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You are here: Home / Daz Studio / Light Emitting Shaders and Surfaces in Daz Studio Iray

Light Emitting Shaders and Surfaces in Daz Studio Iray

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by shibashake 6 Comments

One very interesting and useful shader parameter in Daz Studio Iray is Emission Color. By setting this value to something other than black, we can make any surface in our Iray scene emit light. Light emitting surfaces are fun, add spice to our compositions, and help create dramatic lighting effects. Many people also use this feature to create mesh lights.

In this tutorial, we learn more about emissive shaders or surfaces by applying it to hair! 🙂 Of course the shader settings are general and can be applied to anything. Hair is used here, together with the Sci-fi girl image below, to provide a fun example.

Sci-Fi girl in dynamic shouting pose with bright light emitting hair. Futuristic metal tentacles are around her.
Emissive Hair in Daz Studio Iray

1. Picking the Right Type of Hair

The first step, is to pick the right type of hair. I want something that is long and dynamic, with lots of movement morphs. The hair should be infused with energy, so much so that it emits light. A great example of this is SWAM’s Laguna-Naoko Hair.

It is long, with many separate strands, and some great movement morphs. It was created for a mermaid theme, so the many moving strands that make it look good in underwater scenes also make it especially suitable for light emitting hair.

In addition, Laguna-Naoko Hair comes with a variety of interesting and colorful textures, which make for a striking emissive surface. In our Sci-Fi girl example, we used the Electric Blue material setting. There are also fun colorful textures (see below) that produce very striking light effects.

Fantasy girl in pin-up pose with colorful light emitting hair. She is wearing a black bikini set against a black background.
Laguna-Naoko Hair comes with a variety of interesting and colorful textures, which make for a striking emissive surface.

2. Iray Emissive Surface Shader Settings

Now that we have settled upon a hair, comes the interesting part of playing with the Iray emissive shader settings.

Surface tab interface where I pick which hair surfaces I want to make emissive.
For Laguna-Naoko Hair, I pick all of the hair strand layers. The only surface I leave-out is the base cap surface.
  1. Pick the hair surfaces that we want to make emissive. In this case, I pick all of the hair strand layers. The only surface I leave-out is the base cap surface.
  2. Daz Studio Iray shader settings for our Emissive Hair.
    I set Emission Color to white and set the image map to the same one as my Base Color map.
  3. I scroll down the shader parameters until I get to Emission Color. I set Emission Color to white and set the image map to the same one as my Base Color map.
  4. Notice that as soon as we set Emission Color to something other than black, a new set of parameters become available to us including Emission Temperature, Two Sided Light, Emission Profile, Luminance, and Luminance Units. Here are some short descriptions from Daz as to what each of these parameters mean.
  5. Emission Temperature allows us to set the color temperature of our light emitting surface(s). Different temperatures will tint out light differently (see below). In this example, I do not want any tinting, so I set Emission Temperature to 6000K.
  6.  

    Color Temperature Scale image from Atlanta Light Bulbs.
    Color Temperature Scale for our Iray emissive surface. From http://www.atlantalightbulbs.com/color-temperature-scale/

  7. We leave Two Sided Light to the On position because we want our hair to emit light from both sides.
  8. Emission Profile controls the shape of the light. We do not need to use it for emissive hair, but this Daz forum thread has a good discussion of it.
  9. Luminance controls the strength or intensity of our light. In this case, we set Luminance Units to kcd/m^2 so that we can use smaller values in our Luminance setting.

3. Render Emissive Surface Light Layers

To get the glow and lighting effects that I want, I create three different light layers for my emissive Iray hair:

1. Low hair emission – I set luminance to 100 and render a light layer with just the hair (below-left).

2. Volumetric light – I leave luminance at 100, activate my volumetric container/prop, and render a volumetric light layer for my emissive hair (below-middle).

3. Strong hair emission – I set luminance to 3000 so that my light emitting hair will have a strong effect in lighting my figure’s body. However, at such a strong luminance setting, the hair itself becomes too bright. In this case, I only want the body lighting without the overly bright hair. I achieve this by setting Cutout Opacity to 0.0001 (below-right).

The three separate light layers I created for my emissive Iray hair.
To get the glow and lighting effects that I want, I create three different light layers for my emissive Iray hair.

4. Putting it All Together in Photoshop

Here, we follow our usual 3 stage post-work process.

Stage 1 – Combining Lights

We combine our IBL, key, fill, and back lights in the usual way. In addition, we include the Low hair emission and Strong hair emission light layers we generated above. For the Strong hair emission layer, I mask out the hair cap.

Below, we show the image with just our usual lights (left). To the right, we have added in our two hair light layers. Now, it looks more like our hair is emitting light.

Image comparison of how things look after adding in our low and strong hair emission light layers.
Left – Image with just our usual lights. Right – We have added in our two hair light layers.

Stage 2 – Post-Work Effects (Glow, Contrast, & More)

In this stage, we further emphasize our Iray emissive hair by adding glow. To do this, we create a separate glow layer just for our hair.

Photoshop layer stack for adjusting my hair glow layer. In this case, I only enable the Glow 3 layer and set its opacity to 100%.
Adjust our glow according to taste.
  • Open our Low hair emission file.
  • Apply glow effects on just that layer.
  • Adjust our glow according to taste. In this case, I only enabled the Glow 3 layer, but I set it to 100% opacity.
  • Now I have a Hair Glow Layer that I can Copy Merged (Shift + Ctrl + C) into my Stage 2 file.
End result after running the Shiba Glow Action on my Low Hair Emission layer and adjusting the generated glow layers.
Copy Merged result of my Hair Glow Layer.

In the left image below, we perform our usual Stage 2 operations. The right image has our Hair Glow Layer, the Volumetric Hair Layer (generated in section 3), as well as some added contrast. Note that there is more glow and atmosphere in the image to the right.

Image comparison of how things look after adding in our Hair Glow Layer and Volumetric Hair Layer.
Left – Usual Stage 2 operations. Right – Added Hair Glow Layer, the Volumetric Hair Layer (generated in section 3), as well as some contrast.

Finally, we perform our Stage 3 operations as usual, adding detail by running Color Efex Pro 4 from the Nik Collection. We also make a small collision fix. The final result is shown below.

Sci-Fi girl in dynamic shouting pose with bright light emitting hair. Futuristic metal tentacles are around her.
Final Result from our Daz Studio Iray Emissive Hair Tutorial

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Comments

  1. Nicholas says

    November 4, 2018 at 8:44 am

    Hi.

    I don’t see “Emission colour” in my shader parameters. How does one go about adding that?

    Thank you

    Reply
    • shibashake says

      November 4, 2018 at 3:28 pm

      Standard Iray shaders should all have it. You can select the shader surface and then apply the Uber iray shader to it. That would include the emission parameter. There are also emission shader packs like this one by DzFire.

  2. Johnny Rico says

    January 22, 2017 at 1:12 pm

    Another fantastic tutorial! Thank you again Shibashake 🙂

    Reply
    • shibashake says

      January 22, 2017 at 5:56 pm

      Much appreciated! 🙂

  3. alx says

    January 20, 2017 at 2:27 pm

    That is one burly tutorial!

    Reply
    • shibashake says

      January 21, 2017 at 10:53 pm

      Haha, I have a burly dial for my tutorials too. 😀

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