I want to create a light replacement - just an illuminated primitive. This is accomplished with ambience, right?

I'm sure I saw a thread here a couple months ago related to this, but I can't find it.

Just switch ambient_value to anything higher than zero and ambient_colour to whatever colour you want the thing to display.  

You can get more adventurous by introducing ambience maps and varying the colour, amount and even which parts glow, assuming there is only one material on the prop. 

Hm, thanks... it's not seeming to work right now. Mind you, I'm having all sorts of problems with Poser anyway... hard to know what I should report, as my hard drive is a logjam and I'm probably causing crashes with it just being so full.

If you have a spare HD to write stuff out to temporarily, do that then defrag your Poser drive.  I found it gets a bit grumpy with less than 15GB space.  P6 does, anyhow. 

I'm totally in favor of the external HD... Especially when you can pick up a 1 Terrabyte external for a hundred bucks... I completely moved Poser and all runtimes to it and my crashes have decreased considerably.

Maybe what you are missing is the gather node? In a well lit scene an illuminated prop doesn't really give out as much light, as I'd hope, I had to learn.

With a gather nde you can have an object catch the light and it looks as if something is glowing:

Maybe thse links will help:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2217752&page=1

and this one:

http://www.castleposer.co.uk/articles/shader_gather.html

Thanks, mihoshi... I will take a look.

Not sure what you mean by "well-lit scene." I'm thinking of having the prop supply all the light. Maybe that won't really do it and I'll have to have a little bit of infinite.

don't report it as bug yet, believ.  should work in poser 7 and later without gather node.
unlike infinite or directional lite, no specular emission from posersurface as lite source (GI/IDL).

Nah, I wasn't gonna report it at this point. Like I said, I'm having all sorts of problems... sometimes Poser just "renders" the preview window instead of doing a real render. (But it seems to take just as long as a real render, loads the textures etc.)

sorry to hear of the troubles.  maybe the experts here can sort them out for ya.  the thing where it "renders" the preview window sounds almost like "antialias document" command.

It doesn't do it with any predictability. I almost think it does it more frequently if I bring another window to the front (e.g. Firefox), but I do that almost all the time....

Are you asking for a prop to supply light in Poser 8 or Poser 7? It was never officially supported in P7 and was horribly slow, even worse than P8 was on its initial release. Now, P8 has pretty fast GI, allowing props to be used as light sources. To be clear, in P8 when IDL enabled, all props are light sources, just not necessarily light originators. The fact is that there's not much difference between a wall that is white because a light is shining on it, versus a wall that is white because its shader says it is white no matter what. The part people talk about, the "ambient" part of the shader, is just the simplest possible mathematical formula for the illumination coming off an object - it defines it as a constant. The normal lighting, what we think of as not self-lit, is not a constant and depends on something else illuminating it. But once you enable IDL, then it isn't that important as to why a prop is providing light to other props.  The Ambient channel is one way, but it is just as "self-lit" if you plug a SimpleColor node into Alternate_Diffuse or Alternate_Specular or Reflection_Color ... etc.

I find it strange that I've had to explain the same thing 3 times in one week. Do you guys ever read other threads? LOL.

The job of a shader is to say what color something is. It usually does that by examining light sources and applying some math, but it can just as easily define the math as BLUE - and the color is BLUE - end of discussion. Lights are not necessary to define what color an object appears to be. However, when a shader does invoke rules about light sources before deciding to be any color other than black, then it can use only the "lights" or it can also use all the other shaders in the scene. That's the difference between GI and not GI.

The Gather node is a limited ability to treat nearby props as a light source, but only for a specific material on which the Gather is placed. It's not very useful, it looks bad, computes really slowly, and is completely lame and inexcusable compared to IDL.

Do I read other threads? Quite a bit.

Do I understand everything you write? Just a bit.

Do I retain everything I understand? Not a bit.

:)

The problem is that MOST of us DO read the threads and try to understand them. Sometimes, we think "that'll be useful the next time that I..."

And then you can never find the post again because the search function is hit and miss. Point of fact, I saw a reference to your inverse square thread and searched specifically for Inverse Square posted by bagginsbill in Poser over the last 5 years...

Nothing... At least not the thread I was looking for that explained it.

Yes, Rendo's search functions leave A LOT to be desired. At least, I'm with chikken on not being able to find anything I'm looking for.

