Moving a totally hidden light

[Welles]

I ran into a case where one of the lights was hidden totally behind a .wmf which was imported into my current scene. I didn't wish to mess around with the placement or rotation of my objects and yet one light, which I wished to move, was hidden. As far as I've been able to determine, the only way to move lights is dragging them and for that one needs to see at least a portion of the light icon. Is there any way to move a light other than dragging?

Thanks again (in advance).

[Welles]

I ran into a case where one of the lights was hidden totally behind a .wmf which was imported into my current scene. I didn't wish to mess around with the placement or rotation of my objects and yet one light, which I wished to move, was hidden. As far as I've been able to determine, the only way to move lights is dragging them and for that one needs to see at least a portion of the light icon. Is there any way to move a light other than dragging?

Thanks again (in advance).

[Egg Bramhill]

Hi again Welles
I'm never sure of the answer to this one, it can be a real pain in the ass. As far as I'm aware there's no way of moving a light without dragging.
The only thing I can suggest is to take a note of the X,Y,Z settings, then rotate the text until you 'find' the lost light, move it around until it's visible. Now return your image settings to their original co-ordinates. (Holding down either Shift or Ctrl whilst doing this restricts the motion to one axis at a time)
Hope this helps.
My lights are going out very rapidly now. http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/wink.gif
Egg

[Welles]

Thank you, Egg. Noting the coords and replicating them after moving the light is a good work around. I was secretly hoping that I was missing some trick. Oh well... hope springs eternal...

Cheers!
Welles

[alkolka]

If you are comfortable with hand editing the file, open an X3D file with a pure text editor. In the code snippet below, the Lighting[n]Theta and Lighting[n]Phi element values define the position of the lights. In this example, I changed all three lights to have identical coordinates and, sure enough, all three lights were stacked on top of each other.

Probably more trouble than its worth. But it demonstrates how self-documenting X3D code is.

<Lighting1Source><H>380</H><S>265</S><V>970</V></Lighting1Source>
<Lighting1Theta>-15</Lighting1Theta>
<Lighting1Phi>-145</Lighting1Phi>
<Lighting2Source><H>2570</H><S>275</S><V>850</V></Lighting2Source>
<Lighting2Theta>-15</Lighting2Theta>
<Lighting2Phi>-145</Lighting2Phi>
<Lighting3Source><H>125</H><S>550</S><V>1000</V></Lighting3Source>
<Lighting3Theta>-15</Lighting3Theta>
<Lighting3Phi>-145</Lighting3Phi>

[John Rayner]

Hi Al,

Neat information. Wealth of information one can play with/mess up x3d files with. I will have to remember tthis tip.

Tried looking at a xara file in a text editor. Might as well have been looking at source code... nothing useful.

[Welles]

That's a very cool tip, Al. I think I'll look at a 3D file just for the heck of it... You never know, I might learn something even though I'm an artist rather than a programmer.

[fencepost]

Sometimes you can "exploit" the software by playing around with the settings in the raw text file. I played around with various settings awhile back and got X3D to do some things that it normally wouldn't. Can't remember all of them and none are earth shattering, but here's one example.

When you create a graphic, one of the settings is Miter or Round. The text instruction to look for is "<Corners>X</Corners>" With "X" representing the value for Miter (0) or Round(1).

For the first graphic, I left it at miter. For the second line of text I switched it to round. For the third line of text, I put in a 2, there is a difference, albeit slight.

Another neat trick is text sizing. X3D limits you to 288 pts. When you go into the text file, search for the <Size>X</Size> code. A value of zero represents "Fit to Width". Change it to 500 and see what you get!

One more and I must go. If you're using the Pulsate animation, the minimum size you can set is 1. Go into the text mode and look for the <MinimumSize>X</MinimumSize> tag. Replace the 1 with a zero. That way there is no small dot lingering out there.

As I said, there are many different things you can do, but be careful. I got a little happy making changes and X3D decided it wasn't gonna open some files with some numbers.

Have fun.

Art

[Welles]

Art,

I had already run into the circumstances of wishing I could specify a text size over 288pts so that's one of your tips I'm going to use immediately. Am I correct in presuming that you are going into an image file and changing the parameters and then reloading the image? That's one aspect of Xara3D5 which I hope could be changed in the application for 3D6. I do most of my work for print and 2000 x 2000 pixels at the quality which Xara produces can be uprezed in PS for a poster size image with little degradation, particularly using Reindeer Graphics Optipix, although the new resizing native PS algorithms are pretty darn good. As a result I'd like the option of filling the working window with my graphic rather than being constrained by the leap from 288pt to "Fit to Width."

I do have one additional but tangential question stimulated by this discussion. I'm getting my first PC in 10 years next week specifically because of the Xara products. What is a good Windows text editor for modifying files? On my Mac I'd use BBEdit which is a highly evolved text application for coding of all sorts.

Boy this thread is an eye-opener! Thanks to you all! http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

[fencepost]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Am I correct in presuming that you are going into an image file and changing the parameters and then reloading the image? <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Not the image, per se, but the actual X3D file itself. Since I don't work with Macs, I assume it's a very similar process. I just right-click the X3D file (Macs don't have a right-click do they? http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif) and select "Open With" and point to WordPad, which is a very low end text editor. I do the changes, save the document, and re-open the X3D file normally.

I don't do much text editing so I can't address that question.

Art