I've read 3 different post on this and have played with the settings several ways. I am trying to have a primitive give off light.  I can get the primitive to illuminate when all lights are out but, I can not get the primitive to give off enough light to illuminate another object.   What am I doing wrong?  I have linked a pic. Thanks

Do you have IDL enabled in your render settings?

with IDL/raytracing enabled, using ambient=6 may cause the sphere's surface colour to burn out in FFRender.

What those two said.  Location also helps.  I can't tell if the object is in front of, beside, or behind the skeleton and that's going to affect things.  If it is a 2d plane, than I assume that could cause issues as well.

Also, if you don't know how to use render settings go to Scripts > Partners > Dimension3D > Render firefly and change it from there.  The default one doesn't have as many options.

I hate to ask this, but what does precalculation scale do?  I've done a few test renders but I can't seem to figure out what it is for.

The problem with hborre's setup is that an ambient value of >1 will change the color of the emitter prop. In this case, the orb looks yellow while it casts an orange glow.

So for my render I used a second orb, slightly bigger than the first one.

The first one has an ambient value of 5, but is made invisible to the camera, so only its "glow" is visible in the final render.

The second one has an ambient value of 1 and is not visible in raytrace, but in camera.

So it just renders normally, but doesn't block the glow of the first orb hidden inside it.

This way, the orb glows red while it still "looks" red at the same time.

While I'm thinking about it, how do you get your renders to not turn out grainy with IDL?  That's a problem I've been fighting with forever.  Increasing the number of sampes helps, but it's still there for me.

Precalculation scale just scales down the image and quickens precal in IDL pass.  Rather than staring at your final render full scene, it's reduced to a fraction of the viewing area.

@ JoePublic:  Good observation.  I did it as a quickie and chose 2 to brighten the render for posting.  I like your recommendation.  Must give it a try.  Thanks.

Okay, so it sounds like something you can turn down for test renders.  Thanks.

Thank you nancy, it was actually the IDL's irridance cache that was giving me problems.  I usually had it on 100 because I thought doing it all at once would be better.  Turns out not.

Turns out it looks best on 99 with a seperate pass and not on 100 for some reason.

WoW  thanks for all the Help.  I'll give it a shot and see what happens.

See no way to edit pre-post ...  I had IDL off :p  Thanks for all the help.  I wanted to experiment with making fluorecent tubes.

Setting the irradiance cache to 100% means don't use it. It means you want 100% accurate lighting, not interpolated at all via IC. Unfortunately, without interpolation (which smooths the variations) you get visible grain from the local per-pixel inaccuracy when you don't use enough samples to converge on the correct (and therefore consistent) value.

Bill, I really wish the manual would say stuff like that.  What you said makes a lot sense from what I can understand, but it's also counter-intuitive.  Most people (myself included because I was lazy) would think that 100% should produce better results than 99% because "how is this working on the inside isn't a question" a lot of people start with. 

I'll be honest, until Nancy mentioned it, it was one of the few render settings I didn't tinker with.  I was looking to other places to try and find out the cause and it never occured to me to turn down the cache.  

I was making a bad assumption because in a lot of cases, lowering a cache tends to hurts results.  So at least I know now that this one setting probably needs to be a little bit in the middle because I don't want to run 2k samples all the time.

All this not knowing what's happening under the hood has really been killing me in using poser and was an obstacle.  So I'm grateful for learning more.  The other day in chat for example, someone finally helped me with my mat room problem (when even SM's tech support couldn't, I tried it once).  Turns out leaving that Poser Surface preview on was what was causing all the lag I was seeing.

I guess I'll just have to learn when to start turning things off or turn them down.

     For the first sphere, give it a gentle ambient, about 0.5 to 0.75 or so.  High ambient will both white the ball out (except for primary colors - yours is apparently pure red) and make it lose depth (note that yours appears to be a flat silhouette).

     The second (slightly larger) sphere can have a high ambient.  Try a fairly rich but not pure red.  This sphere will be your unseen IDL emitter.  The trick is to set the properties of this sphere to not cast shadows and to not be visible in camera. See attached screen shot.

     Render with IDL enabled.