflections get stronger when the lights get stronger because the shader has Reflect_Lite_Mult enabled or Reflect_Kd_Mult enabled, both of which I have said a bajillion times should never be on.

For many of us each kind of light is no mystery and trying them at random is unthinkable. But for Esther and many others, it is a mystery.

I keep meaning to make a tutorial about lighting basics, including how to position and aim them. But this is best done as a video - a written tutorial will not show the workflow very easily. I'm having trouble finding a good free video capture program that does all I want (dynamic pan and zoom) and doesn't lose synchronization of audio and video when I render.

NOTE: Cross-posted

Have you tried FRAPS? Cheap, easy to use, works with video games and reasonably good support.

Quote - Ummm, I might have found it in P8 Light properties.

I had bookmarked a thread here on ISF. I didn't realize that it was an auto setting now - just found it too, after seeing you had found it in Properties.

Stupidly, inverse square falloff is not even mentioned in the PP 2010 manual.

/return to thread

I think you better reread the manual.  It is mentioned in the beginning and in the lights chapter.

 Hi,
thanks all.  Will try again and let you know how i get on.
That is very useful.
BB is part of the reason I'm having trouble - even with IDL, because I have a wall missing in the room for the camera?  I was wondering if the wall and ceiling are needed to bounce light off in IDL?
Love esther

 okay, I set my lighting up the same as the BB example (as far as I can tell).. Immediately I changed the setting from normal to inverse  linear fall off, my scene preview went fairly dark.  then I dropped the intensity of the light to 60% from default of 100% and my preview went even darker.  It's a shame the preview lighting can't look something like the final render lighting really.
Okay I'm rendering now, in what I think are fairly fast render settings, but with IDL enabled.  will keep you posted.

 did you say if I should have AO on or off for the light?

BTW I have now put a couple more point  lights around the ceiling - also at 60% intensity and same settings.
will see how that looks.

just could a texture could not be loaded or image map etc error message, but will see how the render looks anyway.  I wonder why adding 2 more lights gives me that message (please don't tell me if it involves double calculus)

Love esther

Judging from the light meter, you might have a bit too much lighting again.  But there is improvement with the way the image is rendering.

 what do you reckon causes that funny little square artifact seen on some of the bowls?
I might have missed something.  what is the lightmeter meant to look like to be right?

Your lower bucket size will increase render time.  Have you tried bucket size 32 and Min. Shading rate 1 for starters?

Pixel sample and Raytrace can be decreased slightly. 

you want me to make min shading rate less to help with my render time? I already have it set at 2.  doesn't reducing it increase my render times? 

 I left min shading rate at 2, but I have increased my bucket size to 64, decreased ray trace and pixels both to 4.  Yes, that's very much faster. Thanks.
Love esther

 I really hate this time difference between us (so disruptive) but I have to go to bed.
Love esther

Just a quick thought, esther, before I go to bed. I think your lighting setup renders are taking way too long... it must be so frustrating for you.

Irradiance Cache set to 41% (in the standard render settings, as shown) means that the IDL Irradiance Cache (which you can't see unless you use the Dimension3D Render Firefly script, in the Scripts menu) is set to nearly 54%. For lighting renders I generally use standard IC = 10%, which sets IDL IC = 32%. You could even try standard IC = 0%, which sets IDL IC = 25%.

You could try with 2 or 3 IDL bounces, instead of 4.

A lot of lights will slow things down even more. How many lights do you generally have switched on in your (real) kitchen? You need have no more than that in this scene. But you do really need a ceiling to provide indirect light across the whole room.

On the other hand, your IDL quality setting is really low. Increasing the quality affects the sample count, which is not as costly as you might imagine. I tend to use a minimum quality setting of 10.

In short, you really should not have to wait hours for renders just to get your lighting right. Minutes should be enough.

 thanks - sleepwell.  will try.

Hmmm, there's something not right... it just shouldn't take so long.

Oh wait... I notice you increased bucket size from 12 to 64. Maybe you don't have enough RAM for that bucket size, so it's just stalling. Otherwise, it should certainly be quicker.

The other thing that will add a lot of render time is the reflections on the work surfaces, fridge and the glass in the cupboard doors. Maybe you could switch those off for the time being? You will have to do that in the materials, because you need the RT bounces for IDL. Assuming the reflections are using the Reflection_Color channel on the Poser_Surface node, you could just change the Reflection_Value dial to zero (making a note of what it was set to).

