Trouble with light linking

[badsearcher]

Hello,
       I have a really simple problem getting light linking to work properly. I have a complex room scene and only a few strategically placed lights to illuminate it. Now, there is one single poster in the room that I want to make a little brighter so I figured I would just create one single ambient light and break its light links with everything else in the entire room except for the poster. For sake of organization I put the ambient light near the poster (I'm not sure if that would have any influence on anything, to my knowledge ambient lights are supposed to light everything equally regardless of relative position, please correct me if I am wrong) but it keeps influencing an object near the poster and I do not know why. I used the light-linking editor and the break light links command but it doesn't seem to work? What am I missing here?

Thank you in advance

[badsearcher]

Oh, and yes, I turned off illuminates by default in the ambient light controls and strangely enough that didn't really seem to affect anything. I say strangely because before I turned off illuminates by default the light linking deactivation did seem to have an effect on the other objects in the room.

[joojaa]

No info to debug on.

When having rpoblems open a simple scene and see if you can do it in scane with 2 objects. THEN analyze what s different.

Oh, and yes, I turned off illuminates by default

Illuminates by default just affects the default light set membership. If you go ariound chekking it on maya will just reset your light linking information. Its not actually a attribute at all but a function.

Likewise if you put it on maya just links it to everything. If you go light linking then maya sill jsut unchek the virtual attribute in ae the NEXT time you select the object

to my knowledge ambient lights are supposed to light everything equally regardless of
  relative position, please correct me if I am wrong

You are partially wrong, they act as something in between a fully ambient light and a point light. Thay only work the way you describe if ambient shade is set to 0, otherwise they will work a bit like a point light.

PS: avoid descriptive words liek complex and simple. Untill we know you then we have no idea what you would begin to mean by that. Reast assured that the word complex really varies quite much. For example i worked with a car manufacturer and they refeered to a 13 million poly model as simple. But thenagain their complex was really so complex there wa no way of dealing with it.