Hi all: having a serious case of Friday; was trying for like several hours now to create a light and put it inside a prop so it's lit from within. Nothing seems to work. I am in Poser 13, and this should be simple but am either not using the manual right (yes, I am reading the manual regularly, still) or having a very acute case of no-brain.

HOW do you grab a light (and is it a point of a spot?) and put it INSIDE an object?? What parameters should I pay attention to? Why is this so hard suddenly?

I feel your pain. Whenever I try something like that, I want to pull my remaining hair out. And here I thought that was just me because I hate reading manuals.

Oh, lordy, if it's not just me, there must be a secret. WHO will spill?

Get the coordinates of the object you want to insert the light and translate those coordinates into the light.  Enlarge the light so that it's more visible.  Change the light to an Object Style and give it a different shader texture other than a wireframe.

I've asked on Slack and they were wondering if you might upload an example of your set up Rae!

What exactly is your problem? Is it aligning the light into the object, or is it making the object act as a shade?  

The problem is having the lights in the objects, that is, the whole process of dragging the lights inside a thing.

I have a helmet. It has gems on it. The gems should be having their own fire due to their magical qualities (yeah, yeah, Silmarils, I know). So I need to have wee lights inside the gemstone, but for the life of me I can't do that. If I do the 'point at lights', they lit up the scene too much. If I drag lights, they either disappear or not go where I want them to go at all. I haven't tried the suggestion from hborre above.

I must be dense, @hborre, really. When you say 'coordinates of the object', do you mean the x, y, z position? Because if I type those into the light coordinates, it ends up in a completely different place from the object, so I am confused.

You have more than a few options for doing this.

First off, do you really need a light to do what you want to do? Do you want the object to glow, or glow and light the room? Because that makes a huge difference when trying to do it with a light.

Do you actually need a light, or do you want a shader to fake more than one thing at once?

Let me give you an example of what I mean. Here is a very simple way to make something, transparent, an emitter, and not blow out the light on the actual object.

This example is in Superfly.

Notice that the room is lit entirely by the object, the sphere is transparent, and the light it emits is not present on the surface of the object, blowing it out. You can change the factor settings to adjust the transparency or translucence, or both at the same time. And you can control this with textures if you want a different look, but the entire trick to this is the lightpath node hiding the emission on the sphere from the camera. The sphere appears to be lit from the inside, but there isn't a light in it, and it is casting bright light into the room, that is not visible on the object.....

No additional light to move around, all done with one object.

To go one step further, you can duplicate the sphere, scale it down, adjust y height to center it, and then you have a second object that can appear to be a light inside it... Obviously the inner sphere could use a far simpler shader as well. or just use the same one set up differently.....

Yep, I am working in Superfly. I will give this a whirl so I understand and save the shader for sure--thank you.  But here is the thing: I am working with gems that shine from within, and, the diamondish/glass shader on them must remain so they look like gems, if you know what I mean.

So I need something that literally lights it from within--not the material itself unless you can make a diamond/ dispersion glass shader an emitter.

Now I am absolutely not a shader guru but I sort of futz around in the material room; with the shaders I have from VinceBagna and D3D for diamond/ heavy dispersion glass, I did not find a way to make them emitters as well.

You could easily make the shader I posted into a gem shader by changing the translucent part of the shader to a glass shader.

You don't have to be a shader guru. The more you play around with it, the better you will get at it.

Learning shaders like the Lightpath shader will allow you to do things that defy the common rules of PBR. And surpass anything a Monte Carlo based engine like Firefly, ever dreamed of pulling off.

As shvrdavid said, you can adapt the shader to emit light.

If you really want a light inside the gem, load a point light. Shrink it to be smaller than the gem. use the front view camera to line it up with the gem from that angle. Then use the side (left or right) view camera to line it up from that angle. You might want to set the gem to outline or wireframe so you can see the light easier. I also often use frame selected object (with the light selected) to get a close-up of it. Then parent the light to the gem to move them around.

The problem is having the lights in the objects, that is, the whole process of dragging the lights inside a thing.

If you give the light xyz position 0,0,0 where does it go? 

If you give the helmet xyz position 0,0,0 where does it go? 

