Hi Sky.
I do know the very, very basics of the light ball controls. I remember them from Poser 4. (Yeah, I'm showing my 3D age here.
) I ended up using the parameters to manipulate them in P4 because at the time, I was doing 3D on a Compaq Presario 1272 laptop... Windows 98... and 32mbs of RAM. Yes, megabytes, not gigs. LOL It caused my interface to slow down to such a crawl that trying to use the light ball controls was impossible, so I ended up going to the parameters dial instead.
With P11, it's the stuff under the Properties tab that I'm still trying to learn as far as what setting does what and on which type of light, and what the differences are between all of the lights... how to control shadow direction, shadow opacity, softness, etc... I understand the Min Bias thing just fine, I have no clue what all the Attenuation settings are, or how to use the Atmosphere settings, stuff like that.
The main issue I had with Poser lighting was the inability to look through the lights and see what the light is seeing, because THAT is how I set up my rigs in DS.. I have to SEE it in order to set up a light rig. The other issue I have still, is that moving the lights around, shadow casting... it's all a guessing game... I can move lights into this position or that, and most of the time, when I render, it looks awful. It's a constant game of move a light, render, move a light, render... heck it takes me longer to set up a light rig than it does for me to build the entire scene.
Being able to look through the lights helps IMMENSELY. Also, being able to see the light cone helps a lot as well. From the other thread, we're told that you basically don't ever get to see the actual light cone without a third party script, but Seach demonstrated how to look through the Shadow Cams to see what the light is seeing - and that does help at least a little bit.
At the moment, I've been relying on Fabi's Boreal light sets to do my materials work. Once Nataani's finished, I'll try to dig in and do some play renders or whatever to get a better grip on the interface. I have this very strange mix of knowledge when it comes to Poser... some stuff I know because I remember it from Poser 4 and Poser 5, and then lots of other stuff I haven't got a clue because I moved into DS around about Poser 7 and between P5 and P7, my hardware had aged so much that I couldn't even render with shadows enabled or the whole thing would crash on me. A single Mike4 with one shirt and a hair object, on my old desktop rig was enough to crash Poser 7 at the time. I went into DS and pretty much never came out again until, well... heck, not until I started trying to do HiveWire stuff and wanting to try and support both programs. LOL
So some stuff it's like I'm a green newbie on, and other stuff I remember from P4/P5 or P7. And then there's stuff I know I've just plum forgotten - like with this that you posted up above. Totally forgot that you could control the light intensity from the little slider with the yellow dot on it...