Author Topic: Global lighting saturation toggle  (Read 953 times)

2023-01-16, 14:15:24

romullus

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When working with materials, it's important to have the lighting as close to neutral as possible, but it's not easy to do when you're working in a scene with many light sources and different light types, therefore i'd like to propose a global light desaturation switch. I think it could be located in the render setup, scene tab, next to render overrides. When activated, it would desaturate any light source, including mesh lights, HDRI, sun&sky and neutralize the scene lighting. I think many would find such override quite useful.
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2023-01-16, 15:22:25
Reply #1

dj_buckley

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2023-01-16, 19:53:54
Reply #2

Aram Avetisyan

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Im my opinion and practice, when setting up a material, you generally want to have different lighting scenarios (studio, warm/cold, ambient white-ish etc) to test the material, not desaturate all lights and check if the material is ok. I usually test the materials in the devlook scene, which I know has the correctly picked lighting sources and lighting scenarios, which can be quickly toggled with lightmix or scene states.
I would advise having a separate state set (or scene state, they can get confusing but both have good usage) in the scene, which will have just the object or the object and some other elements. There will be one to three lighting sources (HDRI preferably, as environment maps set up in render settings > scene, one studio with many spot/linear lights, pure white, another one a diffuse "general purpose outdoor" map and any other of your preference) which can be easily lightmixed and check if a material looks fine. Then you can quickly change back to the initial scene state.
I believe this will provide a more consistent and more convenient way of testing the material rather than making all lights in the scene, setup of which can differ from scene to scene, pure white. If you need more details, I will create a simple scene and share here.
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2023-01-16, 20:59:09
Reply #3

romullus

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Your described workflow sound quite interesting. I'm keen to learn more about it, but in my limited experience, scene states for me always has been a source of incredible confusion and frustration. That was with Max 2014-2016 though, maybe things has been improved since. I will take a look, thank you.
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2023-01-18, 13:20:44
Reply #4

Aram Avetisyan

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Here is a scene and a video of quickly switching to LookDev state.

Note that there are Scene states (Tools > Manage Scene States) and State sets (Rendering > State sets), and each of them can get confusing enough, not speaking about using them together.
For specifically having a LookDev state and mostly other things as well, I have found State sets to be more handy. Their only downside is that you need to activate and deactivate each state manually, and you cannot use them with BatchRendering (you can use Render All states, but this will be tricky to set up, and more time will be needed to check everything). Scene states can be used for Batch Rendering and generally provide more control.

State sets record changes from the neutral state - the state where no State is active. The arrow next to the state tells that the state is active, clicking on any active arrow will bring back the neutral state.

I have tried having single LookDev state with multiple environment maps using lightmix, but this is really not handy and you kind of lose control over the lightmix, and that is something you may want to keep intact.
So I have just recorded environment changes (one in real environment in 3ds Max, the other one as Render change, switching to "Use Corona" for environment map) and viewport being perspective instead of in Camera, so you can freely move around and look at the object.

So, for just having a quick material check state in the scene, the idea is to:
 
• isolate the object
• have no hidden light rendering
• just toggle the LookDev states

Each of them in the attached scene has just one environment map, one for studio, pure white lights, the other one an HDRI which a few years back used to have well balanced colors and values.
This should work perfectly in your case.

Of course much more and much complex things can be done with State sets, let alone combining them with Scene states.
« Last Edit: 2023-01-18, 15:25:01 by Aram Avetisyan »
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2023-01-18, 16:37:43
Reply #5

piotrus3333

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Set it up so when you isolate object/objects you are left with just a handful of IBL setups. Slider manipulators are quite convenient control over map selection, rotation etc.
https://youtu.be/3rT_vE6jmcY?t=177
Marcin Piotrowski
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