How Do I Package Spotlights in My Product? [Solved]

lukon100

I made a car for Daz Studio.

I want to attach spotlights to the hull, aimed out from the headlight geometry.

Can spotlights be saved as “Figure/Prop Assets..” and thereby included in one’s product download?

Richard Haseltine

They don't need to be saved as assets, just the settings. Try saving a Wearables preset if you want them parented.

lukon100

In this context, that is, spotlights; I fail to understand the advantage of saving just the settings as opposed to saving the asset to which the settings are applied.

If I don't save the whole asset, I can't include it as part of my product for users to download. If I include just the settings as some kind of preset, the user must do the extra work of loading in the spotlight asset (2 of them) and applying my preset to them. That is, unless presets for spotlights just happen to automatically load in the spotlights when the user clicks on it. (Seems unlikely to me. But who knows?)

As for saving the spotlights as Wearables that are parented to the car, this baffles me. I barely know what a Wearable is, let alone how to create one. I tried it anyway, but I got some error message about needing to select some special kind of object in the scene. If the hull of the car isn't this kind of special object, then I can't make Wearables for it, I guess.

But here's what DOES work: If I save each spotlight as a smart-parented "Figure/Prop Asset", they work precisely as I want them to work. They load into the scene, parented to the car's hull and everything. The only problem is the icons for the lights have a catergory tag that says "Light ?" in white letters against a pink backround. I assume this means there's something still not quite right.

Is there something I can do to get rid of the "Light ?" tag?

Or, is the Figure/Prop Asset approach still just the wrong way to do this for reasons I don't understand?

Richard Haseltine

Are these Create>New Spotlight spotlights? if so then the preset will create them, and their settings. If they are custom assets (models) then of coruse you would need to save them in the usual way, and if they are custom shaders (actual shaders, not settings for as tandard light) you would need to save them as a shader asset.

lukon100

Thanks again for you patience, Richard. I finaly figured out how to save the spotlights as parented wearables. I just needed to selsct the hull of the car when saving, instead of selecting the spotlights. Its like saving a heirarchical materials preset wherein ya select the items to include in the preset only after you issue the save command on the root node.

Right then. All is well.