High Ambience:
Photo-realistic Lighting and Atmospheres in Vue 6

One of the most difficult challenges when rendering Poser characters inside of Vue 6 is to create a lighting setup and atmosphere combination that produces pleasing results.  Because the lighting/atmospheric combinations in Vue are very difficult for many people to master, I have developed a free product containing 6 scene files called High Ambience which optimizes the lighting/atmosphere setup to produce near-photoreal rendering results in Vue.  These scene files have been built in such a manner to allow consistent, repeatable high quality rendering no matter where the character is placed in the scene.  A key feature of the lighting/atmosphere combination used in these scene files, is the incorporation of  "over-driven" or "High Ambience".  This tutorial explains how High Ambience works.

Note:  You can download the free High Ambience product from the Cornucopia3D store here:

http://www.cornucopia3d.com/purchase.php?item_id=3039

 
The render above illustrates the use of High Ambience.  In Vue 6, it is now possible to over-drive the "Artificial Ambience" setting past 1.0.  The image on the left (Standard Ambience) has an Artificial Ambience setting of 1 while the image on the right (High Ambience) has a setting of 3.  The key difference is the High Ambience image has much more realistic, less saturated shadows.  Notice the shadow areas under the breast, around the fingers and the back of the thighs.  By using a High Ambience setting, you can reduce the sometimes harsh, overly saturated shadows which are caused by indirect lighting.
The image above reveals the atmospheric settings used to generate High Ambience.  The key settings to generate the atmosphere are the "Artificial Ambience" value and the "Ambient Light" slider.  The Artificial Ambience value controls the saturation level of the shadows while the Ambient Light slider controls the amount of shadow presence.  Moving the Ambient Light slider towards uniform, reduced the presence of shadows and visa versa.  

The image above shows the 6 types of High Ambience atmospheres that are included with the High Ambience scene sets.  All of the scenes use only infinite lights so you can move you character freely around in the scene and still achieve the same lighting effect without having to reposition the lighting. 

Light Gels:  Several of the scene files employ Light Gels for the directional lights.  Light gels simulate a diffused lighting effect and can produce very soft shadows.

Post Render Options: All of the 6 High Ambience scene files employ post render options which are new to Vue 6.  In particular, Natural Film Response and Lens Glare is added to the render to produce more vivid, soft looking images.