I was trying to get a light to illuminate just the eyes on V4 the other day, and I could not get it to work.  After some experimentation, it appears this function doesn't work the way I thought it did, at least in the latest version of CP7.  If you have hair on the figure, and try to light just the head, or eyes, or any part, the hair is lit, but nothing else.

Has anyone else experienced problems with "Light Only" in 7.1?  I haven't tried "Everything But" yet, but will experiment to see if that works.

Is this a limitation of this function, in other words does it work only on entire objects (like V4, or a hair object) and not component parts (like eyes)?

Klebnor

 It's not a bug but it is a limitation. The items you actually select on a figure in "light only" dialog box are actually the bones, not the geometry.  The character is treated as a single piece of geometry in Carrara which is why it shows up as "model" in the hierarchy above the Hip bone in the properties palette. 

A work-around for this to add a spot light with a point at behavior and a very narrow beam. You can scale the spotlight to make it more manageable in front of the characters face. You can parent it to the eye to make things easier.

Mark

I haven't tried it, but since the eyes don't have any edges in common with the rest of the mesh, you could probably cut them out of the mesh (or duplicate them, and make the originals invisible). If you leave them in the same place, with the same hot points and parented to the head, it might work. You'd lose any morphs for the eyes, I expect, but you should still be able to rotate them where you need them to be, then you can do anything else you want with them since they'll be free of the figure's skeleton.

I did a horror pic once (in another app) where I did something like that, a skeletal figure putting on human skin and eyes to pass as human, and the disconnected eye part worked fine.

Thanks guys.  I suspected it was something like that once I started playing around and trying various options.

Klebnor