RedPhantom posted at 5:04 PM Sun, 30 April 2023 - #4463861

moogal posted at 4:12 PM Sun, 30 April 2023 - #4463858

The solution to this would be to be to draw the lights at a constant size, and have new lights always appear at the center of the scene. They seem to appear at random, and are sometimes so far outside of the camera view that by the time you've zoomed out enough to see them they are now to small to be visible.
There are so many things that we've gotten used to that no one seems to be reconsidering them any more... Wouldn't it be nice if you could e.g. select a bulb object and have an option to add a light in the center of that object? It might still need adjusted, but you wouldn't have to look for it or copy the position of the bulb to the light manually.

This behavior was changed in Poser 12. It's still slightly random, but much closer to the center now.

(Which reminds me of another issue I have with lights. Because they are not actually visible I need to place them inside of the casting object. Problem is if I make the bulb opaque the light is blocked, and if I turn off "cast shadows" for the entire lamp object then I get no shadows from the lamp socket/lamp post etc. This means every street lamp in my scene needs a separate child bulb object in addition to a child light. Pretty time consuming when you have 50 or so streetlamps in a scene. So it would also be nice to have some way of putting shadow casting lights inside objects without the object that is supposed to be emitting the light blocking it instead.)

If you want to put a light inside a modeled lamp, rather than just turning the lamp into a light, you would need to make the modeled lamp transparent, like in the real world. If you look at a real lightbulb, it is transparent, or at least translucent glass (or epoxy) with something glowing inside it, be it a filament, a form of gas, or a diode.

Yes, but you don't want the bulb to be transparent if it is to be the visible source of the light. What I do is turn shadow casting off for the bulb/globe. My complaint is that it has to be a separate object from the lighting fixture as I do want that casting shadows. I guess I just wish that objects simply did not cast shadows when the light was inside their volume as opposed to outside of it. Here I am using the edge blend on the ambient and transparency channels of the globes to give the appearance of a bulb within.