Quote - > Quote - samhal - Why do the shadow cams not work for you?

Whichway

Howdy Whichway!

Well because unless I'm doing something very wrong, they're nothing but cameras. Let me explain.

I can switch to Shadow Cam 1,  and I don't see where you are looking thu the light. I can rotate around until I find the light, any light, but that's looking thru it unless I come up on it. Matter of fact, if you rotate the Shadow Cam 1, and switch to the Main Camera, it's exactly the same...unless like I said, I'm missing something somewhere.

What I'd like is something akin to C4D. It's called Link Active Object. When you look thru a light, you look thru the light. Any movement affect the lights position directly, totally independent of anything else in the scene.

Hope I explained that right.

I know exactly what you mean. I've had the same problem, since I use Shadow Cams, but only now and then so I tend to forget how to display the cam view.

Here's the trick: You have to select the Shadow cam from the viewport. Right-click in the upper left corner of the viewport, on the name of the view (e.g. "Main Camera"). From the drop down menu that appears, just select the light that you want to view through.

Believe it or not, this is actually a good thing since it allows you to have the light selected while viewing though the shadow light cam. You'll need this because it's the lights' parameters that control the position and direction of the light, not the Shadow Lite Cam parameter's. (Those mainly control the near and far clipping of the shadows, but that's another story.)

I typically use the Shadow Lite Cam to help position spotlights on figures, say to highlight a face, or to help see how a shadow will fall.

Stefan has a great site with much useful information about Poser and the FireFly renderer. Check out http://www.keindesign.de/stefan/poser/firefaq.html#1 - there are a couple of tricks to increase renderspeed there.

This is wierd ... I could access the page and download it alright from my desktop computer, but I get the error when trying from my laptop. Both run Internet Explorer and use the same internet connection.

The problem was that I had Displacement turned off in the render settings - Duh! Your page put me on the right path, Stefan. Thanks a lot! You're my new best friend! ;-) Besides, it contains a wealth of useful info on the FireFly renderer. Such as what the totally undocumented (not a word of mention in the SR3 Release Notes) Probelight node is and how to use it. I've tried using it a couple of times, but it had me completely baffled. Until now. So, thanks a lot for sharing the tutorials and explanations on your webpage!

Yeah, I've had that too, but that's not the case here. For this particular piece (LM Stormguards outfit bought at DAZ) there's MAT presets, and like you can see the right side appears normal. Also it often, but not always, seems to be appearing on only one side. It's the same texture & bumpmap, so it must be Poser's renderer that treats on half of the texture/bump differently.