spotlight lighting

Hi all:

quicky question (one I probably have the answer to already, but y'know...). I work for a RL museum and we're creating a virtual gallery. I would love to have working spotlights, rather than having to create background textures with the light fade and shadows. Are there such things as directed lights, or am I just going to have to suck it up and wield my crappy Photoshop skills to make shadowed backgrounds?

thanks!

You can buy spotlights for this kind of thing I believe though I do not have a link you might try SL Exchange. Anoither thing you can do is make a prim that is a Light - then position this prim around the object you want the light to fall upon, you might want to make more than one.
To do this us create a prim and then under one of the Edit tabs there is a Light option - you turn that on and can choose intesity, colour, etc.

EDIT: I found this item that might be suitable, in the picture at least one of the lights looks like the sort you might find in a gallery:

http://uncensored.slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=342536

The spotlights as mentioned before don't actually generate the shadows so you probably need to use both the prim spotlight and a shadow texture to create the illusion.

Thanks so much to both of you! I'll do some experimenting and see what I come up with.

The real gallery we're modeling is very dark, with only a few pieces under dramatic lighting. The pieces themselves will be full bright, but I really didn't want to have to shade the frames. I'm thinking that maybe a small cylinder with a transparent texture will create enough of the fade I want to avoid having to 'shop everything. The sculptural object has some really dramatic shadows, but since we have a good installation shot of that piece, I can pretty easily make a texture from it (famous last words...).

You can definitely create the lighting as folks have described....but another thing you might want to consider is how others will have their lighting set in-world. It might actually bo good to hang a sign telling folks to adjst their preferences to sun & moon only....to better enhance the type of lighting you'll be using in the gallery. Or, perhaps have them set to midnight. There are so many variables due to everyone running around with different versions of SL...light options and day settings...just a thought.

Good luck with your gallery...sounds like a cool concept..keep us posted~!!