Over the past few years I've watched every lighting-related video tutorial Rendo and SM have made available and STILL CAN'T get the lights to do what I want! I have a fairly solid grasp on what each type of light offers and light most of my scenes with a combination of infinite, spot and area lights. I've tried various Poser-supplied HDR Sphere and basic light sets, as well as the standard multi-light combos Poser loads with each new scene -- but none of them give me the control I need over shadow to create mood or drama in a scene. I also only render in Firefly, and avoid SSS mats as much as possible; shiny skin without texture on people -- unless they just had oil poured over them -- looks gross to me.

With all that said, here is the problem: It is very difficult for me to get the lighting I need in an indoor space when the lights appear to be located outside hundreds of feet away! I have to use the Top camera view, zoomed-out hundreds of feet above the building, to see the lights at all. If I drag them back into the room I'm trying to light and then make any adjustment to the pins on the light control ball, these lights instantly snap back outside again. The main problem with that is from that far away, the lights cast shadows in the scene from invisible objects in their path that don't relate to objects in the scene -- even though I meticulously remove all walls, ceilings and other visible or selectable items in the path, including things only visible during rendering.

Why can't I just have the lights I create be located in the same room as the scene -- like in the REAL world? Also, it would sure be nice to be able to quickly see the lights without zooming out from above... Thanks in advance for any advice you guys can share!

you can select the parameters panel, set the xTran / yTran / zTran

parameters to whatever you need them to be ( e.g. 0,0,0 )

( even on infinite lights( this may require you to show hidden dials ) )

Now. I can't say I'm the best person to give lighting advice, because lighting is my weakest area, but I'm going to anyhow because I do a lot of indoor scenes. When lighting inside, I never use an infinite light. That seems to be good for outdoor scenes as a sun or a portrait scene that just has a backdrop.

For indoors, I use mostly point lights with some area lights. I always forget about spotlights. To position a light, I never use the pins. That thing makes no sense to me. I will hide everything that I don't need to place the light and switch to the wireframe. I will use 2 viewports (display>camera layout), one from the top and one from the left or front and either drag the light into position or use the dials.

Thanks for your replies, guys!

Structure: I will try the XYZ Trans dials to see if that helps; I think I've have tried them before and gave up because of how many spins it took to get anywhere. I'm still confused why Poser puts lights so far away, though.

RedPhantom: I'll try dragging the lights in wireframe and see if that simplifies things.

Script option: There is a free "SnapTo" script to... "Move currently selected object to clicked location". This can be found via a Google search for "Ockham's python". This Python script is easy to use and may be of help here.

Config possibility: As for the lights leaping far away when tweaking their dials, that sounds like the dials are way to sensitive for some reason. I'm fairly sure I recall in an old Smith Micro webinar, where the tutor showed how to ramp up or damp down the sensitivity of any Poser dial - can anyone give advice on how exactly to do that? Is it in settings, or does one hold down a key when moving the dial?

This might be what you want, a thread on adjusting dial sensitivity... https://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/?thread_id=2914723

"Snarlygribbly's Scene Fixer Python script - [dead link cut]. When you run it - select the second option - Dials - then select all the dials you want to change the sensitivity on - input the new sensitivity value - tick the box and click apply. All done - rerun the script to reverse the settings"

The post's link for the Scene Fixer script is dead, but it can now be found at http://snarlygribbly.org/poser/ - and a post here from 2019 suggests it works fine on Poser 11.

Thanks HartyBart - I'll look into those things. :-)

Psych2 posted at 11:54PM Wed, 12 August 2020 - #4396709

Thanks for your replies, guys!

Structure: I will try the XYZ Trans dials to see if that helps; I think I've have tried them before and gave up because of how many spins it took to get anywhere. I'm still confused why Poser puts lights so far away, though.

You can type the numbers in - you do not have to spin the dials - simply click on the number associated with the dial and type in the values you want.

Dial sensitivity. Click the white arrow to the right of the dial you want to adjust. Choose settings. There's a dial sensitivity box. Higher values are more sensitive. Low values less. A standard for a low sensitivity dial is 0.004, a reasonably fast dial standard is 0.02

You can also find the dial settings inside the various Poser files as trackingScale entries.

One thing that occurred to me, re: the initial problem - the user might have dials at normal settings, but the rooms/architecture may have been imported into Poser at the wrong scale, and then the camera strongly adjusted to compensate and get a view. That might make then make light dials with normal settings seem as though they were hyper-sensitive.