IRay Point Lights, IES, and me.

SwingGecko

Hi all, this is my first post, so thank you advance for any tips you may be able to provide.

I've been working in Daz for only the past few weeks, but one of the issues I have is with the point lights and applying an IES profile to them. This causes them to have an inherent "direction". It's easy enough to maybe move one of them, but in a scene with 4 or 5 different lights, it becomes a challenge to remember which direction they "face" as the pointlight representation does not provide a direction.

I've tried parenting a non-rendered cone in the direction, but I've had no luck saving it as a reusable object. The only way it's worked is as a scene which I "merge" in, and that's not exactly streamlining my process.

So my question is, how do you folks manage your pointlights, IES profiles, and any inherent direction they gain from the profile? Or, how can I create an object that consists of a light and a primitive and have it be re-usable?

Thanks in advance!

Richard Haseltine

Try saving your light plus prop as a scene subset - that will merge by default. You can right-click on a saved scene subset and choose Create Custom Action to add it to the Scripts menu, then use Window>Workspace>Customise to move it (in the menus tab on the right) or add it to a toolbar (drag its entry under Custom Actions on the left to the desired toolbar in the tab on the right) for quick access to items you wish to use often.

Ostadan

I parent to a camera so that I can use the camera to direct the light, and save as a scene subset as mentioned. A camera/cone/pointlight with a bunch of ies presets with helpful icons would make a nice product. My use of ies pointlights has been purely experimental because it's rather cumbersome.