buy an Omnidirectional light? And for how much?

how would it work in poser?

OK wait, is that one light or a bunch of lights together? My answer is yes, I think

It's 14 spotlights connected to a central part as a figure with attenuation settings contolled to minimise overlap. The individual lights are hidden from the menu and reduced in size to a point to make it easy to use and hard to mess up. The BODY of the figure has ERC dials to control the light parametres that can be safely adjusted without breaking the arrangement. Here's a picture I just rendered with it at base settings except the colour adjustments, which are set to mimic flame. This image contains _no_ postwork whatsoever.

I hope you're taking crosstalk into consideration while developing this product, because many of us will likely need more than one omni in a scene.

You'd have to use a null loader, of course.

My answer is no, I would not buy one. If I needed a real one and could not fake it with a spot or two, I would render in a different app. Cool idea, but it's not worth money to me. Maybe someone else...

SnowSultan put a version of this in Freestuff a few weeks back, and I'm including my own variation in a product out shortly.

That said, it sounds like you've added some intelligent wrinkles to the idea that would make it worth a few bucks to anyone who didn't want to go through all the tedium of building his or her own.

The problem with having two omnis in a scene is not just crosstalk, of course, it's that the second omni must have a completely different set of light names or it will simply take the first omni's place as the scene's Lights; and if the second omni DOES have a completely different set of light names, the first omni will be blacked out when the second is introduced and every black bulb will have to have its luminosity turned back up, one by one.

If your ERC thing gets around that drawback, you're really adding value to the idea, and that's the way to get paid for it.

Good luck!

Bill

I tried it with two and it seemed to work fine, actually. I sort of built a null loader into it by doing a multi-figure character with the first as a null. (Anyone done that before for null loaders?) As far as blacking things out, that's only for LT2 files as far as I know. It doesn't happen with it as a character, since the lights are part of a figure group, and thus have unique :# identifiers on load.

The other thing is that I could add a bit to the license agreement to allow people to use it in their commercial products, provided 1) the price of the product is more than the price of the base omni and 2) the product can use the omni set in it but cannot be the product (thus someone could sell a lamp with an omni light included, but could not simply re-sell the omni light alone). I saw the 18-light one (mine cuts it down by 4 lights and gets rid of the 'hotspots') and it had a license agreement restricting it from being used in any commercial products, which is why I went ahead and built my own -- plus I worked past the drawbacks (ERC, got rid of the big circle of spotlights appearing, no hotspots, etc).

Aaah, it's a character, not just LT2 lights that parent to a control globe . . . I should have realized that's how you can have ERC . . .

You really are adding a lot of value to the idea. I feel sure there's a market for it. How much people would pay I don't know, but it's a great effect, even in my crude version (which does not seem to illuminate as brightly as yours despite having more lights.) People definitely want the effect, and when you add up the hours it would take to build their own, why wouldn't they want to pay ten bucks instead? Of course, in terms of how much time it would cost to make it yourself, if you value your time at minimum wage, you'd theoretically pay a lot more than ten bucks. The problem is, above ten bucks there are so many other products that one doesn't own yet and that would enhance one's Poser projects even more than an omni.

The biggest mistake people make in the Market is to price something at what it's "really worth" rather than what people will pay. A hundred sales at five bucks is better than ten at twenty bucks, and that's the kind of demand curve you run into here. Just one man's opinion.

Anyway, I can now answer your question. Under ten bucks, I'd buy.

Bill

And let me add that you should not let person B resell your omni as part of his product X. The fact that he sells X for more than you sell the omni does not repay you for your time or idea. You sell one copy to B for ten bucks, and he sells a hundred copies of it, adding ten bucks to the price of some cheap prop to house it? Not fair to you. Let him get a fair price for his prop, no more, no less. If you set a price low and fair enough, B can sell X as a housing for the omni at a low and fair price of his own, pointing his customers back at you.

Let me say that less confusingly. It's like you're selling a figure and you're happy that other people can make money selling textures for it -- but you don't let them include the figure with their texture. Why should you?

Bill

'It's like you're selling a figure and you're happy that other people can make money selling textures for it -- but you don't let them include the figure with their texture. Why should you?' The only thing is that It just feels inherently inverse to me. It feels like I've built a new map projection for UVmapping based on something old -- like, say, a Mercator UV projection or a conic projection -- and by restricting people from using it in commercial products I'm stopping a lot of potential good development and improvements to the community as a whole. Naah, at this point I don't think I'm going to sell it alone anyway. I think I am simply going to include it in glowing products like the Dungeon Lighting Kit I'm working on, and some domestic and industrial lighting kits I have in mind.

Oh, I certainly didn't think you could or should restrict the idea -- as you say, it's an old idea that was already out there. But if people buy the particular setup, its perfectly reasonable to say you can't simply resell that setup. You started this thread by asking what people wanted to pay, so I've responded in kind. You can of course just give it away if you want to.

I think it's also a good idea to sell it with your own housings, as you propose. That's what I was going to do with mine. I was also going to point out to people that the light source could be used in lots of ways other than the housings I supplied, that they could freely use it that way in their public or commercial renders, that I claimed no patent or right to restrict the basic idea (with acknowledgments to SnowSultan), but that of course no one could simply resell my housing or my particular light object as supplied.

Of course now I'm just waiting to buy yours!

Bill

I noticed that Lesbentley posted a free figure to control up to 25 spotlights to freestuff on november 27th. If your light is based on his it probably wouldn't be a good idea to sell it. In fact now that I think about it, you described exactly how to make your light, and combinded with this free prop, I could probably make one for my own personal use.

Actually, it's not -- my omni has been developed in parallel with lesbentley's, though. We've done quite a bit of correspondence while I was making the thing.

I'd buy it if it worked simply. And was $10 or thereabouts. No need to offer strings like resale in other products over a certain amount-- that's eating out of your pocket needlessly. I've seen the ones in FS, not sure if I could work them or how they work-- if this is a character, I know how those work. As I say, for those things others could hack their own-- make it simple and intuitive and posers who are all thumbs --like me--will buy it. Emily