Looking for some advice on lighting a stage in Poser 8, i.e. for a magic show or stage play. I'm familiar with theatrical lights- and trying to mimic a theatrical lighting plot in Poser would involve several dozen lights, and completely wash out the figures. (Which is why real-life actors use stage makeup- to compensate for the brightness. Poser characters don't really have that luxury.)

Anyone have any generic or specific advice based on prior experience (or even better, could direct me to a free scene setup with lights?) Thanks!

My only advice would be to simulate the main lights as spotlights and drop the intensity way down .

Starting with Poser 8, spot and point lights can have inverse square and inverse linear falloff in addition to constant attenuation.  This, along with bringing down intensity can help this feat.

There are also a number of scripts about that enable the controlling of multiple lights (similar to "gaffer" plugin for Lightwave).

many yrs ago in one of the "celeb fake" groups, there was a photomanipulator called "Lt. Body",
whose logo was a star-trek red-shirt lying on the ground.  but anyway, if the sum of all the spotlite
intensities is 100% or less, and GC/TM is used, the textures won't get blown out,  use bill's lite
meter prop to keep lites at good levels.

You might be interested in a 'stage' setup I created as a virtual photo studio... see my gallery image (casual nudity advisory) Guinea Pig.

I modelled the two spotlights in the back corners of the stage using Poser primitives, and they incorporate two Poser spotlights. The overhead light is an IDL ambient surface light, again modelled using just Poser primitives, with a specular-only spotlight.

The modelled lights are parented to their respective Poser lights, and the Poser lights are pointing at a hidden 'light target' in the scene. So you can move each light or the light target anywhere around the studio, and the lights (both the models and the Poser spotlights) will always 'point at' the target.

bagginsbill's Light Meter that Miss Nancy mentioned is incredibly useful for quickly setting up good light levels and balancing diffuse and highlights.

Thanks for the advice, everyone- I never thought to use a specular only light. I'll have to keep experimenting with the setups till I get the effect I like.

next to reducing intensity, deploy the falloff start/end parameters so you can light figures but no background and v.v., or light specific figure/prop groups.

The real issue with many lights is that rendertime increases as each lamp has a shadow map to be calculated. Hence, check the Reuse Shadow Maps when balancing lights and textures only.

Real-life camera "one stop difference" means half / double the intensity in Poser.

BTW: for portraiting, I use 9 spots for simulation one softbox (sum of intensities = 100%). Having two softboxes plus some rim / back / backdrop lights make about 25 lights total, so: that's not uncommon.

Runtime DNA has some great lighting and rendering tools. Colm Jackson rocks.