I would like to attach an image to a light, so as to create a throw pattern. In earlier versions of Poser this was straight forward, just attach a gray scale image to a spotlight and you got a nice pattern. In Poser 13, the same process has no effect. Can anyone please help?

Ok, I have to qualify this: It will work in Firefly but not Superfly.

It can work in Superfly, except you will need to place the image on a flat plane in front of the light source and reduce the scale of the light source.  I have done it but it is not easy.

Are you thinking to something this?

At the time of Poser8 and Firefly, I used to us this simple kind of setup

On a spot setup using Constant as attenuation parameter.

I've tried using Superfly but never got it to work, despite some Blender tutos on the subject, but there should be a way to do it, as it exists in real life (TV projectors).

Thanks for this, it's much appreciated. My intention was to animate a hypno black and white spiral. I was able to do it in firefly, but not superfly. Alas, when I spun the light around it's axis I assumed the image attached to the light would rotate as well, but this was not to be. So now I'm going to try what you suggested about attaching it to a hires plane in front of the light, and spin that.

Just an idea...
Imagine an image with a sort of spiral. During your animation, you replace your pic with an identical one with the spiral turned somewhat. For example:

- 10 seconds of animation

- 100 pics to compute, which means 10 pics by seconds, so that every 5 steps: replace the image with one whose spiral has turned a quarter turn. 

Your brain will probably decide for you that the spirale has turned 😁

Poser doesn't support that type of lighting in Superfly directly, like Blender does.

Parametric and normal light projection doesn't work the same way between Poser and Blender, not in the slightest actually... I have asked about that in the past.....

I have tried to figure out how to do light projection in Superfly and basically gave up on using a light to do so, Poser lights just don't support it.

There is a way that you can fake it, with varying success. Use a plane as the projection, that limits how far the light travels. Basically an emitter you can't see from a distance. The closer the plane is to the object, the better the light casts. Ray control is still an issue, simply because normal and parametric apply to light different in Poser.

Explanations on how to make emitters you can only see the projected light from a distance, and not the source, can be found here.

Read on for a page or two for more info on that.

https://www.renderosity.com/forums/comments/4468046/permalink

This has more info on it, but based on duplicating a point light. https://www.renderosity.com/forums/comments/4467644/permalink

Lol... not being as advanced a user as you are shvrdavid , it took me quite some time to understood what you were explaining.

Now I think that I've understood how to project a picture on a wall:

the "Chastity" picture is on a small square almost against the back wall:

Using this material setting

That's fine if you are using a rear projection and that method looks very cool.  What the OP asking if it is possible for the light source to project an image or pattern with Superfly rendering.  The answer is no.  But you can embed an image onto a flat plane and use a small spotlight source to project the image unto a wall or floor.

Light projection.  Set up below.

Material Room.

It's possible to put a plane in front of your light, and give it colored transparency, so you get a projected image. But getting the shader and the light intensity and the relative positioning all correct at once is very tricky when any one of those things ruins the whole effect and you don't know which one you've got wrong. Also, you need to make an enclosure around the light and plane so there's no leakage to the side, and there isn't a hollow tube primitive. So you need to make one side of the enclosure transparent which requires a trans map.

It would be nice if there was a prop in the library with a complete gobo setup, with all the correct spacing and all you had to do was load your image. I've struggled with it a few times and never been satisfied.

The bat signal is the easy version, because there's no color and the light bleed around the outside is intentional.

The problem with using a plane to do the light like a gel, is that Superfly is a ray trace engine. Firefly is a rasterization engine which works backwards and differently at the same time, as to how ray tracing works, as far as light is concerned.

In a rasterization engine, the light goes out the light, to the object, to the camera. Which makes it fairly easy to control light with gels, etc. Gels literally limit where the light can go in a rasterization engine as soon as it passes thru the gel, or exits a spot light that is a gel in itself. But that is not the case with a ray tracing engine. To a point....

