I'm not quite sure what use this is yet, but maybe someone else has the time to play with it. I'm up to my eyes in work at the moment. OK. Today I discovered that when a light is parented to something, the saved file has a new line at the beginning clearFigureKeys 1 At first I though this line was responsible for switching off the existing lights when adding new ones. Well, it does seem to do that, but changing the 1 to 0 doesn't NOT switch them off, if you know what I mean. Here's a code to switch all lights off without adding new ones. Just save it as an .lt2 file and put it in any lights folder. { version { number 4.01 } clearFigureKeys 1 } I then tried this code as a cr2, pz2 and pp2, hoping to do something useful, like zeroing figures, but nothing happens. Apparently, if it's not a light file, it does nothing. Anyone feel like playing with this one? mac

If the condition of switching them off is true (=1), then once they're off, maybe you can't turn them on again if the condition of switching them off is false (=0). So the existing lights can go from enabled to disabled, but maybe they're permanently disabled.

I'd expect that clearFigureKeys 0 would fail to clear the figure keys - i.e. leave them alone. When you choose lights from the library, Poser replaces the existing lights - and if your new set has less lights in it than the old one, you can see there are still the same number of lights in the scene but some are switched off. clearFigureKeys must be how Poser does it, and I suspect this is another of those hard-coded features that seem to keep popping up.

Yep. I assumed from the minute I saw it that '1' was true and '0' was false. Unfortunately, setting it to 0 doesn't change anything. The lights still get switched off. I also followed the 'Keys' clue by setting random key values in the Init and k lines, then trying to clear them with that file, but it doesn't work. Pity. Could've been useful. mac

Here's my theory - while coding Poser 4, Metacreations suddenly realised they needed a way of introducing light sets with different numbers of lights in them. The clearFigureKeys keyword was introduced, maybe with the intention of making it do just what you described; but during testing, they hard coded it to just turn off lights, and the parameter was ignored. Then, with deadlines looming, the rest of the cFK specification was either deliberately pruned to save time, or accidentally overlooked. And to this day, there's a comment in the code reading: // Must finish this off How close was I? :)

Ha-ha! Sounds pretty close to me. Another 'forgotten spanner in the works'. I'd love to find a way round this switching off the lights business. It's a pain. I've been making lights for a new product and 'discovered' (nothing very new really) how to add new lights and shadow cams without replacing the existing ones in the scene. All's you need to do is replace every instance of a light or shadowcam name in the .lt2 file with it's own unique name. This forces poser to add new ones to the scene, not apply new properties to the old ones. It's cool because you can add extra lights without losing all the old ones. The only minor annoyance is that poser switches off all the old ones. They're still there, but you have to switch them back on again. I bet if you looked in the poser code you'd find another comment //Annoy the user at every opportunity mac

LOL. Very cool. I knew I was right! mac

Attached Link: Some Observations on Poser 4 Lights

I'll refer you back to the thread I posted when I discovered a method for doing this (see link above), here is a short quote:

"One big advantage of loading lights from other than lt2s is that you can load one or more lights without turning off all the other lights in the scene."

In this same thread I also describe how to add new lights and shadow cams without replacing the existing ones in the scene, quote:
In the above example both the light and the camera have been given unique names rather than the standard "spotLight 1" and "SHADOW_CAM_LITE 4", this prevents them from being acidentally changed by lt2 files that refer to "spotLight 1".

Mac, I think your responce after reading this was:
Thanks les. Ssome very useful info there.

mac

Maclean:
"The only minor annoyance is that poser switches off all the old ones. They're still there, but you have to switch them back on again."

I also address this issue in the same post:

"This is also one of the reasons that I made a number of utility poses for lights in pz2 format, if I had implemented them as lt2 they would have turned the lights off."

To summerize; if you want to add lights to a Poser document without turning the other lights off, put the lights in a pp2 (or cr2). If you just want to change the paramiters of lights without turning the other lights off, use a pz2. For more details see the link at top of this post.

All this relates to Poser 4, but I should imagin it works in Poser 5 as well.

Thanks (again) les, The information WAS useful. In fact, I've been messing around with this stuff for the last 4 or 5 days and I already had that thread saved as a reference. At first I tried the lights parented to a cr2, but I'm not happy with the channels being stripped out, so I abandoned that. I didn't try pp2s, but I imagine they strip them out too? Whatever. I'm selling this pack, so I can't take chances with weird glitches, (and DAZ don't like them much either). What I ended up doing was making lt2 files with unique names for all lights and shadowcams, so they're added to a scene, instead of replacing the scene lights. I then made a series of pz2 files (what I call SET files) to adjust the lighting. That solves all problems except the switching off of the current lights when a new set is added, but since the only way round it is cr2/pp2, I think I'll give it a miss. I may not use information immediately, but I do save it and store it away. Never know when I'll need it. mac