Aside from that, we really do have a problem here with user knowlege level vs guru knowlege level. I'm with Believable 3D. I read much, understand little and remember less.

Take BB's VSS. I've dled it, read the instructions multiple times, and STILL can't make it do anything. I'm sure it's a wonderful tool that would really help me out, but I'm too embarassed to ask for help because it seems that everyone else understands it. So, I do without, even though by making it FREE BB intended it to be available to the user base.

And I'm not picking on BB. He's probably one of three people in the world who really understand how Poser's lights actually work. I'd hate to log into this forum and have the number of messages waiting for me that he always has. Still, this points out the difference in user level between the two of us. Since the docs didn't help me, I've no idea where to go and don't ask him for help because I feel like a pest.

It's a problem that is only getting worse with time. I wish I knew the solution.

All the torches have a 'flame' material: I plugged the original color map into the ambient node, gave it a bright orange colour and set ambient value to 100. That's right, 100. I turned all lights off.

The first render at my usual preview settings (IDL on, of course) looked pretty terrible so I did another at my production quality setting... and then went and did the shopping, came back, unpacked all the groceries, made a cup of coffee and... it was almost finished. So be prepared for long render times to get decent results.

It's still not perfect and could do with more aggressive render settings, I think, but it shows that self-illuminated props can work.

The render is quite impressive.  You claim an ambient setting of '100'.  Is that 100 % (1.0)or 10,000% (100.0)?  If the former is the case, the torches may just be way over 'lit'.  The image is very good, however, I think the lighting is a little too severe for torches.  I would expect more light dropoff with distance.

@ nekkidchicken:  Unfortunately, some common pertinent posts are found within OP which originally had no initial bearing on the subject.  And this is frustrating when conducting a search.  Usually, I either bookmark the topic or print a hard copy for further perusal.  Believe me, I have stacks of folders sitting around my desk for quick reference. 

@Basicwiz:  Don't let your embarrassment prevent you from posting a help question.  Although BB has fairly extensive knowledge of Material Room and shader technique, there are others who have followed in his footsteps and are equally competent to help others. 

Guys, if you need help, just post the question.  Don't feel intimidated.  We are all here to offer guidance.

cspear: Very nice.

hborre: Hm... I don't think it's overlit. There are a lot of torches there. I do think you're onto something with dropoff, though - it looks like to me the space further away from the torches is about right, but the spaces right under the torches doesn't look quite dramatic enough.

Quote - Take BB's VSS. I've dled it, read the instructions multiple times, and STILL can't make it do anything. I'm sure it's a wonderful tool that would really help me out, but I'm too embarassed to ask for help because it seems that everyone else understands it. So, I do without, even though by making it FREE BB intended it to be available to the user base.

Have you seen my "VSS for Dummies" mini-tut?

I wrote that precisely because I'm one of the dummies. I was struggling a bit with the instructions too, and had to break it down like that for myself in order to get going with VSS.

cspear, if time permits, try render with ambient=10 on those, and hsv exp 2.0 (tone-mapping) with gain 2.0.

Miss Nancy, I would agree ambient = 10, but the HSV exp = 2 might be a tad much.  Remember, increasing the HSV exp scale will cause the scene to brighten.  IMO, I would down scale.  Gain value is ok.  BTW, is there gamma correction applied to the scene?

Quote - > Quote - Take BB's VSS. I've dled it, read the instructions multiple times, and STILL can't make it do anything. I'm sure it's a wonderful tool that would really help me out, but I'm too embarassed to ask for help because it seems that everyone else understands it. So, I do without, even though by making it FREE BB intended it to be available to the user base.

Have you seen my "VSS for Dummies" mini-tut?

I wrote that precisely because I'm one of the dummies. I was struggling a bit with the instructions too, and had to break it down like that for myself in order to get going with VSS.

I'm hoping I pretty much have got it right, here, Bill... feel free to chop this up and feed it back to me if I get it wrong, but perhaps even erroneous information will clarify what VSS is and what it isn't and just how much that 'V' bit is incredibly true!!!

One of the aspects of VSS that kind-of gets ignored or is not really looked at is that it can be used to manage not just humanoid figures but really any multi-material zone figure or indeed figureS. It does this through rules. The rules act on Templates that are material-zones you create in VSS if they don't already exist. The shaders you make go into those material-zones, and the rules then sort out where those shaders are to be distributed to.

