UberSoftLightKit is a revolutionary lighting kit that gives you the realism of IBL/GI while allowing the control of conventional lights. UberSoftLightKit includes a lighting kit comprised of 3 new light types that work together allowing the user to paint and sculpt light is a very precise and controllable fashion. The rich feature set includes a Sky light, pseudo area-lights, incredible shadow controls and more.
- Built in Skylight/Ambient controls with separate Zenith, Horizon, and Ground colors with adjustable Horizon Height.
- Ambient Occlusion
- Indirect Lighting (Global Illumination)
- Directional Soft Shadows
- Controllable Shadow Softness
- Add up to 20 UberSoftLights with minimal effect on render times. Computationally expensive shadow is calculated once then used across all UberSoftLights.
- Shadowing takes all UberSoftLights into account, and creates a single modulated, soft shadow.
- UberSoftLights act as Fast Pseudo Area Lights with light Wrap and Wrap Falloff controls.
- Unique single shadowing technique allows for Directional Lighting control which provides a blend between point (omnidirectional) and distant (directional) lights.
- Per-light attenuation controls
The UberSoftLightKit is comprised of the following 3 light types: UberSoftMaster, UberSoftPoint and UberSoftDistant.
The UberSoftMaster Light is the master light which contains the principal shadowing and sky controls for the UberSoftLightKit. It acts as a collector for all UberSoftPoint and UberSoftDistant lights in your scene.
The Sky controls are powerful in and of themselves giving you power to create an infinite number of virtual skies.
- Sky Intensity
- The overall intensity of the contribution of the sky color.
- Zenith Color, Horizon Color and Bounce Color
- The 3 colors describe a color gradient of a virtual sky from top to bottom (sky to ground).
- Horizon Height
- The height of the horizon. A low value will give you more sky (zenith) and less bounce.
- Occlusion Softness
- The Softness of the shadows
- As this light kit is designed to give soft light effects, this control should be used sparingly and generally gives better results when used with Directional Shadowing.
- Directional Shadowing
- A control to blend between non-directional shadowing (ambient occlusion) and directional shadowing. The shadow direction is calculated by taking an intensity weighted average of all UberSoftLights in the scene. This calculation is per shading sample so direction can vary through the scene depending on light placement providing complex and realistic shadowing effects.
Using indirect lighting will provide Global Illumination (GI) or bounced light effects.
UberSoftPoint and UberSoftDistant
These lights have the same controls and in fact will react the exact same way. The only reason there are 2 light rather than just one is only for OpenGL preview. These lights give you the amazing ability to blend from a Point Light effect to a Distant Light effect by using the Directional Lighting control. When Directional Lighting is 1, the light will act like a Directional Light; when it it 0 it acts like a Point Light; 0.5 will be halfway in between.
- Wrap Falloff
- The speed at which light falls off as it wraps the surface. A small value will falloff slowly; A value of 1 is normal falloff and high values create a fast falloff.
- The amouth that light will be allowed to wrap around the surface. 0 for a pin light; 1 for a normal light; 2 for a large area light which wraps around the entire surface.
- Directional Lighting
- A control that allows a blend between omnidirectional (Point Light) and directional (Distant Light) lighting. This is the control that separates UberSoftPoint from UberSoftDistant.
The falloff controls are the same as UberAreaLight and are used to attenuate the light by distance. Basically, Falloff occurs between the start and end points at a rate described by the Falloff Decay exponent.
- Falloff Active
- Turn on/off falloff
- Falloff Start
- The distance at which falloff begins
- Falloff End
- The distance at which falloff ends of the the distance at which the light will attenuate to zero.
- Falloff Decay
- An exponent describing how fast the light will falloff. 1 = linear falloff. 2 = inverse squared falloff (faster falloff)
Other Falloff notes:
- The default settings are set to me the most "physically accurate" but the idea is to give you maximum control over the look.
- When End is <= Start, falloff will be infinite. Providing a falloff with speed up your renders.
- All units are in cm; 100 = 1m
- My free OmNodeTools can be used to measure distances between objects in order to help you determine falloff.
A couple instructional videos are available on my YouTube channel:
1 of 2 Instructional videos covering the parameters and controls of the Uber Soft Light Kit. This video covers the main "Uber Soft Master" light which controls the shadows and sky controls of the light shader for DAZ Studio.
2 of 2 Instructional videos covering the parameters and controls of the Uber Soft Light Kit. This video delves in the controls of the "Uber Soft Distant" and "Uber Soft Point" lights in the kit. These lights allow for pseudo area lights via light wrapping controls as well as advanced falloff controls via custom light shaders for DAZ Studio.