CompuServe Messages

Lee, First, click on the light that you want to channel, then chose "Light" from the "Channel" menu. The box above the 9 letter selections is used to display a default number for the function of each of the nine keys, ands displays this number as soon as you select one. In the case of choosing a type of light, click on "T" and the default of "8" will appear in the top box. You can change this if you want, but for light tyoe, it is better left at 8 or 7. The number represents the highest/lowest vertical posistion for a point in the window. There are only 8 light types so typing a higher value for "type" would be useless, and typing a lower value would limit you. I haven't figured out what the "m" and "b" are that are above the 2 bottom boxes, so I ignore them. As for the two bottom boxes, the upper one is where you type in the frame number you want a point to be at, and the lower one is where you type in a number from 0 to +/- the number in the top box, which for "type" is set at "8". So after clicking "T" for "type", press "A" on the keyboard to add a point to the window. You can then position it with the mouse, and as you move it up and down you will see the numbers in the bottom most box change to +/- values. If you have only 1 point in the window, you can't drag it to the right, and in most cases when selecting light type, you don't need more than 1 point anyway, assuming that you want the type to be constant all the way through. Now you have 1 point in the window, and you can go to the lower of the 2 bottom boxes and type in a number from 0-7. Now you have a light of the type specified by the number in the lower of the 2 bottom boxes, at the frame specified by the number in the upper of the 2 bottom boxes, in this case, 1. That's all there is to it. I haven't tried anything yet like having a bulb go from no shadows to shadows, or a sun go to a spot, but they are on my list of things to do when I feel like goofing off. I doubt if it will work since there isn't any documentation that says you can have floats instead of integers in selecting a light type, but I'm going to have to try anyway, just to see what happens. Michael S. Flynn