DAZ Studio Glamour Shots Tutorial

While working on a class project yesterday, I quickly put together a glamour shot. Putting the glamour shot together was quite easily done. Doing glamour in DAZ Studio is easy.

Looking at the elements, I used about three spotlights and two Distant lights (bringing up the total to five). The secret to doing a glamour shot in DAZ Studio is lighting.

The lighting should bring out the face(s) of your subject(s) and make the subject stand out. Here I use a black background (consisting of a black geometric primitive plane), f.ober's foberini (a free Lamborghini model that should be sold on DAZ) blackened, and Victoria 4 in Aery Soul's Ozone outfit. All of these elements do not make a glamour shot.

Of course, the lighting can be improved in spots: changing the lighting model to skin and keeping the glossy render can make your 'model' stand out. But there are times when you don't need the model to stand out and it is still glamour and glitz.

The lighting I used was one yellow-white spotlight, one blue spotlight, and one really yellow spotlight (i.e. gold). I then used two distant lighting lights to represent light scattering, both at 50% intensity. Although instead of using a dark grey scatter from the ground, I used a white light scatter from the ground. This softens shadows and makes your figure stand out more.

I used the usual studio scatter light, white light at 50% directed at Victoria. This stands her out a lot better. Then I set up the spotlights.

Spotlight setup requires some test rendering to see what your model will look like. I used a test render to see how intense the subject will be and I adjust the lighting of my spotlights accordingly.

Using Elite textures from DAZ, or the Elite Human Surface Shader

One of the important things to know is that the Elite textures from DAZ have an annoying habit to have a high specularity when using spotlights. I found this out when doing a horror shot. The specularity was so high that the spotlight at 100% washed out any color from Vicky's skin, creating an unnatural -- overexposed -- look. If you use the Elite textures for your glam shots, and no doubt you will since they are wonderful, beautiful textures; test render your scene and reduce the intensity of your spotlights as needed.