Radiant Lighting for Free!

Author: Locke21

Tools Needed

• POV-Ray
• PoseRay

Have you got Poser 4, but always admired how P5 and P6 use radiant lighting to simulate how light reacts to objects in the real world? If your like most people, you can't afford to drop a big amount of money just to get the latest toy. Well now you don't have too! I'm going to show you how to use two free programs to get some of the most beautiful renders you'll ever see. You'll be able to use full-on radiant lighting; photon caustic lighting which simulates light passing through clear objects, and you'll have access to some of the most impressive surface materials I've ever seen. Where to I go and what do I get you say? Well, go to www.povray.org and pick up their latest build of POV-Ray and PoseRay, and let's get started!

Ok, now that you have installed both programs, I'm going to tell you how to use them. I would first suggest that you play around with POV-Ray, just to see what it can do. I think you'll be surprised at the level of perfection you'll get out of this sweet freebie! You will also need to tell PoseRay where the POV-Ray render engine is. Its in the bin folder of the POV-Ray program folder. You'll notice one thing about POV-Ray, you have to CODE everything! “I don't feel like it” you may say. Well thanks to PoseRay, you don't have to. Here is how you get your Poser or Studio stuff into POV-Ray for rendering. First open up Poser or Studio. Then bring up what you want rendered in POV-Ray. I'm going to render a crystal skull, so I'm going to first bring up Dark Whisper's Morphing Skull. Then, if I needed to, I would put it in the pose I want it in jaw opened or closed, skull morphed, that kind of thing. Or if you don't have that, you can use the P4 Skeleton man.

Once you have everything the way you want it, go to File/Export/Wavefront Obj. You select ONLY the parts that you want, and save your obj somewhere on your hard drive.

Ok, that's all you'll need from Poser or Studio, unless of course you want to render a background for your object later on. But for now, let's just get this thing rendered! First open up PoseRay. Although it may look slightly confusing at first, it's really very straight-forward. On the very first tab, you'll see Load Obj. Click that, navigate to your saved OBJ and load it up. PoseRay will spin away for a minute, and then you'll have your obj loaded! One thing, see down at the bottom where it says No Warnings, or possible Warnings, well that usually refers to a material setting that PoseRay can't resolve. Don't let that stop you, we can just change the setting to suit us!

Now that our OBJ is loaded, click the Preview button at the top to see it. Alright, there is our obj ready for rendering. You'll notice off to the left there are four tabs, camera, lights, options and placeholders. If you don't then click the Show Tools Button at the top. Options Tab gives you several preview options that help you pose your obj. Camera gives you the tools to manipulate your obj into the pose you want. Lights allows you to either create new lights, or use pz3 light sets that you create in Poser! Placeholders allow you to define spots within your preview that you can later change in POV-Ray. I wouldn't suggest using the placeholders unless you intend to learn the POV-Ray scripting language, which can be rather satisfying. For now though, just use the camera and light tabs to set up your scene just the way you want it.

There is one more really important thing that you do in the preview tab, that's applying a background. You do that right above the Preview window. While you can use the various backgrounds already provided, I prefer to use the Map, which applies a spherical map AROUND your object, simulating light being thrown at it from its surroundings! Imagine a chrome sphere, you can see the sphere itself, but you also see the world reflected on it. If you add a reflective material to your object, this is what will happen! While you can probably find a lot of spherical maps online, you can make your own either with Photoshop's Distort/Spherize filter or with The Gimp's Apply Lens filter. I'm going to defiantly use a spherical map because my skull will be make of crystal, which reflects the environment around it. So I use the drop down menu to apply a map. You may not see it half the time, but don't worry, its there.

Ok, now that the basics are out of the way, its time to get down to the fun stuff, time for the MAT's and materials. This step is very important, because just like Poser and Studio, the materials define how your obj will look. While PoseRay does have a button for loading Poser MAT files, more often than not exporting and importing obj's and MAT's will cause slight naming problems and the MAT's won't load.

It's easier just to load them by hand. I'm sure everyone can comprehend the Materials tab, it's so much like a simplified Poser Materials Pane that its scary lol. It has options for pigments, which are simply Poser color maps, bump maps and transparencies. I suggest that you spend a lot of time playing with all the different option and that you also check out the displacement option in the Geometry + UV tab at the top in place of a bump map. But I'm not going to use Poser materials; I'm going to use one of the standard POV-Ray materials to achieve my crystal skull look. If you'll look way over to the right, you'll see a tab that says POV-Ray materials. Click that. What you now see is a two selection areas that allow you to work with built-in POV-Ray textures, and the ability to mix and match these into your own custom textures. The selection area on the left sets the textures, while the area on the right gives you the ability to change the surface reactions of the obj. These options are far beyond the scope of this tutorial, I suggest you'read the POV-Ray Help program for more on Phong, Shiny and Reflective surface options

The left selection area has a drop down menu that is filled with different materials. They range from dozens of gold, silver, copper and brasses all the way through over fifty different types of woods, stones and various types of glass and just plain cool-looking textures. Since I'm going to do a crystal skull, I'm going to pick the richly colored Ruby_Glass material. To do this, you have to select each body part and then press Insert.

In the blue window below, you'll see a line of code appear telling you that the material setting has been applied. Now, that I have everything in place, I'm ready almost to render. But not yet, because like I said, there is also a option in the Geometry + UV tab that will allow you to use displacement. Displacement, for those of you that don't know, is the using a grayscale map to actually change the mesh that your rendering. Whereas a bump map simulates high and low spots, a displacement map actually creates them. Well it just so happens that Dark Whisper provided a grayscale map with the skull, so lets go for it! Just go to the Geometries tab, click Displacement and load whatever map you may have, just like in the Materials Tab, each map for each part of the body. Oh, and don't forget to set the strength. Black is the “deepest” part of the map, White the “highest” parts.

Well, that's it for this model. Now to render! But before we do, we have to make a few decisions. Go to the POV-Ray tab and look under scene options.

See that option that says radiosty? Well that's what we've been working towards. That option will give you the same type of radiant lighting that Poser 5 and 6's rendering engines can give you. BUT, like the warning says, it will slow down the rendering time. It once took me five hours to render one obj at 800×600, with no background! So just be ready to walk away from the computer if you model is very complex, it will need all the RAM and processor time it can get. Oh yes, for all the anime fans out there, POV-Ray can do a halfway decent cartoon render as well! Ok, well I want radiant lighting, so I check the box. Now go to the Render Options tab. Here is where you decide if you want bmp, POV-Ray's native format, PNG, and the size of the picture and so on, so I'm not going into all that. Do notice however that you have the option of setting an alpha channel. Its not a real channel, POV-Ray just gets rid of everything in the background, but a little layer work in Photoshop will give you an alpha. Now, all you have to do is click Save and Render up at the top. This will save all the information that you have input in POV-Ray code, and then open POV-Ray and render it!

And that's it. Using Photoshop, or any program that uses layers, put a layer under the image you've just created and fill it black. Then make the top image invisible and you've got a nice little alpha selection to pick up your object and put it into your scene. I'm just adding black for a background. Now I'm sure that you could export an entire scene as an object and render it, but I have no idea how long it would take. I suggest you also check out the cool results with the millennium figures and their high res textures! Well, I hope you have a lot of fun with POV-Ray and PoseRay, and never forget, you have a great free render engine that can give you super-sweet results.