Poser: how to toggle all scene lights when making Preview renders

Selecting GROUND in a Poser scene is a handy trick that does not, in every single instance, make the guide-wires of Lights invisible in a scene. I’ve seen instances where spotlights don’t toggle off when GROUND is selected.

Why would we want to toggle the lights? Well, when working with lights the last-selected light leaves ‘guide wires’ showing in PREVIEW, and these will mess up a comic-book render. This picture of a live scene in OpenGL shows the problem…

If one were to render this in real-time, the picture would have the light’s ‘guide wires’ arrows and circle on it. Easy to miss, easy to forget until it’s too late and you’re dropping it into a panel on a comics page.

Willyb53’s free Light Toggle script can be hacked to do this for us. Willy’s script was set up to turn all the scene lights off and on, but a few simple tweaks keeps them shining while only their guide-wires are turned off in the scene. To do this we simply open his script with Notepad++ and change it to read…

… then save, rename Toggle_Visibility_All_Lights.py and place the new script wherever you keep your Python scripts. Mine are in…

C:\Program Files\Smith Micro\Poser 11\Runtime\Python\poserScripts\ScriptsMenu\FavoriteScripts

You can then iconise the new script using Dimension3D’s $10 eXtended Access. This runs fine so long as you have the AVFix for it, and I load it at every Poser startup. Attached to a meaningful icon (here a red closed eye), the new script then becomes one-click and it can be handily positioned near the Poser lights control panel.

If you have the neat and attractive Scene Toy addon for Poser, and if all you mostly use the Hierarchy Editor for is to click on GROUND to get rid of the guide-wires, then this script lets you hide that window and reclaim a little more screen space in the Poser UI. “Begone, ‘o great space-wasting panel of grey ugliness”…

Finally, the other thing to keep in mind, re: lights and Preview renders, is that OpenGL is limited to eight lights in a scene. This is an OpenGL limitation, not a Poser limitation. In practice, that “eight lights limit” may be even less, because your PCs’ hardware may not be able to support that many interacting lights and their shadows. For working in Comic Book Preview mode it’s probably best to try to stay at three or four lights in a scene. Sketch only supports three, in terms of having the strokes follow the light directions.