Any ideas on how to mimic the lights on an XMas tree?
They need to be colored, variously and not light up other far off objects.

I've been working on a scene that includes a XmasTree.
I wanted to mimic that of the actual lights on the tree.
The tree I used, available here in the market place, is "Trim a Tree" It includes lights but I'm thinking that they are reflection based. My scene is inside, at night with the lights off and I'ld rather not add any infinite light.

Anyway in my quest to create the lights I came up with, or so I thought, was a great Idea.
I created a trans map for the bulbs, the nonlight type we hang on our tree's.
I then added a "point" type light & moved it to inside the bulb.
Guess what?
It didn't work.
I have a workaround that involves putting my light against the bulbs and haveing it's glare act as the bulb. I guess I'm happy with this.
I recently downloaded from the free area a bulb that in the owners pics show exactly what I want to do but the bulb couldn't be reduced enough to look correctly so I didn't go further with it. I should but am confident if my maps didn't work neither will his.

Any Ideas????

Many Many Thanks!

Scott

If you have Poser 6, you can use a gather node on the tree and ornament materials, with ambient settings on the lights, to simulate that sort of illumination.

Your idea to put a point light inside a transmapped object should work okay. Here are screenshots of a ball prop textured with a spots node in the transparency channel (just to act as a quick transmap). The ball is at the centre of the Poser stage with the point light inside - there's no other light in the scene. The three boxes are at zTrans -1, -2, and -3 respectively. The point light is red and has its Dist End set to 3 to get the light falloff, otherwise the light would illuminate everything equally.

The first image is the preview and you can see that the light does illuminate the boxes. Image 2 shows that the falloff works. The problem is that the light cannot illuminate its own exterior because the rays will never hit it, so the ball looks black. To fix that, you can set some red ambient light on the ball material.

Steve

Hmmmmmm... Thankyou Very Much. I have another sub idea I want to create from the same scene I posted in the gallery, much simpilar with less content. I will try to get the effect I was looking for using your tut above. Of course the uses of this is endless. Many Thanks!!! Scott