♥ PosetteForever ♥

Note by Tormie: I moved this tutorial here from the knowledge base in order to have all the tutorial in one place easy to find

I'm working from the Poser 6 interface, which should be close to P5 and P4, but may be slightly differrent, so keep that in mind. Also, I am going to assume little knowledge of lighting and proceed from the begining. Some of this may be review.

First, I usually have my Preview window sized to about 1024x800. It is kind of large and covers some of the controls, but makes it easy to see what I am doing. So, set your preview window to something like 800 x 600 using the lower left corner and roughly center it. You should now see several controls around your preview window. The controls should be camera controls, light controls, editing controls, document styles, etc. If you see these words around the desktop, but no controls, go to the "Window" menu in Poser and make sure the "Lighting Controls" are selected. When you can see what looks like a little world with round headed stick pins in it, we are ready to start.

The little world represents the outside your Poser world with the character in the center of the ball. The stick pin looking things represent the lights. Click once on one of the lights. You should now see a scale representing light intensity with the left side being dark and the right side being brightest. Working around the bottom you should also see a little colored circle representing the color of the light, a light bulb representing light properties, a trash can to delete the light, and another symbol to create a light. There should be a little triangle next to the Light Options directly above the these controls that has a pull down menu for doing some of
these same things.

Now, if you haven't yet, create a new default scene, load a character and let's play with the lighting. 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.hat is the basics of lighting.

Once you understand how to use your lighting controls, it is mainly a matter of creating and aiming your lights, setting the light type and color, selecting whether the light will cast a shadow, and setting the intensity. All of these are a matter of artistic taste and how you want your scene to appear.

Some final thoughts. Point lights are just localized points of light. They can be useful when you need to light one small section of a picture. I have used point lights inside gemstones to make it look like the stone glows from the inside. Only use the lights you need in the final render. I start with 3 white infinite lights to provide even lighting all around. As I proceed, these lights may get changed to spotlights, or deleted. Other lights are added as necessary. The more shadows you cast, the more resources Poser uses, so select which lights and characters/objects will cast shadows.

Experiment with each and do lots of test renders to see the results.

Thank you:)

Ive made a scene with only AO and very soft shadows:

Nice explanation (wish I saw this earlier, but hey).