Vary light levels.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Anyone have a good idea on how to quickly vary the intensities of lights? I have lots of lights in the scene I am working on, and would like to vary them quickly. Right now, the different groups of lights are instanced, so that will probably have to change in order to vary them. They are currently in groups of about 300 to 400.

 

Alternately, ...I am thinking of taking the glass, and varying the transparency levels in order to generate the idea of different illumination levels inside of rooms.

[Justin Hunt]

sounds like a scripting exercise,

 

how about light lister?

 

jhv

[Tim Nelson]

Yea, you could make them uniques and then vary in light lister, but that would not be quick. Scripting would definitely be the way to go, but unfortunately I don't have a clue. Doesn't sound that hard to do though.

[SandmanNinja]

Could you use reactor animation?

you could make a slider with as many 'clicks' are you wanted, and then tie it to the light level/intensity of the lights.

 

Instantly change from 0% to 100% in as many steps as you want.

 

I made a tutorial for this - let me try to find it.

 

edit: can't find it - But you use the modifier Custom Attribute, then chuck a slider on there, then link the slider to the lights. I can make another if it would help. Any parameter can be controlled in this manner.

[BrianKitts]

select all the lights you want to randomize and execute the following script in the maxscript listener...

 

for i = 1 to $.count do $.multiplier = random 1 100

 

it will assign a random value to the lights multiplier value to all the selected lights in the range given at the end of the command so as is above it will set all your values for each light randomly between 1 and 100.

Edited June 13, 2009 by BrianKitts

[RevitGary]

You have a scene with groups of 400 lights?

Why? Doesnt this create problems?

 

I really would like to know what you are doing. I didnt know Max could handle so many lights.

 

I am guessing you have no viewport lighting / shading that matches your lights. I am also guessing these lights are not casting shadows.

 

Could you explain?

 

Thanks!!!

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

You have a scene with groups of 400 lights?

Why? Doesnt this create problems?

 

I really would like to know what you are doing. I didnt know Max could handle so many lights.

 

I am guessing you have no viewport lighting / shading that matches your lights. I am also guessing these lights are not casting shadows.

 

Could you explain?

 

Thanks!!!

 

Actually, the scene has around 1500 lights, all casting raytraced shadows. Definitely the easiest thing to work with. LOL.

 

It is a dusk shot, of a large medical facility that we are going after. I am not sure of the square footage, but I would put it around 2.5 million sqaure feet of enclosed space. Not only does the scene have this many lights, but I also have around 15,000 proxied trees and bushes, and maybe 40 or so proxied car. My Final Gather pass is also fairly dense at 0.8, with 200 rays which is being rendered out at 2500 pixels. That is taking about 2 hours to caculate, which is quite a long time. I am rendering the final image at 4500 pixels wide with 1 to 16 sampling, and it is running through in just over 2 hours. This is all on one machine, no DBR or strip rendering.

 

Obviously I could have lit the inside using different methods, such as IBL or simply using fewer lights, and trying to get more out of each light. But I am fairly happy with the results I am getting, it just takes a little long to render small tests.

 

I don't use a lot of viewport lighting because I don't believe the size of the scenes I work with most of the time will be friendly to it. I would love to be proved wrong on this. Even turning on shaded view takes awhile. You simply have to be comfortable with the knowledge you have about how the lights will interact with the scene.

Edited June 13, 2009 by Crazy Homeless Guy

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

select all the lights you want to randomize and execute the following script in the maxscript listener...

 

for i = 1 to $.count do $.multiplier = random 1 100

 

it will assign a random value to the lights multiplier value to all the selected lights in the range given at the end of the command so as is above it will set all your values for each light randomly between 1 and 100.

 

Thanks. Taking the day off, but will try this when I get back into the office.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Could you use reactor animation?

you could make a slider with as many 'clicks' are you wanted, and then tie it to the light level/intensity of the lights.

 

Instantly change from 0% to 100% in as many steps as you want.

 

I made a tutorial for this - let me try to find it.

 

edit: can't find it - But you use the modifier Custom Attribute, then chuck a slider on there, then link the slider to the lights. I can make another if it would help. Any parameter can be controlled in this manner.

 

I will try this too. It sounds interesting, and might be able to produce some interesting results.

Edited June 13, 2009 by Crazy Homeless Guy

[RevitGary]

"I don't believe the size of the scenes I work with most of the time will be friendly to it. I would love to be proved wrong on this"

 

You are correct I believe viewport lighting has a 32 light limit.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

"I don't believe the size of the scenes I work with most of the time will be friendly to it. I would love to be proved wrong on this"

 

You are correct I believe viewport lighting has a 32 light limit.

 

How does it deal with a lot of geometry? Is a scenes performance in the base viewport reflective of how it will perform with real time lighting?

[RevitGary]

It is supposed to be possible but I have not figured it out.

 

I believe it has something to do with using mental mill to adjust materials to render and display the same.

 

I AM NOT SURE ABOUT THIS. I have not figured it out.

 

There are viewport degradation settings you can use to adjust viewport performance.

[Justin Hunt]

Just figured this out

 

Open a Scene Explorer, (Tools -> New Scene Explorer) filter the display to just show lights (Customis -> Configure Columns)

With the column chooser add a Light On and Light Intensity columns

 

Then select a whole bunch of lights and you can change whether they are on or off and their intensity

 

Creating selection sets of banks of lights will make this easier too

Of cause you can save the scene explorer for later use

jhv

Edited June 17, 2009 by Justin Hunt