Lighting the whole figure

adekii_7c5e2f82c7

Hello!

I'm pretty sure I'm just missing something really simple, but I haven't been able to figure this out on my own.

I made a character in Daz 4.0 Pro (haven't upgraded to 4.5 yet) and bought the Genesis Catgirl pack. I dropped one of the full-body sets onto the figure, and then replaced all of the external textures with new jpegs that I had made by painting over copies of the package ones in photoshop.

The problem is that when I add light to a scene, it only seems to illuminate the "edges" of the figure. The figure has some items generated by the Genesis Supersuit, I have other figures included in the scene that I have not used any custom textures on. When I turn the lighting on and off, I can see a difference on the entire bodies of the other figures, and on the Hair and Supersuit portions of my catgirl figure. But the body of the figure seems to get virtually no illumination at all.

Is there a special type of light I need to add to illuminate her more? Is there a setting in the Surfaces Editor that I need to adjust or turn on?

Thank you for any and all advice!

Miss B

Not seeing what your render looks like, I can only guess at what's needed.

That said, I usually have my Key light (the main light) pointing directly at my main character. To do that, click on your main light, and in the Parameters Tab scroll down a little to the "Misc" section and the last option is Point At, which will say "None" by default. Click on that and a window will pop up listing everything in your scene. If you have a lot going on in your scene you may have to scroll to find your main character but once you do, click on her/him and click the Accept button.

Then all you need to do is play with the intensity and color of the light if it turns out too bright.

adekii_7c5e2f82c7

Miss B said:

Not seeing what your render looks like, I can only guess at what's needed.

That said, I usually have my Key light (the main light) pointing directly at my main character. To do that, click on your main light, and in the Parameters Tab scroll down a little to the "Misc" section and the last option is Point At, which will say "None" by default. Click on that and a window will pop up listing everything in your scene. If you have a lot going on in your scene you may have to scroll to find your main character but once you do, click on her/him and click the Accept button.

Then all you need to do is play with the intensity and color of the light if it turns out too bright.

Thank you very much! I will try this out :)

SpottedKitty

There's something else you can do that might help. See the drop-down menu at the top of the Viewport where you can select which camera to look through? The lights (except, obviously, point lights) can also act as cameras, so you can select them and look where the light is pointing.

Things to remember: this through-the-light view is heavily affected by the light cone angle in spotlights (wide angles giving a strong fisheye effect), and the view through a distant light can look a bit weird. Also, any object in your scene set to not cast shadows will be invisible. And remember to switch back to your camera view before rendering.