Hi all. For the last five hours I have been having a terrible time trying to get lighting to do a very simple thing. When I place a character in one spot on the screen and render they look great, but when I place them elsewhere and use the exact same camera angle, they look totally different because of all the shadowing on the face with the Poser default lights. Yes, I know I should use a different light set but it wouldn't solve this particular problem. Basically what I want to do, is just have "universal light", as in no particular lighting effects at all, just a totally bright, well-lit environment like a huge hockey arena or warehouse where everything looks exactly the same from every angle and there are no "directional light" effects, as if there were a million white lights pointing in every direction at every inch in the environment. But, I don't want to actually HAVE a million lights, because my system will crash. Is there any way to basically disable lighting so I don't have to worry about it at all? Even with 6 or 7 infinite lights they still produce far too many varied effects. Barring this, what's my best option? Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks!! Cenozoite

Well you CAN disable all lights but that would result in a black rendering. Daz has some global lights, worth considering :o)

Try turning off shadows in the render options - sometimes it looks fake, sometimes it works. If it looks fake, then turn off shadows on all lights except maybe one or two. That should un-clutter your renders a bit.

...Or rather than turning shadows off entirley you could turn them down to say 0.200 or 0.300, this makes for a much softer lighting whilst still adding some deffinition. My default light set has 3 infinate lights, plus one spotlight (off by default) parented to the main cammera as a fill.

Hi Would the glowball help? I can't remember who did it, posibly snowsultan, sorry if I'm wrong but i'm doing this quick at work try a search in the forum. Dave

And once you get a set put together that you like, could the lights be parented to the figure, so that they would stay with it when it was moved? I've thought of this, but not tried it yet.

SnowSultan's GloBall yields amazing results (I use P4) but I don't think it would be the solution in this case. Check out those DAZ global light sets. The second one is superior, although the first one has a few very helpful settings, including a "true global," which I find bland for rendering, but fantastic for setting scenes up. Lesbentley's suggestion is excellent...explore those individual light settings. Light sets are great, but are always improved by modifying with your own tweaks, additions, subtractions, etc. Playing with "map size" can also dramatically affect the sharpness and softness of lights. It can be a lot of work, but it's sooooo worth it.

1. The effect is horrible, like a bad flash photo, but a spotlight located at, and parented to the camera will achieve what you described. 2) A quick fix to make the lights more manageable would be to take the default set, change them to spotlights, both Parent them and Point-At an invisible square prop located about neck high. You can then scale this prop up, moving all the lights out from the center, enlarging the area of illumination while maintaining the same look. This of course also allows you to translate and rotate the entire lighting setup without tweaking each of the individual lights.

Hi everyone. Thanks so much for all the very helpful suggestions; I really appreciate them and I'll be giving them a try right after I finish typing this message. On the subject of shadows, I didn't actually mean literal shadows, sorry about the mistake. I have the master "display shadows" option turned off at all times, so unless lights act independently of this setting the shadows themselves aren't the problem. It's more just, one area of a figure (on the side where the light is) is more illuminated than the other darker side by sheer virtue that the light is coming from one direction rather than all of them. The other problem is that I'm not trying to get just one good shot from one angle, but rather have a whole scene that's perfectly lit from all angles, so I can move the camera around and do a hundred different renders that all look the same lighting-wise without having to touch the lights even once. I should also point out that I'm still a bit of a novice and not that familiar with the "parent" and "point at" options. I know they're covered early in the manual but I didn't quite get the concepts when I read about them, other than the obvious one of pointing a camera at an object. I don't know what parenting or pointing-at a light would do, but I don't want the lights attached to any one figure more than any others, since I might have ten figures in my scene and want them all illumined all the same all the time from all possible angles. Anyway, some of the solutions mentioned do seem to address that goal so I am going to try them out presently. The "glowball" looks like it actually consists of several thousand individual lights arranged in a spherical pattern, which would probably crash my system. But, maybe it only looks like that in the preview. I'll try it and check back, thanks! :)

I got a light set laying around, dunno where I found it, that has somewhere between 20 - 30 lights. IT runs fine, it just takes awhile to do if I turn shadows on.

I've been using some of the suggestions here and having some good success, thanks all. A further question: I've noticed several "python scripts" that let you manage all lights at once, but I don't quite know what "python" is. Do I have to get Pro Pack in order to have it, or is it available for regular Poser 4 somewhere?

Not available in P4. Requires ProPak or P5.

You can controle al the lights in a light set by using ERC, but that's a big subject, can't go into detailds here.