If anyone is interested, and I know some people have to be because I've been asked this one, I'd like to take a moment to explain how to set up the blades on my lightsabres and the flames of my fireprops (of which I will soon have several for sale on DAZ, so they figure prominently in this explanation). This also applies to magick stuff and pretty much anything I make that glows, which I guess I have a penchant for. In Poser 4, the blades work because the strength of the ambience is taken from the lumnosity of the ambient colour. If you use white, the abient strength is 100%, if you use something that has a luminosity of 120 according to Windows (50% -- I don't know why that's not 128, go figure) you will get a strength equivalent to 50%. Black has a strength of 0. In Poser 5, the strength is set seperately. If you render my blades as-is, you will get a murky slightly-glowing colour that doesn't look at all like a lightsabre blade. Set the ambience to 1 (100%, all the way up in other words), and my blades will render in P5 just like they do in P4. I've also heard that they look good if you set the ambience strength to use th texture as a map. I know that that corresponds well with how to make them render in 3DSMax. Speaking of which, if you want to render them in 3DSMax, what you do is first get all your maps corrected because the Poser export .mtl files don't seem to keep track of maps well. Then click the chequemark for 'colour' on the self-lighting selector. Click the map button and set it to be a bitmap. Browse for the blade's texture map file again and load it as the ambience map. Viola, your blade will render fine. I should note that the 3DSMax default scanline renderer will make it look a little thin. You can fix this by playng with the values for the transparency map or by making a new copy of the trans map with the gamma adjusted lighter. If anyone would like to set up MT5 files for the various colours of blades, I'll host the files with my stuff on dodger.org and credit you for the file and everything.

Thanks. I was wondering how to make stuff fullbright in P5 in general. :)

It's also interesting to note that you can set the ambience above 1 in p5 to make some rather interesting effects. One thing I'm trying to figure out is if there's a way with P5 to finally make the sabers glow, like they do in the movies. If anybody has any ideas, I'm open to input. ~DM

Well, they won't shed light on other stuff, if that's what you mean, unless P5 renders radiosity, which I haven't heard it does.