Playing with spotlights a lot lately, and I am noticing these (In Red circle)"Shadernodes". I see: "LampBase_Light" "LampsFlaps_Light" "Preview_Light" and on Each of em... "(nothing of coarse), B,G,R," (Blue, Green, Red) Any links, tutorials on this.

Those are the shadowcam settings for each light. They determine how shadows look and are postioned. Most decent tutes on lighting will include something regarding them, but you can get some great info by doing a seach on "shadowcams" in the poser technical forum. P5 gives us a lot more options and stuff for futzing with shadowcams.

thanks! now I have more ways to @#$% up my renders..;) interesting..

"Those are the shadowcam settings for each light."

Then why don't these options appear on every spotlight? Just now, I converted an infinite light to a spotlight from the Poser's default rig, and the parameter options end at "Transform".

The "shadernode" parameter only appears when I attach a shader to the light (like a light gel) in the material room. However, even then, the controls called "preview light 1", etc. only change the RGB and intensity values of that light and don't seem to affect the shadow cam at all.. Message edited on: 11/07/2004 20:41

Wow...attach a shader to the light? Never did that....but still those dials appeared, and some only had a few to. I just added spotlight, moved to a location, selected (Editted) "Angle Start, Angle End"..and stuff like that. Then took more notice of these extra dials.

have you rendered -- even a test render -- with that light yet? particularly when changing, you sorta need to kick it in the pants. And yes -- you can attach a great many shaders to the lights in p5...

Here is an example of a light with shader... And i tried some basic render changing the LampBase or LampFlaps... But it doesn's seem to change anything...

That looks extremely cool, semidieu! What was the rendertime on that? Can we see a screencap of the node layout your used in the material room?

"Then why don't these options appear on every spotlight?"

The shader node channels are only added at render time, even after a render you have to select something else, then reselect the light to refresh the pallet before these channels will show.

In Poser channels with internal names starting with "kd" controled the colour and intensity in both preview and rendered image. In Poser 5 it seems that the kd channels (Red, Green, Blue, Intensity) only controle how the lights look in preview. The "Preview_Light_0_" channels (contrary to what the name sugests) seem to controle how the lights look in the rendered image. Poser somehow linkes the Preview_Light_0_" channels to the kd channels so that changing either one changes the other.

The above explains 4 of the ShaderNode channels, but I have no idea what the lampFlaps and lampBase do :(

Ynsaen, if you have any more info on these, or links relating to them, PLEASE pass it on.

Message edited on: 11/08/2004 14:14

There also seems to be a serious bug in the way Poser5 lights work. I loaded a spotlight into a pz3 that contained no other lights, set its colour to green, rendered, then saved a pz3 (scene) file. Upon reopening the pz3 I changed the colour of the light to red, in Texture shaded mode the light was red, but when rendered the light was still green! The link between the kd and Preview_Light_0_*" channels appears to have been broken.

'but I have no idea what the lampFlaps and lampBase do' I can explain that one, les. LampFlaps and lampBase are materials. Normally, they're never seen, but if you parent a light to a figure and save it, you'll see that those 2 materials have been added to the list. That explains what they ARE. As for what they DO, I'm not certain, but I think that, because lights use the EDGE ONLY display mode, they require materials in order to display at all. But thats only an educated guess. mac

'I just added spotlight, moved to a location, selected (Editted) "Angle Start, Angle End"..and stuff like that'

Here's a snip from the help file for one of my products which may explain AngleStart/AngleEnd for anyone who's puzzled.

---

These 2 dials control the Falloff of a spotlight. In plain simple english (unlike the Poser manual), this means that they make the edge of the light hard or soft. Nothing more than that. And just to confuse us all even further, these dials have no effect whatsoever on the hardness or softness of the shadow thrown by the light. That's controlled by the Shadow value.

The trick is that a spotlight beam has two Falloff values - inner and outer. The AngleStart controls the inner value, which affects the amount of 'softness', and the AngleEnd dial controls the outer value, which is the maximum size of the beam. When these two values are the same, the light will have a hard edge. If you reduce the AngleStart, or inner value, the edge will soften. So, if you want a hard-edged beam, keep the 2 values close together, or identical. If you want a soft-edged beam, reduce the AngleStart (inner) value. To make a narrow beam, use low values. For a wide beam, use higher values. In the images below you can see some settings and their effects. As you can see, keeping the values identical produces a tight beam and reducing Start softens it and reduces the coverage. Obviously, the size of the beam also depends on the distance from the light to the figure

---

mac

Wow...kewl stuff... Getting somewhere. This helps understand. I know what Angle Start and End is. But for those who don't. Those Extra dials...gosh. I did play around with em last night. Got knowwhere, but here I see something.

Message edited on: 11/08/2004 16:25

Ooops! Images 2 & 3 are identical. I pasted them up in photoshop and must have made a boob. Here's the correct image. mac

This is very strange! It seems that setting the colour for the lampBase or lampFlaps, also affects the colour of the lights, but I can't figure out the interaction between these variousw channels, and what is seen in the preview is not necessarily what is seen in the render. I would really like to understand this, I made some ERC controlled omni lights for Poser5, and this stuff may have a bearing on their operation. They seem to work ok in normal circumstances, but I can feel these lampFlaps hovering over my head like an axe about to fall!

Les, if I ever do figure it out more than pretty much what ya'll have set up so far, you can be damned sure I'll tell you -- in particular, since 60% of what I know about lights came from the stuff you and snowsultan have done with them. I hadn't, however, noticed that interesting issue with save thing you noted in post 10. That makes me rather curious. I have an inherent mistrust of Pz3 files from way back in Poser 3, when they just pretty much stopped working for me 100% of the time. Since then, I never save as a pz3, and I don't trust products packaged in that format. I like my library stuff as it is, tyvm, lol. But I'm crazy, so I can't expect sane folks to do similar. If I can ever get some free time and a brain set that allows it, I will definitely look into that myself. I want to create a package set of lighting elements at some time and such info will be rather crucial.

Really surprised we didn't get info on these Dials. What they do. I looked in my manual and see nothing about these dials. I think these are bonus dials (lmao!!), but to make us stumped on what they do.

Message edited on: 11/09/2004 00:36

maxxxmodelz: it took about 5 minutes. For the shader, i use a fire shader (i don't remember from who, but you should find it in the freestuff here...). But take care... when you load an existing shader that is not for the light, it won't connect automatically. You will have to connect the nodes to the color of the light.