A little help for a newbie?
Good evening all,
I've recently got back into Poser after leaving it for a couple of years and I've got my hands on Poser 9, and I'm currently experimenting to get the hang of it (last time I was using Poser it was Poser 5 or 6, I can't remember which!).
One thing I've been trying to do (unsuccessfully!) this evening is to create a glowing sphere that a character has floating just above their hand. I've got the sphere, it's where I want it and parented to the hand properly (that took some fiddling to do, but I'm getting the hang of it now), but I can't for the life of me figure out how to turn it into a light.
It's properties have it flagged as a "Light Emitter", but I can't seem to control it at all. Can anyone give me any pointers, or am I going to have to cheat, add a point light inside of it and make it semi-transparent?
Thanks in advance! :-)
Comments
If your wanting the sphere to glow then go into the material room and adjust the ambient to whatever color you want with a strength of 1 or 2
Cheers for that - I seem to have it working. I think I need to play around with it some more to be completely sure. I've had to pretty much turn off every other light in the scene, and it still doesn't quite appear to be producing that much light...
You're able to set the Ambient property beyond 1 by the way and that'll make the baby bright and it lights up a larger area! :)
Also, you may find that adding a Point Light to the scene (moved to the location of the sphere) will give you the boost you're after.
The Lights Interface which has lights orbiting a ball is a very nice way of controlling Infinite Lights but it took me ages before i realised that you can move Point Lights around the scene manually (or you can copy and paste your ball coordinates in the Parameters Panel to the Point Light).
With a Point Light, you can control the fall off and shadows more easily than just using an ambient object.
Hope that helps. Also, we'd love to see the finished render. :)
I've tried setting the ambient property up reasonably high, but I'm just not happy with the outcome of it - it might be because of the colour of the light, or the brightness, or something like that, but it doesn't give the results I want, so I think I'll go back to the point light and transparent object system that I used previously, and I know works well!
I'll show off a couple of finished pieces when I'm happy with them, but at the moment I'm still at the "load up a collection of presets and hit the render button" stage - haven't really progressed beyond that yet!
In this case you should just copy the sphere and make that a little bigger. Make it invisible and up the Ambient on it til yr satiesfied with the light.
I think that might be a good point actually - the sphere itself is probably the equivalent size of a tennis ball in the figure's hand, so there can't be all that much light given off - I'll try and make it a bit bigger and see if that helps matters, but I think that might ruin the effect I wanted.... The more I think this through the more I can't help thinking I'm going to have to go down the transparent sphere/light point route...
Just keep the original Sphere and make a copy of that one that you just scale up so it nearly touches the hand.
Raise the Ambient to about 3 or 4 and make it invisible to the camera in the properties tab. No need for a point light.
Good to know is that you should have an Environment sphere as well in the scene so that the light has something to bounce off from.