Wow again! Absolutely Fantastic! For one thing, I had no idea that I could animate a value like that and have it show up on the main parameter;/properties panel. (Which I then promptly dropped onto my opening scene's Custom Parameter Palette!)

Oddly enough, back in my previous Poser experience some 20 years ago, I never played with learning anything at all about the material room. Mostly I built things. This is amazing stuff to me and I love it.

Thank you. Very much.

Okay!! Wow! The "Does Not Render" set of lights is very cool. And there's a bit I don't understand. Shadows off makes sense, and diffused and specular set to black sounds intuitive, but what does it do where Color, set to white, is connected to a Simple Color node of black? It seems like that's got to be where the Major Magic happens and I obviously do not understand the consequences of that connection. Somehow that makes it shine white in preview and black when rendered?

Back to Blackbody node. Are we talking physics? Are you creating a blackbody by, hmm, maybe setting intensity negative? Something else? And how does it help? Wanna play with it and see for myself!

Downloaded. Thank you very much! Those preview work lights sound great!

I'm not familiar with the notion of a Blackbody node. Is that something in the studio lighting that I just downloaded? Or is it something else?

One of the things I am is a retired studio owner and portrait photograher. Lights, cameras, softboxes, all that stuff. And I'm very much a lighting nut. So if Blackbody nodes give you a more realistic rendering, then I defnitely want to hear more!

Ah, what I misunderstood was that you meant using IBL, well, as an IBL. As Just A Stupid Light, it works. As an IBL, not so much. Agreed. And, yes, I did understand that. I do occassionally find it useful as Just A Stupid Light, definitely for lighting a preview, and even, very rarely, as a light in the final render. Otherwise I don't use IBL as an IBL, probably because I always use Superfly.

And hopefully though I've explained that my post about using CPP to control my lights is not particularly related to the issue of IBL. Ya don't want IBL, don't drop the dials onto the CPP.

hborre -- Great Tip about Light Falloff! I will be using that!

I did not explain this well. It's about using Custom Parameter Palettes to group controls and, to my chagrin, is pretty much covered in the manual. 

First create a CPP (WIndow>Custom Parameter Palette>New) and get: 

Now select, say, the spotlight in my scene 

Drag the Spotlight's Intensity dial and drop it onto the CPP 

Repeats as wished to add other dials. In my case I added a bunch of dials from several lights.

The CPP stays open and visible regardless of what is currently selected. And, as I did it, it puts all my wanted light dials in one place, always available.

Adding On/Off and Intensity Multiplier dials is a touch trickier and requires first creating the dial on, say, one of the lights, configuring it, and then dragging *that* dial over to the CPP.

That's it. Has nothing to do with IBL, which, btw, works fine with Superfly. I use IBL frequently to temporarily light up a scene so I can see things better for posing, and then I do occassionally forget to turn it off again before rendering.

Rendered with IBL off 

Rendered with IBL on 

Both using Superfly

Boy, do I feel stupid. Well, ignorant. Like a newbie, ya ken?

All this work on wiring together a bunch of parameters via the panel of a Group, and all I needed to do was to take a fresh look at Custom Parameter Palettes. I was heavy into Poser some 20 years ago, and then circumstances happened and I didn't touch it At All for 20 years. But this stuff is way beyond what I worked with back then. Anyway, here's the Custom Parameter Palette I've put together. And they're so easy to setup!! Also discovered that you can edit the pz3 file in notepad (or whatever) and change the name. This one has been renamed to Lighting Palette. The on/off and the intensity multiplier are the only ones that are more complicated than drag/drop of a dial onto the palette.

The on/off ones have a range of 0 to 1 with a min of zero and a max of one and a sensitivity of one and Force Limits checked, turning it into the logical equivalent of a checkbox. Then the intensity of My Light has a Value Operation added which multiplies its value by the value of the on/off dial with a scaling factor of one. This allows for the light to be turned on or off without affecting any of the other values impacting intensity, so, effectively, the intensity settings are remembered across on/off actions. I thought this was clever, but I'm imagining that everyone already knew all about this. My wife tells me I was the last person on the planet to see Lion King, so, you know, I have a record of being behind the curve occassionally.

Still haven't installed Sasha, but I'm definitely getting glimpses of ways to accomplish the eye thing.

The Lighting Palette:

(actually, I go back to the IBM 7094 and the IBM 1401, both prior to the 360)

Thank you, Y-Phil. I will have a look! But I will probably put it off for a bit while I finish wiring this monster:

You'll notice that some dials aren't wired yet, and even more are missing under Middle and Right Light. And -- I don't even have an intended use for it. It just caught my attention as a "bet I could" idea. This after finally having a light turn on about dependencies and master parameters (thanks guys!).

I do have a wild guess about Sasha though. My wild guess is that it's done by adding Value Ops to the Value Operations tab in the Edit Dependencies tab.

Ah, yes. I'd quite forgotten. Right. I programmed that 360 with punch cards, natch. And -- we had a machine, maybe about the size of a small food freezer for the garage, as I recall, and we called it The Duplicator, although, in truth, it only duplicated a deck of cards because of the magic programming on the wiring board, which I did *not* know how to do. But I do recall being told that it could do other things. Sort, I think. Renumber maybe. But I defnitely remembered that the magic was in that wiring board.

Burning sage did the trick. Reading the Poser manual a bit didn't hurt either. Ever since the dark ages of IBM 360 mainframes, I have learned by exploring, asking, and reading. In that order. Yeah, I probably had some looping recursion or something along those lines. I was toying with it, ya know? Had no clue what all the levers and dials and knobs did but -- oh my. Bright and shiny.

I still don't know what I did to make some of them snap into place rather than move smoothly, but I think I'm good not knowing. I figured out how to coordinate stuff which is what I started out trying to figure out.

As for Sasha-16, well, yeah, that sounds a bit strange. I don't own Sasha, so I can't explore that mystery, but it does sound quite curious. I wonder how the dials are wired together to get that effect.

That's it!!! When I look at the parameters for the target, I see  and there's my ,004. Now for some code adjustments. Thank you again!

<a bulb goes on>
Thank you. That was probably exactly the insight I needed. I shall go futz with that and see where I get.

Thanks for the information, but, actually, str is not a protected keyword and can definitely be used as a variable name. I've downloaded code from this forum which uses it as a variable name, as does much of my derived code. The issue was a typo a line or so earlier, such that I was referencing a null object in the line which was assigning a value to str.

I get a lot of milage by setting up an object's materials like this, below, and then adjusting Emission, Color, and especially EmissionStrength. Also following is an example of using this for getting light from a Wall Lamp. You can get a starting setup by copying it from the Wall Lamp (looks like this one!) and editing its materials. You'd probably want EmissionStrength a lot lower. Oh, and make sure that the Properties of object has Light Emitter checked.