I can't reproduce the example given in the manual (making a dial on one light control brightness on another light in the scene).  I've been able to set up master dials on props, but I can't reproduce that example and I'd really like to.  Am I doing somethign wrong?

will check, give me a few

OK ... I did get it to work ... but here's what I'm thinking ... between step 7 and 8, I'm thinking that maybe you have to reselect Light 2 (the one where the master parameter dial is) before you click the Next Key button.  See if that makes a difference, because that is what I did.

But just for grins now I will try it without those steps and see if it makes a difference.

EDIT:

Nope it doesn't seem to make a difference, so there is no missing step, it looks OK.

You wrote the new manual parts, didn't you.

LOL  yeah  (and please feel free to make suggestions ... I'm still working on some tutorials and stuff)

No, overall they're very good.  I just don't get this part.  I'm just doing it the way I'm accustomed to (via CR2 editor).

I know it's light in spots (lighting in particular), but still plugging away!

actually can't get it to work via cr2 editor either :/

hmmmm ... and you have 10199, yes?  (Same build here)

The next thing I can think of is that I can try to do a vidcap of the steps, would that help?

Pretty sure it's not the steps, it's something specific to lights.  I am taking the same steps with other objects and I don't have any trouble.

Yeah I have a graph similar to yours, although I got it without the extra channels I don't want (using Spotlights).  But setting the master dial to 100 does not change the individual light Intensity dials' values, either the normal value or the "Driven" value (above the normal value).

Ah, there's a clue. I will try it with spots.

That seems to work OK too. Strange.

I think I see the problem, I had disabled the Animating property, which seems to interfere with how ERC dials are interpreted - since this property doesn't exist on other objects except cameras I can see why I had not run into this before.

Yeah this seems to work, thanks anyhow, it was a trick question.
Some explanation of the raw syntax of the "valueKey" values written in the CR2 would be nice.

pjz - looking forward to seeing what you're doing with the dependent parm editor. At SIGGRAPH, I've been demoing driving three lights brightness in a scene by raising the arm of Andy the mannikin. The lights automatically add trans channels, but these can be removed. I figure there'll be a lot of good opportunities for folks that want to build full scenes as PZ3 files with interdepencies for things like a light switch that controls all the lights in the scene, or a button to open a door, close a window, operate other items in the scene that would be a PITA to individually click to move or actuate. I see a market for a 3D control panel as well that could be added to a scene and used to drive various channels.

Deecey was awesome to work with on the manual - we tried to rework it in as many places as possible. I was the brakes on some of the overhaul efforts - we have to get this translated.

She's one of my heroes on this project. We worked weekends, long nights, early mornings to draft up a much better manual than what we had as a starting point. Perfect? Definitely not. But a vast improvement over the past work. I don't think we left a single "heretofor" standing.

A toast to you D!

Coop

(blushes)

Coop is da best too, he truly IS Poser's #1 evangelist.  Poser's in good hands I think!

What I'm doing is a "light rack" to work around the GI splotch artifact problem, it turns out that if you add more lights (hence more rays) and if you spread the lights out a bit, like an area light in other rendering apps, it greatly reduces the problem.  I'm beginning to think that the reason for the splotch artifacts is because the rays emitted by a spotlight or pointlight are not able to find a path into certain convolutions of geometry, but spreading out the source of all the rays by adding more lights seems to give more opportunities for a good ray hit in more places in the scene.

I don't really like the approach of treating this as an animation keyframe, although I guess I can see some reasons for it - you don't have to confuse us poor dumb users with things like addition and subtraction - but it would have been nice if the traditional ValueOpDeltaAdd etc. operators were supported as well.