I wonder if anyone has information about any of the following. I started to play with an P3 file attic model that I picked up some time ago somewhere on the web made by Elysium. When I render it in poser 4 it is all washed out. I tried turning off the lights one by one, but still ran into various bleached out areas problems, and never got all the light out even by turning everything off! There are other things that are unfamiliar and strange to me. There are a lot of spotlights that don't show up in the lights control, and then the pop-up lights properties window says that they are infinite! I can't seem to delete them either. Anyway, I turned everything off and still there is light, and too bright in some spots. None of this makes any sense to me. Moreover -- Then under cameras there are "shadowcams" and "shadowlights" What are these? I can't find them in the Poser handbook. Could they be part of my problem? What are they good for? Very strange. Interesting, or just a pain?

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I have this same problem with my anchient temple model (free stuff at site) the only thing we have xome up with is that some lights were exported with it from my max....not too sure how this could be but it seems the only answer...I delete all the lights and it is still lit up.

This sounds like the Ambient colour on your object is set to something other than black, even with all the lights gone you'd still get it showing up as "washed out".

Shadowcams are cameras mounted "inside" the lights. By moving them, you can change the way the light casts shadows. If you select a shadowcam view, you see the scene from the light's POV. This is documented, a little, in P5. The cameras are 10mm superwide-angle and have limited movement parameters. I haven't thought of a reason I'd want a light to cast its shadow in the wrong place, but if you are careful, you can use the camera to help you position the light. Especially handy if you are trying to aim a spot at a small point, like the highlight of a piece of jewelry. But you want to be careful NOT to move the camera.... FYI, Mick

I think the attic was originally a 3DS file which has been imported into Poser. I had to fiddle with it to get it set up, but can't remember what I did now (nor what day it is, but that's just old age :-D ). As C1rcle says, go through the materials and make sure all your ambient settings are total black. Shadowcams are most useful for adjusting the size of your shadow map - if you zoom them in so that you can see only the part of the scene which will be in shadow from that light, you can improve the sharpness of your shadows without having to make the shadow map size ridiculously large.

As a PRACTICAL matter, I figured out how to delete the spotlights and did delete them. That solved the washed-out problem. Then I lit with ordinary lights with shadows turned off to get the light through the roof. Even after the spots were deleted, the shadow cams still showed up on the menu. I could not figure out how to delete them. Yes, the guys at Eleysium said that the model was imported by them and had been around. But they could not recreate my problem and suggested that I try Renderosity forum. I am still puzzled by all this IN PRINCIPLE. I am trying to understand. Should I presume that the spots and shadow cams were put in by some program other than poser and then just kept when the model was made poser-friendly? Or did someone do this in poser? If I understand correctly, I can do this in poser, and it might be handy to have shadow cams. But then is there a way to delete them along with the lights. Anyway, thank you all very much for the tips. This has been quite helpful.

Every light, both infinite & spot, has a ShadowCam. Even with the light's Cast Shadows property turned off, the Shadowcam remains and just does nothing until Cast Shadows is turned back on.

When you create or delete a light, its corresponding ShadowCam will be created or deleted along with the light.

Sometimes the names can get scrambled so the light and its shadowcam names don't quite match in the menu, but there's still one cam for each light.
The only exception I'm aware of can occur if you delete all the lights before importing a lightset. Sometimes this results in a light without a shadowcam, and which cannot cast shadows.

But Nance, I did delete the lights (24 of them!), but the shadowcams still show up in the pull down in the lower left of the document window. Are you saying this should not happen? -- Just trying to understand the system, since it is apparently not explained in the manual.

Lights have "secret names" that make it difficult to delete them. If the shadowcams you are stuck with are for lights 1, 2, and 3, the lights may still be lurking in the pz3, even though they don't "exist." This secret name thing is a royal pain. If you rename a light, its shadowcam is named for the "secret name," NOT the name you gave the light. Truly bizarre, and great when you are trying to figure out which light goes with which shadowcam. Mick

Yup. If you deleted the lights by selecting each and clicking the Trash Can in the Lighting GUI, the ShadowCams shoulda gone also. Do you still have 24 ShadowCams but no lights?

Nance: 21 mysterious shadow cams to be exact,plus the 4 that should be there, in the cameras pulldown. And there are actually views when I click on them, though I did not study the details. But these spotlights no longer show up in the lights pull down because I deleted them in the trash can. In the lights pull down there are only the 4 that I can explain. Mickmca: I don't understand what you are saying except for the "truly bizzare" part, which comes through loud and clear!!! The 21 spotlight shadow cams that I am stuck with are not 1-3. I can understand 1-4, they seem normal. That is, they seem normal now that I understand that they "come with" lights that I put in and remove myself. Before I had the problem with the other 21 and people here started helping me, I did not give shadow light cams any thought.