So, let's say you have a building... the building has a left_Outwall, right_Outwall, front_Outwall and back_Inwall. All of these walls would take the same shader except for the back_Inwall.

So you set up a rule on Out, not on wall for those outer walls.

Then, let's say you have picture_window, sliding_window, bathroom_window and other_window_panes material zones. These would also take the same shaders, so set up a rule on window. VSS uses the * wildcard approach. 

You set up your rules, then you set up material zones in VSS (BB provides Python scripts to do this for you) and call them like 'Template Out_Wall' or 'Template Window'... these material zones will hold the shader that is going to be distributed. You will load that shader by either creating it - you only need to do it once: no copy-and-pasting!) or you can script a shader in Matmatic which will make the materials (mt5s) for you - double-click to load into the material zone. VSS comes with buttons to make the whole process of making those VSS material zones and rules and Template nodes pretty painless. The key is in naming your rules right so that the right material zones in your figure(s) are targeted.

In that special Shader Rules area of VSS, the rules are in nodes with those 'Rule out' and 'Rule window' names. These are connected to 'Copy Template Out_Wall' and 'Copy Template Window' nodes.

That's really the crux of it: making sure that your material zone names are all connected to the appropriate rule node.

For instance, let's say you want to have garden wall to have the same shader as the rest of the outside walls. In that case, connect a garden rule node to the Copy Template Out_Wall node. It will distribute that shader to that garden wall just because that rule existed for garden. Doesn't matter if it's not part of that figure: it goes by rules.

Bill did explain all this really well in that "VSS Skin Test: Opinions" thread, but the first part of the discussion was about skin shaders and not the VSS mechanism, so you kind-of have to read on a bit to get to it. And of course no one gets Poser for complex buildings or things like that: it's all about skin. So VSS became all about the Pr3 shader (eventually) and VSS's talented interface was relegated to distributing shaders to V4.

100% correct, Robyn.

I think the thing that stops beginners is the idea of the control prop altogether, not the innards, and also they're not used to using the Python buttons for anything.

I'm sure I wrote this somewhere but it is buried. The basics are load the control prop, load a figure, load some textures you like on the figure, run VSSMainButtons to populate the Python buttons, display those buttons, and hit Synchronize. That's all there is to using it the first time.

hborre: the ambient setting I used is 100, or 10,000% if you prefer; the results are the results, I can't see any way to control anything except the light intensity using this approach.

Miss Nancy: I didn't save the scene! I might have a bash at recreating this and using your suggested settings when I get time.

hborre: the only GC is on BB's EnvSphere

I was messing around with this and got some nice results (testing, so nothing post worthy) with glowing props.  But how could I make only portions of the texture glow?  For example a glowing flame paint job on a car.  I added an ambient node to my material, using an image map for the texture.  I tried blacking out and whiting out in a photo editor the part I don't want to glow, but it just overwrote the underlying texture.  Even tried making a png with the non-glowing part empty, but it just overwrote with white.

In the attached picture, the black areas in the second image map will render whatever the Color Texture and Diffuse Color are, while only the white areas will render with the Ambient Color.

What happens when you untick Reflection_Lite_Mult?

Since I'm not using anything reflective on the figure, it doesn't do anything either way.

At least, not that I can see.

That worked for me, thanks!  I think I even understand it.  Using a math node, black = zero so nothing happens with the black parts of the texture. 

Quote - First, you want the areas of the "mask" that you want to not glow be black, and then connect it through a Math Functions node to the Ambient Color.

In the attached picture, the black areas in the second image map will render whatever the Color Texture and Diffuse Color are, while only the white areas will render with the Ambient Color.

No need for the math node.

If you plug the black-and-white image into a color (Ambient_Color here), it amounts to the same thing.

If you plug the the black-and-white image into a number, the three values are averaged to produce a single number. But since the image is black and white, the average of r, g, and b is the same as any of the individual values - it already is gray scale.

So you have GREEN * 1 * Mask. This is the same as GREEN * Mask.

And the math behind the Ambient_Color and Ambient_Value is multiplication.

So the full math is Ambient_Value * Ambient_Color * 1 * Mask = 1 * GREEN * 1 * Mask = GREEN * Mask. Same thing.

You could also plug the mask into Ambient_Value instead, and nothing would change. The math then is Ambient_Value * Mask * Ambient_Color = 1 * Mask * GREEN = Mask * GREEN.

