Common actions for all types of lights

Magic Poser provides you three types of light: directional light, point light and spotlight. You can customize each type of light and combine them to create really stunning lighting effects. Before we dive into the technical details of how each type of light works, let's first take a look at the common actions you can apply to all three types of light!

Move, rotate and scale the light

Lights are also 3D objects, just like a character or a prop. You can move, rotate and scale lights in the same way as you do with other 3D objects. You can find detailed tutorials on how to move, rotate, and scale 3D objects in the "Common actions to 3D objects" section.

Rotate the light

• Tap to select the light, and the action menu of the light will show up at the bottom.
• Tap rotate button  in the action menu.
• Rotate the light by dragging on the rotation circles or dragging the slider. If it's a directional light or spotlight, you should see the shadows change as a result. If it is a point light, you will not see any effect, because a point light shoots rays uniformly in all directions. (No worries if anything does not make sense yet. We will cover the mechanisms of each type of light in later tutorials in the lighting section.)

Move the light

Drag directly

• Drag on the 3D light object to move it.

Use the action menu

• Tap to select the light, and the action menu of the light will show up at the bottom.
• Tap position button  in the action menu.
• Move the light by dragging on the position arrows, or dragging the slider. If you have a point light or spotlight, you should see the light and/or shadow change in the scene as a result. If you have a directional light, you will not see any effect, because a directional light shoots parallel rays uniformly across the whole scene. (Again, we will cover the detailed mechanisms of each type of light in later tutorials in the lighting section.)

Scale the light

• Tap to select the light, and the action menu of the light will show up at the bottom.
• Tap scale button  in the action menu.
• Scale the light by dragging on the scaling handles or dragging the slider. Please note that scaling the light has no effect on lighting in the scene. You can use it to make the 3D light object the size you want so that it is easier to tap on. For example, you may want to scale the light object bigger when building a large-scale city scene, so that it is easier to tap on the light to select it!

Brightness menu

There are two common settings in the brightness menu for all types of light: brightness and cast shadow. To bring up the brightness menu:

• Tap to select the light, and the action menu of the light will show up at the bottom.
• Select brightness action  from the action menu.
• Change brightness: Drag on the slider to change the brightness of the light. You can also enter a number directly by tapping on the number pill.

• Toggle on/off shadow: Use the switch  to change if the currently selected light should cast shadow or not. For example, if you do not want any shadow, you can turn the toggle off for all lights. Or if you have two lights, you can use this toggle to choose which one you want to cast shadow. Note that there are two restrictions with shadow casting:
  • Only one light can cast shadow in the scene. If you toggle "cast shadow" on for any light, the shadows of other lights will automatically disappear.
  • Point light cannot cast shadow. For mobile performance reasons we do not allow point lights to cast shadows.

Change light color

You can change the color of the light by bringing up the color menu from the action menu of the light:

• Tap to select the light, and the action menu of the light will show up at the bottom.
• Select color action  from the action menu.
• You can change the color of the light like any other 3D object, using presets, HSV, or RGB mode. Please refer to our Applying Color tutorials for details.

Other common actions

You can apply other common actions to 3D object to the light object as well, such as delete, duplicate, drop to ground. To learn more about these actions, please refer to our Common Actions to 3D Objects tutorials.