can i "hide" lights?

[salf]

Ok, im working on a project here at the office, im not using radiosity, but a whole lotta omnis and others, like the way Smoke3d does it on his tutorials, the reason?, im still learning radiosity, and it takes an hour or so just for the calculations, plus another 30 minutes for rendering, and im not happy with the results, so i dont have time to do the project and learn at the same time, fakeosity is faster for me right now.

 

The thing is that, depending of the camera im looking trough, i have to either add, delete or move a lot of lights. For instance if im doing an exterior shot of the building I will use a set of omnis, but if im doing an interior image on the opposite side of the building, i will need new omnis, but i dont want to delete the ones i used on the previous shot (since is not a final project yet).

 

So i was wondering if theres a way to "hide" the lights i dont need on the scene, so they dont interfere in the rendering proccess, etc

 

In the Display menu i can turn them off, but all it does is not show them on the viewports, but the lights still working in the renderings, and i dont wanna use the exclude/include feature of the lights because it will take me tooooooooooooooo long.

 

[ February 17, 2004, 06:54 AM: Message edited by: salf ]

[STRAT]

say you got 3 camera views set up 3 lots of instanced lights, 1 set each specifically doctored to that particular camera view.

 

that way you have the exact lighting you need for any particular camera, and the others can be switched off when not in use. and because they're instanced they all switch off in one swoop.

[Tim Nelson]

Are you maybe not seeing the on/off toggle switch under the light modifier properties?

 

Yes, turning off the lights in the display properties will not stop it from rendering as 'on' so you need to use the actual modifier tab when you have your light selected & that should work.

[ciberarte]

In the light / Cameras toolbar in the Tab Pannel, "The light lister" tool could help you. There you can control all your lights from a list.

[salf]

duh!>..i feel like an idiot, i missed that ON check on the lights.

[pirallah]

Try using layers: Put one group of lights in one layer and the other group on another layer. This way you can turn off the layers that youre not working on (though they will still render - youll have to turn them off one at a time unless youre using instances). Also pressing Shift+L will hide them all. Press again to make them appear.

[abicalho]

You can do so much with lights:

- Turn off the "Renderable" flag to make them not render

- Turn on the "Exclude from Radiosity" flag to make them only render in the scanline

- Use the Ambient/Diffuse/Specular flags to make them only render in one of the channels

 

Do some experimentation and you'll see how powerful things can be.