I know this is impossible,but thought I would still ask. I already know about all of the glowballs out there that have spot lights parented to them. They are fine but it would be nice to be able to move the infite lights position just like the spot lights. Wouldn't that be a lot easier to place lighting inside of objects such as jack-o-lanterns, lightbulbs in lamps, etc..... So the question is can this be done?

Message edited on: 10/06/2005 01:23

No, because they are coming from an infinite distance outside of the scene. What you want is Poser 7, which should have point lights with shadow maps. Short of that, you can get Poser 6, which has pointlights, but they only cast raytraced (sharp) shadows; or you can get Cinema 4D, Carrara, or one of the other more complete 3d packages. Most of these have point lights that can cast shadowmap shadows, or some form of soft shadows. I share your frustration with Poser's lighting system. Throw a couple of figures and a few props into a scene, and you can get excellent results provided you know how Poser's lighting/rendering works. Try and put anything inside of a building or other enclosure, and you're in for a hell of a lot of pain, unless you render in passes/layers.

The gather node in Poser 6 can help fake lightbulbs, candlelight. I don't think Poser 5 has it though, time to upgrade. ;) Here's a couple gather node examples in case you're curious: "Creating bioluminescence with P6 shader nodes" http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2217752 "P6 Lighting without Lighting using gather node" http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2222447

Ummm, doesn't Poser 6 have point lights... checking, checking...why, yes it does!! Don't know about creating 'luminence' from point lights, but they are not 'Poser 7', they are already here!

I thought I was asking or wishing for the impossible. Upgrade at the moment is not an option (lack of funds). I do however wish to thank you all for your replies.

The point lights in P6 are shadow mapped with blur.

Sorry, double posted.

Message edited on: 10/06/2005 07:50

The point lights can have soft shadows, but since they are raytraced, it will take longer to render. The point lights do not have the option to use shadowmaps.

Well, a good, big shadowmap can take AT LEAST as long time to render as a raytraced shadow. And generally speaking, raytraced shadows just look more real. It does add slightly to rendertime if you want blurred raytraced shadows, but not all that much IMO (or perhaps I'm just used to it, I always use raytraced shadows on at least one light :o)

"Well, a good, big shadowmap can take AT LEAST as long time to render as a raytraced shadow." I agree... shadowmaps in Poser can take a really long time to generate. I often "bitch and moan" about how long shadow maps seem to take in P5/6, compared to how fast they are in some other apps. I had a discussion with Stewer about this one time, and he explained that Poser uses a shadow map algorithm that accounts for transparency, where most other apps use a more simple shadow map method which does not. He's right, of course, in that most other apps, even some high end ones, don't take into account transparency in their shadow map creation process; you need raytraced shadows for that. It would be nice, however, if we could have both a faster, simple shadow map process, as well as the current one.

A little spurious reply here. Since raytracing (and similar processes such as radiosity, HDRI, and other forms of render models) is by far the best rendering method but requires exponential times to attain accuracy, why is it that 'rendering boards' have not become ubiquitous? Although PCI-type connections are slower than those to the CPU, dedicated hardware with scalable firmware could alleviate much of this problem. The only other solution is to increase processor speed, bus speed, memory refresh, and number of processors. Yes, I'm daydreaming, but it would be great to have a raytrace render standard applied to hardware, where maybe multiple boards work in some form of SLI that, in ways, simulates multiprocessor support enjoyed by some 3D software. The advantage is increase of render speeds is no longer tied to purchasing an entirely new computer (under most circumstances) or computers to take advantage of the limited network rendering capabilities currently available. Just a thought...

There is a trick with infinite lights I've often used to create some ambient lighting. It's impossible to parent an infinite light, unless you use the following procedure: - change the infinite light to a spotlight; - parent the spotlight to the figure/object you want; - move and rotate the spotlight; - then change it back to infinite. Now you have a parented infinite light. The position of the parent has no influence on the lighting, but rotating the parent results in rotating the light. I've used this workaround to parent an infinite light to the main camera and have it shine straight in the direction of the camera, which provides fake ambient lighting - less work than twiddling with the ambient settings of all individual materials... The only lights that you can really put inside objects are spot lights and point lights.

There was an old trick where you edit the pz3 file, infinite light section, to change it from type 0 to type 1 or type 2, whichever one is not a spotlight. This makes the infinite light moveable and visible IIRC.

Any way of posting an example? I've tried doing it and got nothing.

Very interesting,yes pls can you give us an exaple? :^) pitklad

svdl: I have tried the ChangeLightType.py as well as another that changes all lights to local. It seems that local lights act the exact same way that infinite ones do. With the python script you can move the light around but it still acts like infinite one(Place the light inside of a jack-o-lantern and the light source still comes from the outside). I would just like to be able to place a light inside an object(spotlite will work)and not have the light still show through the object. An example(since halloween is around the corner)would be the jack-o-lantern, place the light inside it and you would think that the only light outside the j-o-l would be coming from the face openings. However it seems that the light seeps out the top,bottom and sides, which takes away any chance of a good lighted jack-o-lantern effect.

It may be that the jack-o-lantern is a single sided mesh, that might "leak". Grab Objaction Twoface from freestuff here, export the jack-o-lantern as .OBJ file, run Twoface on it, and import the resulting object (don't weld the vertices!). Save the imported object to your props library for reuse. Now "light leaking" should be eliminated. P6 point lights should do the job best.

I have also found that parenting spotlights to various cameras is a great way to get them placed more easily. Poser should work this way already, but it doesn't. I could go on for days about how much I hate Poser's way of doing lights, so I'll stop here :)

svdl: I haven't a clue on what's happening but I did try Objaction Twoface. The light still bled through. I also noticed that when I put the spotlight inside of the jack-o-lantern that I also get a square shadow directly underneath it. I then moved the same spotlight to the outside of the jack-o-lantern and the square shadow was gone when rendered. I tried again using the ball prop and got the same square when I placed the spot inside of it. I've decided to just increase the ambient settings for the texture to give it the appearance of being lit up. Thanks for everyones suggestions.