how do you render catch lights?

DopplerShift

I tried searching and couldn't find a concise how-to on adding catchlights in the eyes of figures. Does anyone have a quick suggestion on getting my lights to reflect back in the eyes to give them more life?

thanks!

Szark

I had to Google "catchlight", yeah just use a spot light set to Specular light only and turn shadows off, set to about 30 - 50% intensity but it does depend on other lighting what the intensity will be. All these functions are found in the Parameters Pane when the spot light is selected.

PS Light is half of the equations when is comes to bring life to eyes, surfaces settings plays a big part too. So it does depend how real you are aiming for. I would start with seeing what it looks like with a spot (catchlight) first and go from there.

Aristoc

is this the effect you are looking for? I just happened to see this during a spot render. I had turned down gloss to about 10 percent or so under the surfaces tab. seems to work in different poses.

DopplerShift

joeinhose said:

is this the effect you are looking for? I just happened to see this during a spot render. I had turned down gloss to about 10 percent or so under the surfaces tab. seems to work in different poses.

Yes, those are catch light in her eyes. I can't seem to get them to show up using AreaLightDiscs or spot lights even when the light is directly in line with the camera.

What item did you change the gloss on? Cornea, Iris, Pupil, Eye reflection?

Aristoc

after I loaded my unfinished character the only light i have added was one distant light into the current viewport.

the next thing I did was i clicked on the top surfaces/rendering tab. and then on the right i clicked on surfaces > editor >genesis 2 female.

then i scrolled down to glossiness and lowered it from I think it was defaulted at 100 down to about 50 or 40 or whatever.

then i did a spot render. and this was the result. that's it. i did not go into iris or cornea or anything else.

im new to this all but maybe one of the pro's here could jump in and explain what really is happening? I have no idea if there is a slightly better way to do this or what this would do to the rest of the character?

thanks.

Szark

NOTE: Area Lights provide very poor specular highlights (which is the proper term in 3D) due to being a shader light and not a conventional light . Spot light will provide good specular highlights as will distant and point lights providing the surfaces, as noted above. are set up correctly.

Specular highlights are broken down in to two functions Glossiness (the size of the highlight, lower the value smaller the highlight is.) and Specular Strength which controls how bright the said highlight is. Pretty straight forward when it is broken down, I had trouble with this when I was new.

What figure is this? If it is Genesis 2 Female then it has an extra material zone called Eye Reflection which IMHO should have the diffuse strength say 5%, Opacity 5%, Glossiness say 30% and Spec strength 100%, Multiply Specular Through Opacity - OFF and reflection 80 -100%

If it is Genesis then that makes it a little more complex as DAZ3D removed the Eye Surface (Eye Reflection) material zone but it can be put back in with this product http://www.daz3d.com/eye-surface-for-genesis otherwise it is a matter of matching surface settings for the cornea and sclera.

DopplerShift

Thanks for all the tips and suggestions. I've managed a workable solution.

If I combine an area light disc with a distant light set to specular with raytracing shadows and change the glossiness of the eye reflection to 70%, I can recreate what I'm looking for. The technique works best with the arealightdisc since the square-shaped arealightplane would need to create square catch lights and the distant light only creates circular catch lights. But the arealightdisc along with the distant light recreates a pretty believable beauty dish.

Anyways, in my opinion, having a specular element added to the arealights would add even more reality to this tool.

Szark

I have been reliably informed recently that adding a specular channel to Area Light may not be possible at all due to the nature of it being a shader light.

Jaderail

There is a WONDERFUL product in the store Project EYEris that can add fantastic reflections to eyes that do not need the lighting to be specific to the effect. That allows you to have what you like without the lighting built to create the effect. Saves lots of work.

john_antkowiak

I stumbled on a much simpler way to fake it than any of these, but it's not nearly as elegant as Project Eyeris. It produces a very small, non-reflective catchlight in the pupil rather than in the iris. It might only be useful in certain low-light situations, but let's face it: in real life, you have to get really close to an eyeball to be able to make out any details reflected in the surface; otherwise it just looks like a white dot. Here's the dirt-poor beginner's solution:

By default,the six or seven Surface properties making up the eye each use the same eye map chosen for the character. I don't know if this is technically accurate, but they behave as though they're all separate layers that can be manipulated independently in a way you'd never guess. For sake of this discussion, let's say the Sclera layer - the white part - has the largest "holes" in the map, through which you can see the colors of the Iris layer aligned below it. The Iris layer, in turn, has smaller "holes" through which you can see the Pupil map layer. But you can adjust the Horizontal and Vertical Offset properties of the Pupil layer. It's like sliding the bottom image around until the portion you can see under the Iris layer is the edge of a black and white region of the map. 

Not perfect, but it'll do in a pinch...

Now, if I could just turn off the lights inside her skull, coming out of her ears and nostrils!