this scene was way overlit with 23 lights, so after watching Charles Taylor's tutorial on lighting, I started eliminating some got it down to about half that the preview looked pretty good so I tried a render...ach, Himmel, a mess.

why?

hugs,

drawn

here's render settings for thaT. I m surprise it is for firefly cause I thot the other, so rendered the same scene in superfly and render settings for thaT. big diff.

well, I learnt from that stick with super, but need to fix the lights more simply.

d

It's difficult to judge the lighting of a render by what the preview looks like. There's a limitation of 6 or 7 lights that can be displayed in the preview. Your best bet if you think you need a lot of lights is to do low-quality test renders on a small scale. even the 10 or so you mention seems excessive but it will depend on the look you're going for and how bright you have them

Your lights are still overpowering the scene.  You need to examine the intensity of each light and what is its contribution to the scene.  This is a theater set.  Expect the audience section to be shrouded in shadow while the stage is well-lit.  If you are simulating a well-lit room, determine what type of lights are appropriate to evenly illuminate the selected area.  You want to use down-pointing spotlights or area lights to achieve a better effect, and they should be of low intensity.  Too many lights can put a strain on your computer's resources.  Additionally, Poser can only display 6 active light sets at a time in Preview mode, all other lights will not be considered unless one of the original six is turned off.

And be sure that your spots and points lights have the correct setting:

thanks sb and Red, and Phil your signature pic is a real cutie, and I do not understand your spots and point light settings. what, for inst. is an inverse square in regards to ray trace shadows?

drawn

It has nothing to do with raytrace shadows.  Without getting into the specific scientific explanation, the inverse square law pertaining to lighting is a falloff of illumination with distance from a light source.  This can easily be demonstrated in Poser by placing a point light in a scene and changing its attenuation from Constant to Inverse Square.  Below are 2 renders: the first is a light source with constant attenuation at an intensity of 100%.

The second render is the same light source at the same intensity but with its attenuation set to Inverse Square.

As you can see, there is significant light falloff with distance in the second render, this is the typical behavior of realistic lighting.

Ahhah!thanks!