Why do light sets made in other versions of Poser do not work properly in Poser 6? Is there a fix? If not, can anyone recommend some good Poser 6 lights, as all my favourite sets don't work properly. Thanks

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It has something to do with Open GL. I'm still not clear what that is, but whatever it is means that you don't need nearly as many lights to light up a scene as you did in earlier versions of Poser. So that means that Poser 6 limits the number of lights it previews to 8. The lights that were made for Poser 6 and earlier versions often have more than 8 lights, and Poser 6 will only disply 8 of those lights and not the rest. However, even though the lights preview almost black in Poser 6, they still render the same as they did in Poser 5. Poser 6 also tends to pile on lights instead of replacing lights when you apply a new set. So go to "Windows" and "Python" and "Utilities" and "Delete all lights" before applying your lights. Unfortunately there is no "fix" for the way Poser 6 is displaying your earlier version light sets. However, making your own lights in Poser 6 is much easier than it was in earlier versions thanks to Image Based Lighting (IBL). Above is a tutorial to how to do that. Olivier was kind enough to write up a tutorial complete with templates. Also, below is another tutorial he wrote to explain lights in general: http://www.runtimedna.com/mod/forum/messages.php?ShowMessage=135278 Also, Face_off has a tutorial on IBL as well. Here is the link: http://www.physicalc-software.com/tutorials/ibl/

The lights should work properly in P6, they just won't preview correctly if there are more than 6. If they are not rendering properly, save them out, delete them from the scene and reload. This also works to convert pre-P5 lights to P5.

The key to IBL is not mentioned in any documentation I have seen. It is practically useless unless you include an input of some sort to the color channel in materials. This is because the default "material" is pure white, so a "naked" IBL is a blast of pure white light coming at your model from every direction. If you don't happen to have a mirrorball picture handy, it's less than useful. And I've found that the intensity needs to be dropped closer to 20% than 65% to avoid washing out details. At the risk of being a curmudgeon, I confess I haven't found much to cheer over in the IBL system. The discrepancy between what the preview shows and what you get is even more radical than with spotlights, and render times climb into the stratosphere, so it's even more fumbling in the dark than "the old days." And generally I can get as satisfactory an image with classic 3-spot lighting, without the grief. Oliver's tutorial is great, but once I had used it to create lights for a scene, I compared the results to what I was getting the old way. It may be butter and margarine to some folks, but for me it's "No deeference!" Well, the difference that it took the better part of three hours to get something approaching satisfactory light saturation. Another potential problem I've encountered involves "real skin." As DeeCey says in Practical Poser, "Translucence" is just "Alternate Ambience," and therein lies a problem when I apply Translucence to brighten up a skin tone. Typically, translucence washes out detail; more subtly than Ambience, but for the same reason. That translucent glow turns into a lovely inner light if I backlight a figure. Fact is, people aren't translucent. We have this opaque layer a few millimeters below the fur, and meshes don't. What's worse, Poser is likely to become unstable with this much going on, and suddenly things go --to use the technical phrase-- totally wacko. For example, while trying to repair the Translucence problem a few hours ago, I eventually deleted every node for a V3 head material except the image map, and the result was a black head shader unless I moved the map to the AltDiffuse node. And yes, I had all the fundamental root nodes defaulted at that point. And the head continued to be translucent with Translucence OFF when I moved the imagemap to Alt Diffuse. I just spent nearly four hours fighting with the combination of IBL and "real skin." Then I switched over to Carrara 5 Pro and starting from scratch with new cameras and lights, it took a half hour to get a satisfactory setup, including render time, and including ten minutes of diddling with the shaders to get rid of the oiled skin look I inherited from the Poser file's "translucence." Carrara renders at 10 times the speed of P6 and more. The only downside is the hassles of fumbling with shaders, which do not port very conveniently (you get most of them, but assigned to nameless materials and with their relationships a bit murky). And because the materials aren't ported, you have to kind of guess which shader is which if you want to modify them. Personally, I hope Poser 7 will come with some fundamental fixes to perennial problems, like render times, instead of a new set of glittery toys. M

Thanks for the info, will have to try & work it out, cause now I have some specific P6 products & will have to use the programme more LOL