How can I make a lighting preset for spotlights that are parented to an object?

lukon100

I made a Wearables preset that parents two Spot Lights to the headlight areas of a car.

These Spot Lights are Daz Spot Lights from the menu at the top that loads spot lights into a scene.

Anyway, now that I’ve made a Wearable preset that loads the Spot Lights onto the car, I want to make another preset to change the brightness (hi-beam / lo-beam).

I tried making a Light(s) preset. It did change the brightness, but it also unparented the Spot Lights from the car. That’s not what I want. I want to make a prest that changes the brightness of the Spot Lights, but leaves them parented to the car. How do I do that?

crosswind

Properties Preset, with Pose + Others.

lukon100

Thanks for your help, Crosswind.

Unfortunately, I cannot figure out how to make a Properties preset for the car that will apply to the Spot Lights parented to the car.

When trying to save the Properties preset for the car, the Spot Lights do not appear on the list of nodes that the Properties preset can change.

I can, apprently, create a Properties preset for each of the two Spot Lights, that will change the brightness. But this forces my user to navigate within the car's heirarchy, select one of the Spot Lights, then click the preset for that Spotlight; then repeat that process for the other Spot Light. That might be sliightly less work than simply opening the properties of each Spot Light and adjusting the brightness there. Slightly less work, but way more confusing.

crosswind

Pls select a spotlight first... as below - :

lukon100

Thanks again for your help.

But I already know about this method and have explained why it is not a real option for me.

So, I must conclude that Daz Studio provides no way to simultaneously change the brightness of two Spot Lights parented to a car without unparenting them from the car. ... short of writing a custom script. I don't know how to write scripts.

crosswind

I'm a bit confused... as you only mentioned you've used Lights Presets, but Lights Presets wouldn't work for your case. Actually there's a workaround: you may select the left/right spotlights first, then hold Ctrl to apply Light Presets and choose Action - Replace Selected. However this way is not really good IMHO ~~

For your case, the better way is: first load Wearable Presets, then Ctrl + Select Left/Right spotlights and apply Properties Presets to change hi/lo beam (e.g. Lumens, etc.).

PS: If you use emissive lights as the car front lights, that'll be much easier as you can just save Mat. Presets or Hierarchical Mat. Presets... You may also use Post Load script with Presets... but for this simple case, it's not really necessary....

lukon100

I wrote: "I can, apprently, create a Properties preset for each of the two Spot Lights, that will change the brightness. But this forces my user to navigate within the car's heirarchy, select one of the Spot Lights, then click the preset for that Spotlight; then repeat that process for the other Spot Light. That might be sliightly less work than simply opening the properties of each Spot Light and adjusting the brightness there. Slightly less work, but way more confusing."

Your advice has helped me in one respect only. I now understand that I can apply the Properties preset to both headlights simultaneously if I hilight both of them before clicking on the Properties preset. So this fixes the problem of having to apply the preset twice. But it still requires the user to navigate down to the spotlights and select them before applying the Properties preset. And this I still think is confusing. It is confusing because all the other presets I made for this car work fine when you just select the car. This one oddball preset needs you to do extra nevigating.

I suppose I could put a warning in the icon of the preset to tell the user to consult the readme file before trying to use it. But.. jeez.

crosswind

Yes... I still have to say that people usually use surface(s) with Emissions for car lights rather than Spotlights. I'm afraid there's no better way without selecting Splotlights first in your case...before applying whatever Presets...

lukon100

Yes. Perhaps Spotlights are the wrong way to go. They just looked real nice when I used them. Nice focused beams.

So perhaps I will investigate how to get the same focused beam appearence with emissive surfaces. I just know that so far, I've never seen a nice focused beam coming out of any emissive serface I've ever created.

If you happen to know a decent tutorial on how it can be done, feel free to point me towards it.

Thanks again for your help.