Can we have a 'colour of shadow' please.

I second that motion!

You can get that with ibl/hdri lights.

With IBL you can change the light color but you can't change the shadow color as far as I've ever heard. But if you have a tutorial on how to manipulate the shadow color independent of the light, we'd love it!! :)

If you mean for unnatural effects, that would be really cool.  But if you mean for realism, then Santel is right.  Your ambient light (IBL, environment sphere, etc.) determines your shadow color.

Let's say "artistic". ;)

Fine art painters often use purple or blue shadows regardless of the light color (or let's say, especially with a warm, yellowish light).

There was a big discussion around here not long ago about how Poser isn't equipped to do that. Not sure where the thread is now...

What ever happened to the weight mapped G2 figures, especially Sydney?

I'd heard her mesh was a mess, did that bring about a cancellation of reworking her?

Quote - Let's say "artistic". ;) Fine art painters often use purple or blue shadows regardless of the light color (or let's say, especially with a warm, yellowish light).

Oh, I didn't mean anything negative by unnatural.  I was thinking more about the difference between "natural" light and special effects. 

The reason I made the distinction between "natural" and "artistic" is exactly what you're talking about.  The natural phenomena that, for instance, impressionists observed and painted was that shadows are colored in the inverse hue of the light.  Or, more accurately, the light's color is removed from shading when occluded.  Given warm sunlight or even candlelight and a realistic, naturally bluish or purplish sky, you get blue or purple shadows.  Which is totally different from, say, fauvists who used whatever color they wanted as long as it was saturated and high value. 

Essentially, yellow lights do cast blue shadows.  If you want the shadows to be emphatically but naturally blue, then the whole environment's ambient lighting should be blue.  And the solution is to make your IBL or environment sphere very blue. 

In fact, thinking about it, I don't think it can be done any other way.  Lights don't have "black" shadows, exactly.  They are a color, and other things get in their way.  So "shadows" are whatever color a surface is without the light on it.  Shadows aren't positive.  They're an absence of light.  What happens in the absence of light is ambient shading.  Which, again, is controlled globally by IBL and IDL.

The next version you say?

How about being able to turn off lights affecting selected objects like Vue does?

Speaking of artistic vs. natural, I just ran across something in Vue that I didn't know existed:

"If the Variable color option is selected, the color of the light will vary with the distance to the light source (of course, the intensity of the light varies independently from the color). Although there is absolutely no physical justification behind this behavior, it can be used to create interesting effects on occasions (especially when using volumetric lights)."

Not sure how I might use it, but interesting possibilities.

IIRC, there is a way to make Poser generate coloured shadows, with shader trickery. Unfortunately, I can't remember what it is. :(

Quote - What ever happened to the weight mapped G2 figures, especially Sydney?

I'd heard her mesh was a mess, did that bring about a cancellation of reworking her?

Her mesh is asymmetrical, which is not the same as a mess. Making the mesh symmetrical would break every morph & every character ever made for them.

As far as reworking her for weight mapping, anyone with Poser 2012 or 2014 can do that themselves.  In Poser 2014, the first 60 or so steps have been reduced to 1 step:

Figure - Merge all Zones to Weight Maps. 

After that, I don't know how much you know about the Joint editor, but if you follow along in chapter 33 of the 2014 manual (Working with Joints, Weights, and Skinning)

It isn't hard, but it can be tedious.

Vector Maps :)

Quote - > Quote - What ever happened to the weight mapped G2 figures, especially Sydney?

I'd heard her mesh was a mess, did that bring about a cancellation of reworking her?

Her mesh is asymmetrical, which is not the same as a mess. Making the mesh symmetrical would break every morph & every character ever made for them.

As far as reworking her for weight mapping, anyone with Poser 2012 or 2014 can do that themselves.  In Poser 2014, the first 60 or so steps have been reduced to 1 step:

Figure - Merge all Zones to Weight Maps. 

After that, I don't know how much you know about the Joint editor, but if you follow along in chapter 33 of the 2014 manual (Working with Joints, Weights, and Skinning)

It isn't hard, but it can be tedious.