Are the objects at scale 100%?

I just tried to replace the translucent node with a diamond shader. Not sure what I am doing wrong but this is what I get instead of pure light:

Shader on gem with Diamond shader instead of the translucentBSDF:

It seems that Point light in Poser 13 are having an issue and could not be used in superfly. The setup Rhia474 would be trying to do would end up wrong as Light in a object as the " Dist End " can't be set ! It seems having no effect when changing the distances and acts like a Infinite Light in superfly. Either it is a error in Poser or Point lights are not supposed to be working in superfly. In Firefly they work as they should.

If using this Point light system in a gem like you plan it would light up the whole environment when rendering with superfly. Someone might check the Point lights Dist End to confirm that issue, else it is just on my side and ignore my comment.

Yeah, RedPhantom, your method works best with the point light and lining it up as you described--thank you so much. I changed the display to cartoon for it to be visible, and changed the shader back to a diamond shader. It's SUCH a pain moving lights in Poser, you'd think there are some better methods.

It seems that Point light in Poser 13 are having an issue and could not be used in superfly. The setup Rhia474 would be trying to do would end up wrong as Light in a object as the " Dist End " can't be set ! It seems having no effect when changing the distances and acts like a Infinite Light in superfly. Either it is a error in Poser or Point lights are not supposed to be working in superfly. In Firefly they work as they should.

If using this Point light system in a gem like you plan it would light up the whole environment when rendering with superfly. Someone might check the Point lights Dist End to confirm that issue, else it is just on my side and ignore my comment.

Yeah, I was freaking out but it is getting to where I am semi-happy with what I'm getting. Just a bit more tweaking of the position of the jewels and adding some effects, probably.

Much thank yous, everyone.

Yeah, I was freaking out but it is getting to where I am semi-happy with what I'm getting. Just a bit more tweaking of the position of the jewels and adding some effects, probably.

Much thank yous, everyone.

Um, can you just add emission to the crystals ?? Via Cycles or super-ambient ??

I faked such by adding a small 'primitive' cube' to the whatsit I wanted glowing, moved it inside the whatsit, parented so it tracked...

the method shown above for adding emission and then adding the diamond material (as suggested by shvrdavid) did not work for me. the point light addition and positioning as described did. by the time you add the cube, position it, modify the material, you may as well just used a light, I think?

we are all different. this is not a superrealistic render, it's fantasy.

Others have mentioned that Cycles can not do Firefly style lighting, which is not the case.

Learn the light path node..... You can use a prop to duplicate the Firefly point light in Superfly, and get the same results.

The other styles of light falloff can be done even thou we don't have the lightfalloff node to do so in Superfly easily.

Completely adjustable, just like in Cycles. This is using a ball prop, scaled to 10%, just off to the right in the scene.

This is constant falloff shader, which is very simple to set up and makes it easy to do in Superfly.

This can be added into any emitter shader, and terminate the light at whatever distance from the source you see fit, Or even terminate it after X number of bounces by using ray depth....

Actually, we do have the lightfalloff node, apparently I forgot they added that, lol

That makes it super easy to do all the Firefly lights....

You just caught yourself.  I was going to comment that the Lightfalloff node does exist, I use it most of the time.

Hm, again, I am not sure what I am doing wrong, or what units you're using that I am not, lol, but when I add that material to a ball prop at 10 percent large and position it the way you do, I don't get any light on my scene, just a big black screen.

Sigh. I am not very good at this, am I?

Increase Value 2 in the math node until the light hits what you want it too. I am not sure what the value is (as far as mm, inches, poser units). So it will take some experimenting.

Value 2 is the distance the light travels, and you can bet that things like scaling affect it.

And as far as Poser having a lightfalloff node. Poser does indeed have one. But it is a bit different than the one in Cycles. You can not properly attach it to a lights, because it already is part of it in the background, and it works very oddly on props.... The Smooth function in Superfly works on a miniscule scale compared to what it does in Cycles. 

It would really help if we had a live Cycles preview to see what your doing when messing with settings like these....

This is the difference between the proposed light shader and the one I conjured up with the LightFalloff node.

