Jay, once again, this is exactly what I was looking for. I also like that these tips and tricks videos are shorter. You still managed to give a fair explanation for the problem before giving the solution which I think is essential. thank you.
You said you'd post re ghost lights and you did, thank you. I found a clean copy of the earlier Daz so I'll stick with that. Unfortunately I read the forums on the topic and found Daz's response extremely rude and dismissive... just uncalled for. So, I am pretty annoyed with them right now... we pay for assets, pay for their fancy cars and houses, and get treated like that... no thank you.
Thanks for this video. Very useful. However ... I have made the decision to lock my configuration at 4.16 because this is not just a case of changing how "Ghost Lights" work it is also the breaking of existing products and the ruination of any existing work that used techniques which, after all, you yourself created a video showing how to use and for which DAZ sold products using the system. I understand that the fault is with NVidia, who have no interest whatsoever in DAZ Studio users other than as a route to sell more graphics cards - which you can't buy anyway! Anyway, thanks again, your videos are always interesting and informative.
I went to re-render an old scene, and I'm like "Why are my lights off? Didn't I save last time? No, my lights are still on. What's going on?" I brought the opacity back to 1.0 and they turned on. "Well, let me visit WP GURU. It's probably on top of his videos list." And it was! Thank you so much! Bit of a pain that I have to re-work any past ghost lights I already set up when I go to open old files though. I never used the Watts, always foot-candles or cm-candles. Maybe I'll switch to Watts since there's 2 places to change light intensity!
Thanks for the tips. Even if it seems easy to do it for free, I prefer the ghost light plugin, click -> set presets -> done. Hopefuly the developer will find a solution for this.
Indeed, and that option exists on the regular scene lights (point lights and spotlight). Those are actually mesh lights under the hood, I guess it's just not implemented on the regular Emission channel.
@@timdoheny-adams1008 😄 Good question! Like so often in 3D, there's more than one way to skin a cat. Some users prefer ghost lights, other prefer to light with parametric lights. There's no right or wrong way to do lighting.
@@WPguru thanks for the reply! I’ve seen a few guides which say rendering time is quicker with ghost lights instead of spotlights. Do you know if this is true?
Thank you! Even when I do this, however, there are so many fireflies in the shape of the ghost-light that it may as well not be invisible at all. When the brightness is very low this doesn't happen, but now since we have to exponentially increase the luminance, etc to make up for the opacity, they are unusable for me. Is this a glitch? Am I doing something wrong? This wasn't happening in 4.16
What annoys me just as much is the attitude of some of the people in the Daz forums. "It was a bug that was exploited, now the bug has been fixed, deal with it", "It's not how real world lighting works", That attitude isn't helping anyone. The beauty of 3D, is you can create and manipulate outside of the realms of physics and reality. Will Daz be offering refunds for KindredArts' products? Roguey uses ghost lights extensively in his scenes, will Daz be offering refunds for his stuff? I doubt it.
Thanks for this work around, but now its now a real headache control amount of light output. Ive tried till im blue in the face to recover an old scene with invisble mesh lights and i just cannot restore the same amount of intensity that i had before. I think its basically safe to say that invisble mesh light are not merely 'changed' but 'broken' and should be avoided where ever possible from here on. just a nightmare to set them up this way. I dont know why they couldnt have added a simple invisible source 'on / off' toggle
You're in luck: this change is coming and in the works. The latest version of Iray has a property exposed that lets us hide the emitter for emissive surfaces. A script is required to enable this, but the next version of Daz Studio will ship with it as part of the Default Resources: www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/609556/creating-a-ghost-light-daz-studio-4-21-1-25
It seams the higher I set the ghost light, the more speckled the render is at the start and the longer it takes to achieve any sort of acceptable render. I wish I was more disciplined when it comes to updates. Volumetric fog? I couldn't care less, I'd rather ghost lights functioned the way they used to. There must be a version of 4.16 floating around somewhere.
Done, back to 4.16 and ghost lights work again. What I don't understand, is in the Daz forums, blame seems to be directed towards NVidia, yet I'm using the same drivers 511.79, the only difference is the version of Daz.
It’s an update in Iray that’s causing this change, which is made (or used to be made) by NVIDIA. The new version of Daz Studio includes a new version of Iray.
Your getting fireflies where the light is. What's the point if the ghost light creates fireflies in the render? It IS BROKEN. The whole point was to be able to hide lights
@@1986Hikaru It's the same deal here, you have to crank up the power, and make them less invisible. For every .0 you have in the opacity slider, you need to increase the power of your light by 10.
It is annoying, why was there no warning about this effect ? - I have scenes with a heavy amount of lights, where the props used in the scene did not have different areas for the emissive part of the prop. For example a candle with just one surface and if you add emission to that candle the whole candle emits light not only the flame. I placed emissive invisible objects above the candle flame to replace the effect an emissive flame would have. That whole work ist now for nothing and new renders in the scenes are now sh.... . I now have to touch and fix every bought prop that needs an emissive surface and does not have one have to remake all lights in the scene, because now you see the mesh lights, even if you go to 0.00000001 and you get a high amount of noise in the area with the mesh lights especially if it is in full view of the camera. It would be better they would chose to change the product in areas it needs work like working with more than one core or a search where you can search after specific type of parts like props, chars, materials etc. and not only a generic name search in the content or smart content tab or just don't try to load every damned morph you have when you only use one morph in a char to make the loading time faster. And I still don't understand why a simple File->New takes that much time (It's faster to end DAZ and restart it.)
I hear you! I highly recommend keeping a separate (manual) installation of 4.16 around so that you can render those existing scenes without having to rework them all, it'll save so much time. All you need is the 4.16 installer, unZIP it and run the app from there. It'll share all settings and libraries, just don't run two separate versions at the same time to avoid conflicts. If you ever need to make a portion of an object emissive that doesn't have a separate surface, the Geometry Editor can create new ones. I'll make a video about this, it's a "hidden gem" that's really handy.
@@WPguru where do I find the 4.16 installer, today I had problem which made me uninstall and install Daz again, the problem is version installed was the new one 4.20 and now I have no idea how to turn back as also all my work is based on the previous version.
@@Dnakii Sadly Daz don't make older installers available for download. You may find it in your Install Manager's Downloads directory (on Windows, the default path is Users/Public/Public Documents/DAZ 3D/InstallManager/Downloads). If it's not there, you may have to hunt around via Google. When you find it, unZIP it and run the DAZStudio.exe in that folder, it'll just run independently from the latest version you have installed. Best of both worlds.