A ray trace engine looks out of the camera, finding a lit surface that uses global illumination and the lighting it finds is entirely controlled by the number of samples you set in the render engine, not by the light itself. I know that sounds odd, but that is how works. Do a superfly render with one bounce and see what you get versus 60 in a fully enclosed scene and see... You never touched the light, and it will be lit very differently from 1 to 60 bounces.... Same lights thou....

As you add render samples to a path tracing engine, it not only adds bounces, it adds to where it bounces based on output of the camera, the shaders, and angles it encounters, caustics, etc. Basically what this all comes down to with a gel light. Is that the more samples you use, the less effective the gel setup is due to bounces and scattering off of objects and shaders. Caustics just adds far more chaos to that bouncing..... Worse yet, we can't control the light exit direction of any light. Say to make the all parallel paths..... Even if you put it in a tube that only one end is open, it will still bounce around and exit the tube in a cone.

What the engine sees thru the camera, is based on the number of samples. But what left the light is not controllable, path wise, very well at all...

The method I showed can project a light source in Superfly, but it has to be very close to what it projects on or it washes out rather quickly, based on render settings, shaders, etc.

You can add to what I did by limiting the number of bounces on materials in your scene, but that gets very complex, very quickly. 

The only options we presently have to control light as far as its path, is what is in the Lightpath node, and what you can do with vector math to change some other things. Blender Cycles has additional ways of controlling the light. It even has sort of a rasterization fall back to mimic rasterization light control. And now the newest version of Cycles has Path Guiding controls as well.

Using my light setup you can project light onto a scene from the plane itself. No other light is required for it to work, and it doesn't depend on other light or gel either either. It is basically just a custom area light when you use the shader on a plane. Use it on a sphere and it is a point light.. But the scene has to be set up properly for them to work, and the distance cutoff for the ray length is crucial as to getting it to look right and not show up directly in the cameras view. You don't want to see the source, only what is was shining on.

Remember, at the end of the day, it is all in the illusion.......

It's not entirely true that Poser lights can't project an image in SuperFly. Don't get too excited though... It handles coordinates in light shaders very differently than Firefly does.

Firefly light shaders map UV coordinates over the light's area, regardless of the light's type. That made applying textures and shaders to lights fairly intuitive. What you get in the preview is basically what you'd get from the light.

As far as I can tell, lights in SuperFly can only use world-space normal vectors.

That can be used to drive an EnvironmentTexture node and project an image. The downside is that light normals are stuck in world space, which means the texture map is stuck in place regardless of which why the light is pointed. Point a spot light up, it protects the top of the image; point it down and it projects the bottom. The middle of the image will stay in the exact same point on the wall.

The same setup can be used with a point light, only the light orientation has no effect at all. The image can be manually aimed with a vector Mapping node, though that's hardly convenient. And the orientation displayed in the texture node preview isn't what you'll get either. The actual output is flipped and rotated backwards. As for the other types of lights, they only give single normal value and are useless for image projection.

[My apologies for the weird display. I got a new monitor and Poser's UI scaling doesn't seem to work correctly...at all.]

While light shaders and textures in SuperFly are less practical than they were in Firefly, I just wanted to set the record straight in case someone might find the info useful in some way.

One case where I do find Superfly's quirky lights useful is protecting a light or shadow from a specific part of the environment map. Flip the Mapping vertically by setting the second Scale value to -1, then position and aim the light where the light/shadow in the image would be cast from. In my experience, this gives a more defined light/shadow projection than using an environment sphere by itself.

The sun is partially obscured by trees In the environment texture. However, the lighting is too defuse to get a defined shadow. To emphasize the shadows cast by the trees from above, I used the environment texture in the shader above with a spot light. I'd previously done the same effect in Firefly by fiddling with the image scale and offsets to get the shadow of the tree limbs, but I actually found doing it in SuperFly to be easier.

Not exactly easy, just easier.