I would like users, in their spare time, to play with both setups and determine on their own which arrangement may fit their needs.  There are too many permutations to demonstrate here, but I will give you my assessment of the difference between the two shaders.  Shvrdavid gives a convincing demonstration and it works fine, except there are finite limitations with the math.  It is stated that Value2 controls the distance of the ray length and it works well to an extent.  The higher the value, the more far-reaching the light ray.  However, notice that this math node is attached to the Factor connector of the MixClosure Node which in turn is connected to Emission and TransparentBsdf nodes.  The TransparentBsdf node controls the transparency of the object emitting light, may it be a ball, cube, cylinder, etc, thus hiding it in the scene.  The Factor range limit value is 0 to 1.  The Math node does a fine job controlling the value ranges for the Factor keeping the object invisible, however, when the Math node Value2 is increased to 7 and beyond, the TransparentBsdf node is triggered off and the object appears in the scene.  If primitives are off-camera, there are no rendering issues, but if there are intentions to light the furthest distance with the emitting primitive on-camera then it will appear.  In this particular case, it would be advisable to uncheck the Visible In Camera box of the object under Properties to avoid this annoyance.

Your material works fine when I try it, just need to adjust settings because it blows out everything at the strength you show.  It gives a pretty constant light, but the effect is entirely different form what shrvdavid shows, imo.

Shvrdavid's material works but I had to remove any background except a black background prop. Even then, the effect if far from the point light soft glow he shows above, so am not sure what background he was using (construct?), if any.

Ball prop at 10%, with his material, math value2 at 0.3, this is what I get:

hborre's material on ball prop, again 10% size, strength at 30 instead of 200:

Interesting techniques and I saved the materials for sure, but I can't get the subtle point light effect described.

A-HA! It's supposed to be an empty scene when I tell it to be an empty scene, right?? Yet apparently there IS a ground that I STILL have to hide even though the scene was told to be empty without anything in it. ARGH!

Ctrl+G then render with nothing but black background prop, no light and 10% ball prop with hborre's mat on it produces nice soft pointlight effect.

Same with shrvdavid's shader on it:

I wish the ground behavior was consistent ie. if I tell the chooser I want an empty scene it would give me just that ie. a completely empty scene.

On the LightFalloff node, the Quadratic channel is your Inverse Square, a typical feature found in most of the light sets.  The Linear and Constant channels will deliver a full blast of light like an exploding sun.  Whenever I use this for node arrangement with emitting objects, I attach a Blackbody node to the Color channel of the Emission node to simulate different types of lighting from candlelight to incandescent through LED to mid- to late morning/afternoon.  In some cases, the tint is very slight but more realistic than faking a color chip.

You seem to have missed the point of my light setup, and I did not explain some very important features... 

Most people do single frame renders, but these work for something else as well.

Have you ever done lighting in an old game engine that fakes GI with a ton of point lights?

What happens when you pan out in the preview engine? Or turn a corner into a long section of the map?

Yep, you see hundreds of white blobs, everywhere... You might be able to see part of the scene thru all those lights, but probably not.....

Panning back just a little.... Darn, I still see 2 lights.... I could alter the settings and position, and you would never see them in that camera path.

You can still see two lights in this render, which obviously are not blocking anything in this scene because they are small and there is nothing behind them to block....

Pan back a bit more more? 

Poof, nothing is blocked by any white blobs. It would be far worse with a big soft light, like a huge area light.... 

One light could block the whole screen and since I can't preview this, I might get a white render of lights....

Now look at the floor in the last render, how many lights are there? There are more than 2 shadows, far more... Where are all the lights?

All the prop lights here are using my magical disappearing light shader.... The one I shared without writing a book on what it is actually capable of...

Your simple shader will work well for many things, and I sometimes use that exact same setup. And there is nothing wrong with that, if that is what your after.

Mine works for others, like seeing what your actually doing from a distance, versus white everywhere..... (still praying for a live GPU or Embree preview in Poser)

You can unplug the transparency from my shader, and the light part remains unchanged, except for the transparency toggle, and other functions you didn't think about......

