Daz Studio 2 & 3 Tutorial 4 : adding lights and rendering.

In my 4th tutorial I will explain the differences between the various lights and how you use them. I will also show you how you can render your 3D scene and change it into a picture.

In my first 3 tutorials, Daz Studio 2 & 3 Tutorial 1 : loading and customizing a character, Daz Studio 2 & 3 Tutorial 2 : adding clothes and hair. and Daz Studio 2 & 3 Tutorial 3 : adding a background and posing you character., I went through the various steps of explaining how Daz Studio works and the basics of making a scene with a customized character with a background.
In this tutorial I will finish the picture by adding lights and rendering it.

The basics of working with lights.

There are 3 different lights : Point light, Distant light and Spotlight and they all have their own uses.

Point light : this light shines in every direction, so rotating it has no effect.

Distant light : this light can be compared to the sun since it will light up the entire scene and you can rotate it but repositioning has no effect.

Spotlight : this works as a actual spotlight and you can move it around and rotate it and change the spread angle to get the desired light effect.

With all the lights you can change the color and turn on the various shadow settings.
Resizing doesn’t have any effect but it is useful to make it easier to see in which direction it’s pointing. If you want to get more light you’ll either have to increase the intensity or add more lights.

The lights can be made under Create and changed under Parameters.
They have the following options : Shadow with the options Shadow Type, Shadow Softness and Shadow Bias, and Light with the options Illumination, Color and Intensity.

I have made renders with some of the various options to give you a good idea of what effects they have.
All the renders were made with 1 white Distant Light with a Intensity of 100%.

Default, no shadow settings, Illumination On :

Shadow type : Deep Shadow map, Illumination On :

Shadow type : Raytraced, Illumination On :

Shadow type : Deep Shadow map, Shadow Softness 50%, Illumination On :

Shadow type : Deep Shadow map, Shadow Bias 0.5 (a high Bias will make the shadow break up), Illumination On :

Shadow type : Raytraced, Shadow Softness 50%, Illumination On :

Shadow type : Raytraced, Shadow Bias 0.5, Illumination On :

Illumination Off :

Illumination Diffuse Only :

Illumination Specular Only :

Step 1 : adding the lights

Since this a simple outside scene I will only use Distant Lights.
Go to Create and click on New Distant Light.
Here you see a variety of options.

Click Accept to add it to the scene.

You’ll instantly notice that your scene will become darker. This is because Daz studio’s default light automatically turns off since you’re taking over by adding lights.

In Parameters you can now rotate it to create different light effects.
In my “The basics of working with lights.” Module I have already shown what does what so I’ll let you play around with it yourself.

When you work with lights it’s important to add them 1 at a time to slowly get the desired effect. This way it’s a lot easier to work with them.
You can also buy or get free pre-made lightsets, like this one and adjust those to get a nice effect. A lot of items also come with lights.

Just try to keep it realistic, just because you have 10 lights, it doesn’t mean that they all cast shadows, nor should they all be the same color. You can get really nice effects by making some of the lights light yellow or orange for example since these can represent the sun.

Step 2 : rendering.

Rendering is changing the 3D scene into a picture.

To do this go to the tab Render.
Now you will get the following screen :

You have a few additional buttons for adding camera’s and lights but the most important one is the render one (arrow) since that will be the one you will eventually use once you’ve changed the settings to your liking.

To the right you can see a lot of settings.

General, these are the main ones :

and you can use Advanced to make small changes. I never use those to be honest.

In the General tab you can decide to either partially render it or fully render it in Speed. I always fully render it (Software renderer) since that gives me a better idea about what needs to be changed.

You can also decide whether you render it normally or cartoon style in Style (see my 1st tutorial).

Then there is Dimensions where you decide the shape and size of your picture. For this lens I will go with a square 600×600 picture since 600 is the maximum width you can use and the bigger you make it, the longer it will take to render. I always render my 3D art 7000×7000 since that is big enough to fit a large poster but then it can sometimes take more then 12 hours to render something.

The Timeline is for making animations.

And in Render To you can decide what happens to the image you’re rendering.

Once you’ve set everything to your liking simply press the Render button and wait.

Be prepared to spend a lot of time on rendering and adjusting your scene to make it look nice. It can easily take me 20 times to get it right. Which is why I always render images at 700×700 until I think it’s done and then I will render it at 7000×7000.

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