Cyberdene posted at 1:26AM Tue, 10 October 2017 - #4315667

Boni posted at 1:57PM Mon, 09 October 2017 - #4315662

First question always is: what version of poser do you have? If you have P11 or I believe P9-10 as well you can crank up the ambient (white) in the window texture for the buildings to 10-20 (making sure properties has "emit light" ticked. Drawback is you will need a higher render setting and a longer render time to avoid the "fireflies" if you are using Superfly (P11/PP11).

If it means I can get those effects? I don't even care about the long render times lol it would be worth it. Plus I am using Poser Pro 2012 so yeah I always leave Emit Lights turned on objects that have lights. I only turn it off on my figures, because it's weird having that ticked on for the figures or other objects that I don't want to have lights emitting off of. I just never really noticed the difference, so I'll try what you just suggested. Thank you.

The light emitter tick-box actually means "participates in reflected light bounce calculations", but SM needed a short label for the UI. Don't un-tick it for dolls. Occasionally it saves render time to un-tick it for transmapped hair - at a cost in lighting accuracy.

As for render engines, consider P11 or P11Pro for the Superfly render engine; Superfly is an adaptation of Blender's Cycles Physics-based renderer. It is easy to make things mesh lights in Superfly: Superfly materials for Dystopia

If you are using someone else's model and don't have the ability to cobble up some parts yourself, then you could resort to increasing the windows' color saturation and giving them high ambient. Saturating the color delays the "white-out" caused by using high ambient. When rendering, engage indirect lighting, and use 67% or so for both the irradiance cache and the indirect light quality. Use at least 4 raytrace bounces. The problem is that the apparent brightness will be high, but the lightcasting will be weak - apparent brightness and lightcasting response are mismatched; that's why I don't simply jack up the ambient.

If you can use a modeler program a little, then select the windows, and duplicate them (retaining UV mapping and material zones). Move the new window polys outward slightly, so that they cover the original windows (not share the same space). These new window polys will be your emitters. Import the new emitters into Poser, and parent them to the building model. Set the emitter properties to not cast shadows. Set the emitter properties to be not visible in camera. Apply the same material from the original windows to the emitters, but jack up the ambient (maybe 15?).

Poser 12, in feet.  

OSes:  Win7Prox64, Win7Ultx64

Silo Pro 2.5.6 64bit, Vue Infinite 2014.7, Genetica 4.0 Studio, UV Mapper Pro, UV Layout Pro, PhotoImpact X3, GIF Animator 5