.

Sure, why not?

Thanks for the add-ons - I snagged em immediately. I'd love a P90, yes. Especially if its of the same quality as your F2K.

Hmmm... Modelled in Wings perchance? ;)

A great addition to an already great model. One query — what would be the easiest way of adding a visible laser beam to the handgrip prop? My first idea was a simple cylinder, stretched out very long and thin, and made semi-transparent, parented to the handgrip. Or is there a better or easier way?

Wings? me? ya think?..;) yeah..but it's got little mistakes all through it..it's done in .obj, not very big, but I haven't tried using it in Poser..probably go all 'buttery' on me..;) look forward to yours..

Yep, a stretched cylinder sounds like the easiest way to go. As for the transparency, how about using a 'cloudy' transmap, so the beam intensity varies over its length like the real thing would as it passes through the air? You might want to increase the ambient colour level as well, to get an effective glow. - Graham

And now that I've had a chance to fire up Poser and try out my off-the-cuff idea... whaddayaknow, it works. Thanks for the ambient and transmap tips, I tried them and it does make a better-looking beam.

One extra thing I tried that works very well with a bit of tweaking: add a spotlight parented to the base of the cylinder, colour matching the beam, with a very narrow beam width, less than 1° if you can get away with it. With no postwork needed, it adds the little spot of light to what I've heard described as "the ultimate point-and-click interface"...

And now that I've done a bit more experimenting, I've come across a problem. I was trying to save my laser spot cylinder as a prop, with the light parented to it. But when I try to save, there seems to be no way to add the parented light to the cylinder primitive. I'm using Poser 4.03 on Windows 98. I'm sure I've seen props saved so that loading them up also loads a light set. What am I missing, or is this something that can only be saved in Poser 4PP or 5?

OK, I found a workaround — almost. I opened the text files for the .pp2 laser beam prop (lightless) and the .pz3 scene file (with the light) that I'd saved after I got the thing working right. I copied all the code for the spotlight and the accompanying shadowcam into the .pp2 file and saved that out. Tried it, and it works beautifully. Guess what, there's another problem. I can only have one beam in a scene — if I add another beam, the light from the first beam, even if I've moved it, zips back to the new beam and no extra light is created. This happens even if I rename the spotlight parented to the first beam. Is there a way of recoding the spotlight definition so that a new light is added when I add a new beam prop? Maybe the name needs to be changed? (The code I copied uses the name "spotLight 1".

Cool idea with the spotlight, That would never have occurred to me, but then Poser lights aren't something I mess with. I've always worked on the principle that they're relatively harmless unless provoked ;) As a result, I understood approximately a third of your last message LOL I recommend starting a new thread specifically about parenting spotlights - hopefully you'll snag a lighting guru! - Graham

"Relatively harmless unless provoked" — Doesn't that cover most computer programs anyway? Ah well, I'm fairly new to hand-hacking Poser object code myself, so I probably have a few things not quite right. OK, I'll open a new thread on the lighting query as soon as I get back from work today.