Hi all,

I'm working with V3, trying to create some glamour style stuff but my lighting looks aweful. I have "traditional" lighting experience with photography so I'm familiar with what needs to be done. Are there some good light sets to but online? Would that be a good start? Or is there a better way?

Thanks!

What version of Poser are you using? That makes a difference when it comes to recommending light sets.

The way Poser treats lights in Poser 6 and 7 is vastly different than in earlier versions. In Poser 5 and earlier versions you needed about 20 lights to get a good lighting effect.  With Poser 6 and 7 you can use as few as 2.   I find for me that I need to have at least 3 or 4 lights in my scene, but others who are more proficient have shown that they can use 1 light.

Less lights means faster render times because Poser doesn't have to render all of those shadow maps for each light.

That being said, you can still use lights from Poser 5 in Poser 6 and 7, but versions 5 and 6  will only preview 8 lights so the scene will look dark, but the lights will still render fine.

If you have Poser 6 or 7, I suggest you have a look at these threads. 

Olivier's Making of a pomo pic
Castle Poser Tutorials
Poser 6 IBL Ins and outs by Olivier
A little tutorial about lighting by Olivier
Tutorial: GEL MAPS by Olivier
How Light Probes are Laid Out
Advanced Image Based Lighting in Poser 6
Basic OpenGL Lighting

If you are using Poser 5, I highly recommend the "Complex Global Lighting 2" available at Daz.. I use Poser 6 and sometimes I will still use my favourite light set from that package even though it extends my render time.

There are also lots of free lights at RDNA in the free area. Just go there and search "Light".  Many of them work very well with Poser 6 and 7.

the main differences between a photo studio and poser are: 1. poser shadows are bad by default - they need non-intuitive repair work 2. no indirect lighting without considerable render time and effort 3. getting the surface properties of the models right is an art in itself

I'm using Poser 6. Sorry, should have stated that in my initial post.

Thanks!

1. the poser lites don't obey the inverse square law. there are fixes for all these things, but it takes two manuals and several hundred messages in this and the RDNA forum to explain 'em all, as you'll see from acadia's links.