basicwiz opened this issue on Apr 23, 2012 ยท 560 posts
lesbentley posted Sun, 29 April 2012 at 12:32 PM
Q: Can I keep the illumination the same relative to a camera? I have the lights set up the way I want from the front, but when I move the camera to look at my figure from the back, everything is in shadow.
A: Yes, you can do this for a single camera. Parent all the lights to a Poser square primitive. You can't parent infinite lights, so if any of the lights are infinite, you will need to convert them to spotlights (from their Properties), then convert them back to infinite after parenting. Parent the square primitive to the camera you are using. The lights will now move with the camera, and the illumination will always look the same relative to the camera. Because all the lights are parented to one primitive, if you want to change the parent to be a different camera, or a figure, or back to the UNIVERSE (UNIVERSE = unparented), you only need to change the parent of one primitive, instead of needing to do it for every light. Having them parented to one primitive also means that you can translate or rotate them as a group.
After unparenting, or changing the parent of the primitive, you may need to use Restore > Element (Ctrl+E) on it, to revert it to its initial state.
Of course, instead of parenting the lights to a primitive first, you could just parent them directly to a camera, but that is a less flexible technique.