Why the repeated instructions to turn off diffuse and specular, as well as turning off the lights? Without lights, diffuse and specular are off. It's like telling someone to turn off a car engine, and then also remove all the gas.

Once the lights are off, everything that is diffuse or specular is black anyway. It's the ambient things (self lit) that you must chase down and turn off after shutting the lights out.

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Meanwhile,

I am curious about all the faffing you guys describe - has nobody ever said how to do this without touching lights or your prop/figure shaders at all? Nobody can think of any Poser rendering effect that might be useful, combined with a little bit of shader cleverness?

I'll give you some hints:

There is a component in the rendering engine that decides the final pixel color of everything in your scene.

For things beyond a certain distance, it forces the color to be any value you want, and completely ignores the lights and shaders in your scene.

The component I'm talking about is usually used for its built-in z-depth-dependent behavior.

If we used it exactly as it was intended to be used, it will not do what we want, but we can abuse it quite trivially to do exactly what we want.

I have posted numerous times that for its primary intended purpose, it is incorrectly implemented, but that we can trick it into ignoring its own flawed math and use any math we want.

It's been around since Poser 5.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)