https://www.posetteforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2069&p=30578#p30578 ----------------------------------- melamkish Friday, 14 April 2006, 02:06 PM ----------------------------------- Now you should already have some lights set up by default. So let's start from scratch. Click on a light, and then click on the little trash can. Poser will ask if you want to delete the current figure. Select yes. Do this to each light. When you are done, your character will be completely dark since there are no lights. Now select the little Create Light icon next to the lighting controls. Poser will arbitrarily create a light of some color and intensity. Click the Light Properties icon and a Parameter Window for Light 1 should appear. Take a look at these parameters. You will notice that the light is currently a spotlight and has various parameters set. Move this window out of the way but leave it open. Go back to the light controls, click on your light and hold the mouse button down. Move the mouse around and the position of the light should change. This is how you can quickly position the lights around your figure. Go back to the Parameters window and click the parameters tab. You will see that besides controls for various spotlight aspects, you can also move the light using x,y,z dials. Use the world controls for roughly setting the lights, and the x,y,z controls for fine tuning. Ignore the other settings for now and click the properties tab. Spot lights are good for highlighting, but it takes a lot of lights to set up a scene, so I like to use infinite lights to have even lighting so I can see what I am doing. Once a scene is set up, I change, add, delete the lights to get the effect you want. Before we change anything else, let's look at the other light controls. Change the spotlight to an infinite light. Do this in the Parameters - Property window, which should still be open. Just select infinite. Move your light to somewhere left and above the left shoulder. Your character should be lit on the left side from above. You should see a circle with lines and arrowheads representing the direction the light is coming from. In the preview window, spin your character and you will notice the back and right sides are pretty dark. You can add backlighting and fill lighting to get your desired results, but for now spin your character back to a front view. Now I should mention, that anything you can do with the graphical lighting controls can also be done in the parameters window (and more). Back to the graphical lighting controls make sure your light is selected, and click and hold down you mouse button on the little dot under the light intensity indicator. Move it back and forth and observe the results. Set it about in the middle for now. Click once on the colored dot and a light color window should open. Slide your mouse around the colors and you should see the effect of changing the lighting color on your character. The lighting color will affect the overal scene color and may change the look of your textures. I usually set my working lights to white and then fine tune the color later. Let's go back to the light parameters for a moment. During scene setup, I usually turn off shadows unless I need to see how they affect other objects. This allows poser to render faster. Also, too many lights with shadows turned on will create an unreal shadowing effect as if you had more than one sun in an outdoor scene. After you have set up your scene's lighting, turn on shadows for the effectyou desire. A word about light intensity. As you add more lights, the preview scene may appear to "wash out". What you see in preview is not what you will see in a render. Start with a lower intensity in your previews and bring the lighting level up a little at a time while doing test renders to see the results.