Help with Inane Glory's Photo Studio 3

[email protected]

Hi all,

I am new to Daz3D but have done a lot of photography. I recently bought Inane Glory's Photo Studio 3 because it has soft boxes and other classic studio lighting requirements that should allow me to emulate traditional studio lighting techniques better than the lights in DS.

However, I do not understand how I can "turn on" the lights. I understand they will only appear in a render view because they are not really "lights" as such, but nothing else about their use is obvious. I load a lights set into a scene (e.g. Photo Studio Lights X1) and then get stuck - they never illuminate my scene in NVIDIA Iray view and nor can I find any way to change their intensity.

Specifically, how do I get them to illuminate my scene and where are the controls for intensity, angle of spread, etc, analagous with the DS lighting objects? I have found a user's guide for the original InaneGlory Photo Studio on the internet and it states: "One thing that is noticeably missing from the parameters tab is any kind of light controls. You will need to switch over to the surfaces tab to see those controls.". I have looked in the surfaces tab and the lights are indeed listed there with a host of properties you can edit (e.g. shadow colour, fall off, etc) but nothing I change here makes any difference to the light not appearing in the rendered scene. There is an "Intensity" property, but changing it to high values also has no effect.

I am using a newly built Windows 10 x64 computer with 32GB of RAM, an I7 Intel CPU and an nVidia GTX 1080 graphics card, so there is plenty of processing power. I can light and render scenes using DS studio lights and am otherwise slowly finding my way around Daz3D, but it seems I am missing something obvious with Photo Studio 3 and its lighting concepts. I have looked all over the internet for a manual or instructions or other assisance but have had no luck in working this out. Can anybody in this forum help me out?

Anthony

 

scorpio

IG's Photo Studio 3 is for 3delight not Iray.

Daz have a 30 days money back so you can return them for a refund and purchase one of IG's sets that are designed for Iray.

You can make the lights work in Iray by changing the emissive surface to the emissive Iray shader availble in the shader preset folder.

SimonJM

I think you have fallen foul of the fact that 'mesh lights' fro 3Delight (what used to be the default render engine for Daz Studio, and is still there for use) and Iray (the new default) being setup in different ways.  The good news is taht they wills till work, but you'll have to do a bit of work first!  I don't have these but I am guessing the light emitting bit is done via the UberArea light shader.  Each light prop will likely have one each of those.  Seelct the surface in the Surfaces tab and conver it to an Iray Uber shader, you'll then need to play with the Emission settings in the surfaces tab.

fastbike1

The Photometric lights built into Studio for Iray can emulate softboxes just fine. There are geometry settings, spread angle, etc.

Be warned that for Iray lights, the intensity setting doesn't do anything, you will want to manipulate the Lumens setting. Also don't get hung up trying to use real world values for lumens, the lights will be way too dark.

I would strongly recommend you put the Photo Studio package aside for now and just use the Studio photometric spotlights until you get a handle on usage and controls. You can also create a simple primitive and use it as a reflector once you have an appropriate surface.

Here are a couple of examples. First one is a single spotlight configured as a 1x2 meter softbox. Second one is with an HDRI "dome". The dome is configured such that the main light source is from model right, 3/4 view. Third is dome and scene. You can see that the postligh is overwhlemed by the even lighting from the dome

[email protected]

Thanks for the information all. I have asked for a refund for my Inane Glory purchase.

fastbike1, thanks als for the advice and examples. I have looked further into the photometric lights within DS itself and set a spotlight to rectangular geometry to emulate a softbox as per your examples. What does the "size" property mean in such a geometry? Does a light height of 100 and width of 200 for a photometric light with rectangular geometry equal your 1x2meter softbox? The light cast on the scene versus a point spotlight is greatly reduced and much softer in this arrangement (which is exactly what I am after), so I am guessing I am on the right track.