Poser By Design

Indirect lighting simply means that light is coming from (bouncing off) secondary sources. Direct lighting is when light is coming from a primary sources such as light from a flash light, car, or a computer monitor. Good examples of indirect lighting sources are floor lamps that point the light to the ceiling, or light reflected off the snow at night. In both cases the lights aren't directly lighting up the area. An easy way to experience indirect lighting is to have a flash light in your room with all the lights off. Shine the flash light towards the floor and you'll notice that only the areas that the flash light is directly shining on can be seen while everything behind the light is dark. Shine the light to the ceiling and you'll notice that there is more light in the room because the light is bouncing off the white ceiling..

Poser 8 simulates indirect lighting by bouncing light off the models. By doing this an object can be seen even if the light isn't directly shining on it. Below is a picture of a prop from Japanese Flair and the Poser sphere primitive. Below are two renders with all the same settings except for one and that's the indirect light setting. The image on the left was rendered without indirect lighting. There is only 1 light directly above the prop. The only part of the prop that is being lit is the top. The image on the right has the same light but makes use of Poser's indirect light feature that is located in the render settings. In order for indirect lighting to work, we had to add something that light could bounce off. To accomplish this, we used the square primitive prop to create a floor.

You can see the sphere in the right image even though the light isn't shining directly on it. So where is the light coming from? It is bouncing off the floor and on to the sphere (not really, but Poser simulates the light bouncing off the floor). In order to create the same indirect lighting effect in Poser 6, Poser 7, and Poser Pro the scene would require multiple lights each with different settings. In short Poser's indirect lighting feature will allow you to light more of your scene without using so many lights to create the effects. The image on the right contains faint details of the design that is on the prop. If you save this image and adjust the brightness you will be able to see the details on the image that uses indirect lighting. The image that doesn't use indirect lighting will still remain black regardless of any adjustments in brightness.

The indirect light feature found in Poser allows you to do more with fewer lights as long as you have enough objects for the light to bounce off of. The first example (the picture shown above) has a primitive as a floor but our next picture has a wall and floor combination. In the image below the light source is coming from the left and was rendered without the indirect lighting. The light source in the image is from an infinite light but it's not enough light to show the areas that are in the shadows. The floor is white but because of the angle of the light source, the light doesn't reach the floor or the back of the objects in the picture. The usual way to lighten up the dark part of the objects is to create a second light source, but since this is Poser 8 you can just use the indirect light feature located in the render settings.

Below is the same scene with indirect lighting and you can easily see that the floor is reflecting some of the light from the infinite light source. The larger sphere in the picture has a lighter area on the floor just before the sphere. This lighter area is the result of the light bouncing off the object. The light doesn't bounce back at a 90 degree angle because the sphere is not flat like the wall.

Indirect lighting also reflects the color of a wall. If the wall is pink then the color of the light coming off the wall will also be pink. To illustrate this we have changed the color of the wall and rendered the scene again using indirect lighting (shown below). If you look closely you can see that the color of the wall affects the color of the light reflecting off the wall. The floor is still white but the light coming off the wall isn't. The image was rendered with one light source.

Now that you have a better understanding of what the indirect light setting does, it is now time to see how we did it. Using the indirect light setting is simple and can be turned on in the render settings. Here is how to turn the indirect light feature on. Open the render settings and select the Manual Settings. This will give you a screen that looks like the image below. Look for the check box that says Indirect Light, (circled in red in the image). Checking this box turns the indirect light feature on and unchecking it turns the indirect feature off. Once the indirect light is on you are ready to render.

There are a few things to keep in mind when it comes to indirect lighting.

1. The material settings for your props and figure will affect how light bounces of the model.
2. The material settings for your props and figure will affect how light bounces of the model.
3. The color of the prop also has an affect on your indirect lighting. For example, don't expect too much light to reflect off of dark colored props.
4. You'll still need more than one light, but the amount of lights required is greatly reduced.
5. Indirect Lighting takes longer to render.