Reflection_Value = 0 will simply make the reflection have zero intensity but the Reflect node will still run. (I think - been a while since I did timing tests of null shader tree cases.)

The D3D render settings provide a separate bounces for reflections versus IDL. You can set the reflections to 0, while keeping IDL at 4 or 5 or whatever.

Quote - You can set the reflections to 0, while keeping IDL at 4 or 5 or whatever.

That would seem logical, BB, but I tried this a few days ago. In the D3D screen, I reduced the RT bounces to zero and left IDL bounces at 2 or 3. It rendered with no IDL. I know I was half asleep at the time, so maybe someone can corroborate this.

What I didn't try was setting RT bounces to 1, and seeing if it would then obey the IDL bounces setting.

Point noted about setting the Refelction_Value to zero!

I just confirmed you're right. 0 RT bounces shuts down the IDL. But 1 works as a speedup.

I came across this in the reference manual recently:

"When using Indirect Lighting with transparent surfaces, set the Raytrace Bounces setting to at least 2 for proper IDL calculations."

I'm not sure whether or not this is still relevant with regard to changes that have been made to IDL with various SRs. IDL with lots of transparency = long render times on my system.

Maybe we should look at D3D's render settings for a better assessement.  There could be something there we entirely missing.

Here it is and I'm happy with it.

BTW after trial and error for lights, I am also now doing same for render settings.   
Love esther

 I have 14 gig of RAM

Light-based AO should only be used on Image Based Lights. Anyway, light-based AO is completely ignored/disabled when you are using IDL, which you are, right? In which case turning it on didn't do anything. But there is a difference using 40% lights, versus 60%.

Looks good.

Either image is reasonable lighting. It looks realistic now.

 yes, thanks.  I am very happy now.
You are right.  I'm using IDL.
You haven't said what the light meter is supposed to look like when the lighting is right.
Love esther

I thought I did. Big white dots. Little or no red.

 and is too much very red?

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=3627664&ebot_calc_page#message_3627664

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=3627662&ebot_calc_page#message_3627662

 Oh yes.  sorry I admit it - I glossed over that because you used words I didn't understand such as specular.
Love esther

Have a look at the series of posts I made starting here:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=3617202&ebot_calc_page#message_3617202

That was a discussion of the right and wrong ways to deal with skin textures, particularly bump maps, but in order to get to that I had to explain how diffuse and specular work.

Specular reflection is what makes highlights.

Quote -  Haven't tried the D3D script but I am on a mac.

Esther, I'm on Mac too. The D3D script works fine.

It really is useful for IDL fine control, and even for just seeing what the IDL-specific settings are, after adjustments in the standard render settings window.

There is one setting in the D3D script that you just can't get to in the standard render settings: IDL Samples. If this is set very low it increases IDL pre-calculation time (you see a very high density of red dots during pre-calculation) and can in fact give patchy IDL lighting. I usually keep this at 20.

This web site by David Briggs is an excellent introduction to lighting and how color works.

This page in particular explains diffuse and specular effects.

http://www.huevaluechroma.com/021.php

 thanks everyone.  will check it all out.
Love esther

 Okay, started reading that thread BB, and here is a rare and probably very scary insight into the mind of esther.  ARe you ready?
I look at that stuff and think, but surely I'm not going to be fiddling with material nodes.  There are hundreds of materials in my scene (well maybe not hundreds but a hell of a lot).  I can't go changing them all.  They should be okay when I buy my stuff from rendero and daz.  even if I wanted to change them there are too many of them.
Love esther

(Oops, made a mistake. The setting you can't see except in the D3D script is called Irradiance Sample Size, not IDL Samples).

I just noticed the Gc in the render settings posts.  Gc=2.2. 

@Esther, is your MAC monitor calibrated for 1.8 or 2.2? 

@BB, would the discrepancy in render Gc and monitor Gc make a difference?

If you aren't prepared to tweak materials then you are going to have to accept that what you see is the creators idea of what your scene should look like rather than your own.  I regularly modify 90% or more of the materials in my Vue and Max renders and that can be over 100 mats but I want the scene to look the way I imagine it to be rather than the way the person who sold the texture thinks it should look