Here is what I mean by the drp down menu for cameras.

By golly youre right -- definitely goofed up. Actually never seen it do that (and not sure how to make it do that if I wanted to). Seen lights without shadowcams, but not the shadowcams without their lights.

Just curious. How did you delete the lights? With the trashcan icon or by substituting light sets?

Theonly way I could find to delete the lights was with the trash can. I don't know what substituting means.

There is only one other way to delete lights: with a text editor. I just loaded my own lights into P5, and noticed one thing that is useful: The default lights have cameras called "Shadow Lite # Cam", as in your illustration (and Light 1 has no space: Lite1 Cam). Lights you create like your spotlight 4, are named "Shadow Lite Cam #" for some reason. And under no circumstances are they named with underscores. So where did the underscores come from? I deleted all my lights and then created six new ones. The new ones were named Light 1-6, and their cameras were named 4-9! This is because, as I said, Lights 1-3 are still there, EVEN THO they were deleted. But still no underscores. I manually renamed a camera with underscores, but deleting the light still deleted the camera. There doesn't appear to be any way to delete the cameras except in a text editor or by deleting the light that goes with it. I think it's time to talk to the creator of the lights about how it was done. Mick

Mickmca: Hmmmm. In this case the guys who posted the model say that it was already around and that they were redistributing it. Here is from the readme. Ok here is the "Attic" - wish we could take the credit for all of this but the original Max file has been around for quite a while. We of course have ported it to a pz3 and converted all textures to jpg. As it really isn't our original creation - we can't place restrictions on usage. There were no restrictions on the original Max file. So please enjoy and maybe give us a credit if you use this model in your work? If anyone can improve it please feel free to do so! Elysium Poser Playground takes no responsibility for any damage to your hardware or software by installion of this file..... http://www.scm-rpg.com.au/Elysium/ email: Elysium@scm-rpg.com.au I wrote them and they said that they could not recreate my problem and suggested that I try Renderosity Forum. I wonder if Curious labs can explain this? Not sure where else to try. I am mostly curious, because I can live with this as it is, I guess.

I've apparently lost the message below, so I'm retyping it. ---- I tried to create a file in a text editor that has shadow cams with no associated lights, and it doesn't seem to be possible. If there is not a light acting as the camera's parent, the file hangs on opening. On the other hand, I was able to create a complete second spotlight in the editor, with shadowcam. I haven't tried creating a light without a shadowcam. Later. My suggestion, especially in light of the comments from the creator, is to open a copy of the file in a text editor and remove all the lights and shadowcams. All of them. Be careful to remove all references to each. There are typically four references to each shadowcam, I think. Then open the copy in Poser 5 and add your lights. If that works, you have a fixed file. Mick

I've apparently lost the message below, so I'm retyping it. ---- I tried to create a file in a text editor that has shadow cams with no associated lights, and it doesn't seem to be possible. If there is not a light acting as the camera's parent, the file hangs on opening. On the other hand, I was able to create a complete second spotlight in the editor, with shadowcam. I haven't tried creating a light without a shadowcam. Later. My suggestion, especially in light of the comments from the creator, is to open a copy of the file in a text editor and remove all the lights and shadowcams. All of them. Be careful to remove all references to each. There are typically four references to each shadowcam, I think. Then open the copy in Poser 5 and add your lights. If that works, you have a fixed file. Mick

I just fiddled with the attic file. Loading it into P4 PP, I got 21 lights and shadowcams, and I was able to delete all of them. Then I added a spot, which came in as Light 1 with Shadow Cam Lite 4 attached. I'm trying the file in P5 now. I just did the same thing in P5, and got the same result. And my shadowcams to not have underscores in their names. I'd be very curious to see the file you are having trouble with. Mick

I just tried tastiger's attic conversion and also got normal results, the same as mickmca above. Had no shadowcam names with underscores and was able to delete lights right along with their shadowcams -- no problems with the file. You've "stumped the band" and may want to just unzip that sucker and start over again. (or, if youve done work on it, export the model from your current scene and import it into a clean one.) btw, you did get that the material "Rays" are supposed to be transparent light beams coming in through the windows? They weren't your mystery hot spots were they?

Last chapter? I deleted everything but the original zip. Then unzipped and reinstalled. Opened in Poser and up came a very large window! I thought oh, oh. But when I shrunk it a bit and then rendered, there was no wash out! Checked the shadow cams and there were no underlines in the names as shown in an earlier post above! then I deleted spot 21 from the lights list using the trash can, and checked the cameras list and it had gone from there too. So no more mysteries except what the devil was going on earlier? I am curious still, but have nothing to experiment with, and probably it was some kind of glitch and there is not much more to be learned from fiddling more with this. Anyway, I did learn some things and I hope a couple of you at least did too, like shadowcams. Thank you all for your help.