 

By saying it was a mess, I was repeating what I had read. I have Poser 9, so I can't do much by way of mapping her myself, but I do understand joint parameters and use the joint editor quite a bit.

I may just see how much I know and retopo her. THAT would be tedious...

Quote - IIRC, there is a way to make Poser generate coloured shadows, with shader trickery. Unfortunately, I can't remember what it is. :(

Again, you can do it with any form of ambient lighting or shading.  I mean, define what a shadow is, and think about how rendering works.  A shadow is the absence of a light, not something positive.  It's not an addition to shading.  Shadows don't make an area darker or color it.  Shadows are simply areas where a directional light isn't illuminating.  What it can't reach. 

Rendering works by adding up different effects.  Ambient color, diffuse shading, sss shading, specular, reflection, refraction, etc.  Again, shadows aren't "black" by default.  It's just that you start with nothing, and then add effects from there.  If you want a color where directional light isn't, then you color whatever is adding to shading where directional light isn't.  Ambient color.  IBL. Whatever you want.   IBL is just easier than ambient color because it works on the whole scene, so you don't have to start changing the ambient color of every material involved. 

The one thing I know of that's actually light dependent is when you start playing with negative intensities and color values.

I was thinking that 'This light' casts 'This colour shadow'

you can do it with two lights in the same exact position, one the color that you want shadows to be and the other the complementry color.  balance is up to you.

the one that is the color of the shadows is set to not cast shadows. :D

Bill

And the one that does cast shadows doesn't affect the overall lighting as well?

I understand that's what you were thinking but it's not how real light or rendering works.  Light is additive.  It isn't subtractive, unless you start messing with negative colors and intensities.  The shadow is just where the light isn't.  What color a surface is where a directional light isn't is determined, in general, by other elements adding to shading.  It's only black when there are absolutely no other elements to add to that shading.

Lights don't have a "color" of shadow, not even black.   This is exactly why painters use colored shadows: shadows aren't pure black except in outer space where there's absolutely no other source of light.  Otherwise, shadows are the color of your ambient light.  In Poser, we have tons of different ways of controlling our ambient light.  That's how you can control the color of "shadows."  Thing is, pretty much none of them are light dependent.

Let's say you have a room with a nice big window and a door to a hallway.  Let's say there's a person standing in the room near the door.  Let's say there's a light in the hallway, but for now it's off.  And let's say that it's twilight out and neither the moon nor sun is shining in the window.  What's lighting the room?  The ambient light from the sky and land.  It's probably blue. 

Let's say we want to make our 3d version of that scene, and emphasize the blue.  We make an IBL with a really saturated blue.  Yes, the light will get occluded by the room, but it will also get in through the window.  So we've got this dark but very, very blue room.  If we want to make sure nothing is actually black, we can take time and make all the ambient colors of the materials for the room the blue we want to be the very darkest color in our work.  And all the ambient values 1.  It's the color that things will be when there's no light, directional or ambient, hitting the surface. 

Now we turn on that light in the hallway.  Let's say it's a bright yellow/orange light.  What color is the shadow cast by the person standing near the doorway?  Unless that light is unnatural and has negative intensity or negative colors, the "cast shadow" is no different than it was before you turned on the light.  It isn't darker than with the light off.  It isn't blacker.  Or bluer, or redder, or any other color you could set your "shadows" to if that were possible to do for a light rather than a scene.  It's the same exact shading.  What's changed is the area where the light hits.  That's now brighter and warmer.  But the shadow is exactly the same color (same hue, same value)  it was when there was only ambient lighting and shading involved.

I think it might be cool to be able to set an ambient scene color.  It would be nice to have an ambient control that wasn't surface specific.   But I don't see how you can effectively set a "shadow" color for individual lights when shadows are everywhere in the scene the light isn't, not just where some parts of the scene are illuminated.  That would essentially cover the whole scene.  Not to mention that this is already controlled by IBL and/or ambiently shaded meshes.

Yes, you could go to the trouble of making a directional light that doesn't cast shadows.  That will make your materials glow, essentially.  But it seems to me to be one of the more complicated ways to change the shading where a directional light isn't.