No matter how you do it, in the end you have Mask * GREEN or GREEN * Mask. In the end, wherever the mask is white, you get green, and wherever the mask is black, you get black.

I think I used the math node because I also have a tendency to plug the texture into the ambient node sometimes (like, for eyes so the iris texture has an effect on the ambient glow), and the math node would allow both that and the mask.

The math node is also useful if you have a black on white image, setting it to subtract to invert the image.

Quote - I think I used the math node because I also have a tendency to plug the texture into the ambient node sometimes (like, for eyes so the iris texture has an effect on the ambient glow), and the math node would allow both that and the mask.

Eh? Plug color into Ambient_Color, mask into Ambient_Value. Still no math node in that.

Quote - The math node is also useful if you have a black on white image, setting it to subtract to invert the image.

That's true but having a math node that does nothing, and justifying it with the argument that it could do something if you changed it to a different math function is - odd.

Quote - [Eh? Plug color into Ambient_Color, mask into Ambient_Value. Still no math node in that.

Hmmm, never thought of doing that.

I initially plugged another copy of the texture into the ambient color, but the ENTIRE texture became ambient.  So I should just convert the texture to black and white before I plug?  I can do that.  Will be a while though, as I am in the middle of re-doing my OS.  Got a new version of some old software that for whatever reason doesn't play nice with 64-bit.  No matter, I don't have Poser Pro so I can't use the extra bittage anyway. 

I don't understand the phrase "the ENTIRE texture became ambient".

Look there is nothing special about "ambient" other than it is added to everything else the surface generates. Whatever colors you put in there are added directly to the render.

It's simple math: if the rest of the shader (diffuse, specular, etc.) produces color A, and the ambient value is color B, then the output is A + B.

You mentioned converting the texture to black and white. Why? That doesn't change the fact that the texture is non-zero somewhere.

If you can't follow the math (by the way this is 7th grade math, A + B, so you should be able to follow that) then you'll have to show me what you're trying to do and what you're using as inputs (maps) and I'll show you how to do it.

I suspect you're trying to make parts of a texture map glow, while making other parts not glow. That is more than simply A + B. 

That's where you should be using a mask. White or black, on or off, glowing or not glowing.

The mask goes into the Ambient_Value.

The color of the glow goes into the Ambient_Color.

Given what I read, there is the possiblity that you've plugged an image into Ambient_Color and Ambient_Value. "I initially plugged another copy of the texture into the ambient color"

The ambient parameter pair works as follows:

Ambient_Color * Ambient_Value

Multiplication. The ambient value is supposed to be used as a "volume" knob.

But if you plug the image into both, you are doing:

image * image

This is basically f(x) = x ^ 2, or a parabola.

Which means already bright parts get brighter still relative to darker parts.

That is an interesting effect but I doubt it is what you're trying to do. So don't do that. If you do random things, you get random results.

Quote - It's simple math: if the rest of the shader (diffuse, specular, etc.) produces color A, and the ambient value is color B, then the output is A + B.

You got me there.  Somewhere along the way I forgot that everything behind the monitor is 1s and 0s and math.  When I started thinking about it that way things started coming together.  And no more wondering why Poser wouldn't do what I want it to do, lol.

Yay!

I talk about this a lot and it scares people off, although it shouldn't.

CG is math, folks. If you don't understand the math, then you don't understand CG and you will faff about miserably for no reason. It is not sophisticated math, either. Mostly it is addition and multiplication. Yes, I make shaders involving powers and trig, but that is the intermediate to advanced stuff. The basics are well within the abilities of anybody in 7th grade or higher who at least got a C in math class.

Is there a way to do this so the object casts light that would actually illuminate other objects?  For example, a lamp.

Use IDL in P8.

And if one doesn't have P8?

then you can't without faking it or rendering in something that supports IDL/GI

Attached Link: http://market.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2217752

The bad thing about the Gather is it is always grainy, so I consider it unusable. But it is true that it is an option. It's a pain in the butt, though, because you have to go into the shaders for everything around the glowing object and add a Gather node into its lighting calculation. This means doing pretty sophisticated shader work. The only case where it is easy is when the other object has a trivial shader already and is not going to be illuminated by anything else except the glowing thing.

Most of the examples were of an otherwise unlit situation, showcasing the glow effect. Try doing that with, for example, a glowing TV in a room that is actually lit already. Not easy.