Many light path options above Ray Length are turned on when you back away, without ever using them..... The Ray Length is doing multiple light path functions and one transparency, with one transparency node.... Make the light transparent, you don't have to render many of the other light paths from a visible light......

There is a method to my madness.....

And in this case, it came from designing game levels, hiding the lights, and not killing the system by forcing it to render things you will never see...

It works perfectly in Superfly too..... Could you tell there are no reflections (or any other light path things that should be there if you could see the lights) in second render?

Probably not, and you don't need to waste time rendering them at that distance either. Both those renders took mere seconds on a RTX 2060. 

People should use whatever setup that works for them, no argument there. But you missed a few things about my shader.....

This turns my shader into both shaders shown above, accept for the fact it does Blackbody. The first one I did gives normal Lambertian emissions light, using the default Cycles emission falloff. This one is BlackBody color based, plus the magic trick of disappearing... You can add the lightfalloff node to my original shader posted and use the other 3 types as well. And yes, there are more than 3 types of light falloff in Cycles.....

Ah, now I see the method to your madness.  Actually well done, definitely something to revisit in the near future.

And thank you for sharing your knowledge.

The only problem with knowledge at this age, is remembering it.......

shvrdavid posted at 11:54 PM Mon, 12 June 2023 - #4467775

The only problem with knowledge at this age, is remembering it.......

I tend to... to what? ur.. oh yes: to agree 

Just to add to this, I put in an enhancement request for the Map Range Node to be added to Superfly.

That node converts 0-1 to whatever range you want, using different curves. (Linear, Stepped linear, Smooth Step, and Smoother Step for those that don't use Cycles in Blender)

Remember me mentioning other falloffs, you make those other falloffs with either a Map Range node, a color ramp, or a combination of both.....

The Map Range node can be used for many things from lighting to procedural textures, and would be a welcome addition to Poser. It should not be that hard to implement, because it is just a standard node UI wise, so it would only require coding it in.

Just go give some examples of what you can do with it. Circular masks for lighting, procedural textures, etc. It can also be used as a form of color ramp node too....

You can do Infinite falloff adjustment with it and in some ways it makes the lightfalloff node completely obsolete and allows for infinite adjustability.

Think about lighting under water which doesn't follow any of the 4 default versions of light fall off available in Superfly. (Cycles Emissions, Quadratic, Linear, and Constant)

We presently have no way of easily doing light falloff in water in Poser because we are fixed to 4 preset falloff options, unless you go node crazy doing things like the Map Range and color ramp the long way, and it is a very long way......

The way light acts in water is called Light Loss and a few other similar names if you want to look it up.

This is all Rhia's fault you know. Posted a question and then I realized we were missing a very important and useful node in Superfly when playing around with lighting.

A few other jogged my old memory as well. 

One of the reasons I forgot about the lightfalloff node in Poser for a bit, is that I don't really need or use it much in Cycles.... I use a Map Range Node, more often than not.......

It is usually my fault, I make people think by asking questions and then testing stuff out and asking more dumb blonde questions. That's me.

(Also, this is now my favorite shop in the Cita..  I mean, fave thread on the forum) :) 

Rhia474 posted at 3:49 PM Tue, 13 June 2023 - #4467844

It is usually my fault, I make people think by asking questions and then testing stuff out and asking more dumb blonde questions. That's me.

I would love for Poser to have a way to add nodes. But that is not so cut and dry to do.

True, alas

In the past I have found the easiest way to do this is create the light, parent it to the object. Then Zero all the rotations and transformations. This places the light close to the object, but more importantly the axis of the object and light are aligned so the light if moved, moves correctly along the objects  x y or z axis, rather than the axis it started with.

This also applies to anything that needs to be aligned correctly , I use this method a lot for reusing hair made for different characters.

cedub53 posted at 11:11 PM Thu, 22 June 2023 - #4468458

In the past I have found the easiest way to do this is create the light, parent it to the object. Then Zero all the rotations and transformations. This places the light close to the object, but more importantly the axis of the object and light are aligned so the light if moved, moves correctly along the objects  x y or z axis, rather than the axis it started with.

This also applies to anything that needs to be aligned correctly , I use this method a lot for reusing hair made for different characters.