Ghost Light - Invisible Area Lights with a Live [V1.1 update 15-06-2026]

Ghost Light - Invisible Area Lights with a Live - Invisible area lights with a live, one-click workflow for Iray.

Ghost Light brings studio lighting to DAZ Studio with emitters that light your scene but never show up to the camera. Build a single soft light or a full three-point setup in a couple of clicks, shape it with live controls while an Iray preview updates in the viewport, and adjust as many lights as you like at once. It is a DAZ Script, so it runs on DAZ Studio 4 and DAZ Studio 6, on Windows, macOS, and Linux, with no native plugin to install.

- Highlights
- Ghost emitters that light the scene while staying invisible to the camera.
- Four curated emitter shapes: Plane, Disc, Sphere, and Tube.
- A live panel: create, parent, aim, and tweak while you keep working in the scene.
- One-click three-point setups in five cinematic styles.
- Batch editing: select many lights and adjust them all together.
- Live sliders with direct numeric entry, a camera selector, and an Iray viewport toggle.

- The interactive panel

Pick a shape and click Apply to drop a ghost light into your scene. Parent it to any figure or prop so it follows along, and aim it at your subject with one checkbox. Position and rotation update live as you drag a slider or type an exact value. The Adjust controls give you Intensity (in watts), color Temperature (in kelvin), Color, and Size, plus toggles for the ghost effect and two-sided emission. The window stays open while you work, so you can keep selecting and editing freely in the Scene pane.

- One-click three-point lighting

Select your subject, choose a style, and Ghost Light builds a complete Key, Fill, and Rim setup, each light parented and aimed at the subject with its own temperature, distance, and power. Five ready-made looks are included: Realistic, Cinematic, Warm, Noir, and Tungsten.

- Edit many lights at once
Select all your ghost lights with one click, or just the Keys, Fills, Rims, or a single shape, or pick any combination in the Scene pane. Then adjust the whole group together: Temperature, Color, and the ghost and two-sided toggles apply the same value to every light, while Intensity and Size scale proportionally, so the balance of your setup is preserved.

- What's included
- The Ghost Light script (Content Library: Scripts / oldhiccup / oh-ghost-light).
- Four ghost light presets: Plane, Disc, Sphere, and Tube (Light Presets / oldhiccup / OHGL / Lights).

- Changelog
Version 1.1 (15/06/2026)
- Native DAZ sliders: Position, Rotation, Intensity, Temperature and Size now use DAZ Studio's standard slider, with the label and value built in and -/+
buttons. Alt-click any slider to reset it to its default.
- Precise float values for transforms and adjustments, matching DAZ's Parameters pane.
- The window remembers its position between sessions, so it reopens where you left it. Handy on multi-monitor setups, and a safeguard keeps it from ever opening off-screen. (This feature can be unstable at times.)
- The window now loads the currently selected Ghost Light as soon as it opens. No need to reselect it.
- Turning off "Iray viewport" now restores the previous viewport draw style instead of switching to a fixed one.
- Cleaner Adjust panel, and the color swatch is easier to click.
- Closing DAZ Studio while the window was open could leave the application running in the background. The window now shuts down cleanly with DAZ.