Hair render question

3D User 713

I'm new to 3D all together and I have figured out most of the basics but now i have a question. When I use the toulouse hair (or any hair) and UberEnviroment for the lighting, the hair is exposed and the color looks correct. But when I DONT use UE and just use distant lights for Key, Fill, and Rim, 99.9% of the time the hair is always washed-out with no color.

Am I using to much light? Is it a rendering issue? Also when I do use UE and I don't render it progressively, the skin texture goes haywire.

The jpg. is my first render and the hair that was selected was dark brown / black. I've also linked a video of what I'm doing.
So please tell me if I'm doing something wrong.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ib2jktcYsw&feature=youtu.be (sorry for the glitches, quicktime was acting up.)

Jaderail

Would please just post what you think is a proper render here and the one you think is incorrect. I can not follow the Video well enough to tell what you did. You can post 5 images to one post by doing this. Choose File add the name, Then hit Preview Post, then do Choose File for second image, then Preview Post again, and so on. You will get a message saying how much ROOM in bytes you have left. I've never used all 9999KB before in one post of 5 images.

3D User 713

Sorry about that. Here are some quick renders. I can't figure out what happens to the skin with UE and not progressive render and am I just over lighting my other render?

mjc1016

1. Progressive render is NOT a 'final' render...it is a series of 'snapshots' along the way...don't use it. (Also it sometimes has problems that can lead to DS crashing...like it's a memory hog.)

2. UE2 has poor to no specular light. So, with that as your primary/only light source you won't get the same specular response as when using other lights. Using spots...especially 3 of them, that all have good specular light is definitely 'overdriving' the specular settings. Set the key light to be your only specular light (in Parameters, Illumination..ON. The other two...Diffuse Only). That should calm things down some...

3. Blotchiness/graininess and other oddities, when using UE2 are usually due to a sample/quality level problem. There should be 4 'level' presets...us should always use at least #3 for anything other than initial setup/positioning.

Herald of Fire

To expand on what mjc said, the UberEnvironment light neither has specular nor does it give very good results out of the box. By default it's set to a low number of samples. The blotchiness you're seeing on the figure is a result of the individual samples being large enough to be clearly visible. Fewer samples means larger samples, since it still has to cover the same area. UE2 comes with several quality presets. I always use setting 4, since anything lower can give noticeably bad results.

As for lighting, what you might benefit from is specular only lighting. The benefit to Daz's light setup is that you can use lights which only affect the 'shine' of an object and do not provide diffuse lighting. A good example of how you might use this is to set up a main distant light which provides both diffuse and specular, your UberEnvironment light on a moderately lower intensity for filler, and a rear-facing specular light on a lower intensity so that the rest of the scene still benefits from specular highlights.

3D User 713

Thanks everyone for your input, I will give it a go. Is there a certain way to apply the high-level UE2?

mjc1016

Where you find the UE2 to load it, there should be several presets for lighting and some quality presets. With UE2 selected, in the scene click on one of them.