I'm curious as to the significance of black lights in most of the light settings I've downloaded. While the computer has to take extra time to make light maps for those when it's rendering, I actually notice no difference in the appearance of the picture if I delete all the black lights before rendering. Is there some mysterious purpose for them that I'm not aware of?

Not an answer to your question, but you can set up in "Render Options" not to render shadows... This sounded like a "bad idea" to me.. but Shadows are still displayed, and it takes less time to render... (doesn't go thru "rendering shadow one... rendering shadow two.. etc.) Try it out... (it's all I sue anymore myself...) -Lee

ummm.. that should be "use" .. LOL

Ive found that you tend to get the black lights when you load one light set over another. They are merely lights that didnt get overwritten. Say you had lights 1-10 in a scene and loaded in a new lightset with lights 1-6. Lights 1-6 would be overwritten and lights 7-10 would be left, but turned off. Hence the black lights. Lights also dont get overwritten if they have a different name from the new ones loaded. There may be other reasons but thats one I`ve witnessed myself. To see if this is the cause you could try loading the new lights into a scene with no lights and see if the black lights still appear.

re Routledge: eggs-actly. (or negative lights?)

Actually, I've done that...deleting ALL lights and then loading a light set I've downloaded. Most of them still have black lights. Since I see no difference I might go through them, delete the black lights, and resave them.

Have you tried using flourescent materials to see if they glow ???

Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it.
Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together.
All things connect......Chief Seattle, 1854

I think it has something to do with the intensity setting of each light...if you look at the intensity dial, it is nearly off or off on the black lights. If you move it to full, the light becomes white.... If you change the light color to, red, as an example, then turn the intensity down, it will become black.... So basically, when you have black lights, the intensity is very low

Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it.
Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together.
All things connect......Chief Seattle, 1854

note: my last post - read negated instead of negative.(min color = 0)sorry about that. Dave-So is right as far as he goes ... I actually played around with new lights last week. You might want to check out my post in poser technical forum which turned into a series of three notes on the subject,"lights where you want 'em", in which I noted the turning off of lights that are not specifically named in the new set, which substansiates routledge.

alao, when you load a second light set, the old ones are turned off. If you click one of them and look at the properties windoe, the ON button is not checked.

Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it.
Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together.
All things connect......Chief Seattle, 1854