Daily Builds 1.5

[Tanakov]

Two things.

1 - is it pausible to make Lightlisted to difine instance light sorces? It will make setup much easier when you click for one light sorce not couple of hundrets of them because you don't remember the names. And same for light material.

2 - Will we see someday regular mapped pattern for corona scatter. I belive you promised it in 1.5 Ondrey.

To solve "1" use "Named Selection Sets" for that. It will overaly speed up your work.


Onra, what do you think about my previous idea?

[yagi]

I just want to express myself abit : the new lightmixer idea is amazing!!! very creative effort by the corona team. Nothing like it in the market i believe....theres no way im ever going to be able to tryout another renderer after seeing this, ever again........except unreal though .lol  ;)  keep it up guys

[racoonart]

I finally found some time to test the new light mixer stuff: Pretty awesome! There's just one annoying problem which is kinda obvious and probably can't be "fixed". Adaptivity is only considering the Beauty at the moment, so light select elements are sometimes hopelessly undersampled in some regions. I'm currently simply disabling adaptivity to get a clean result but I thought I should mention it. Maybe the devs can figure out a way to for example add an "influence adaptivity" checkbox in the light select element.

[racoonart]

And another very important thing for me: Please add a maxscript interface for the lightmixer settings (something like an array containing objects with LightSelectName (or maybe better a reference to the RE), Multiplier, Color). I want to write a small script for saving and loading different presets.

[Edit] Oh and please add a Lightmix Render element so we can actually save what we have in an animation =/

[Visual Impact]

And another very important thing for me: Please add a maxscript interface for the lightmixer settings (something like an array containing objects with LightSelectName (or maybe better a reference to the RE), Multiplier, Color). I want to write a small script for saving and loading different presets.

[Edit] Oh and please add a Lightmix Render element so we can actually save what we have in an animation =/

saving presets and ability to animate lightmix are exactly what is needed for full functionality. Both these functions were implemented well in Fryrender for reference.

[Ondra]

hey, try if touching these properties works - it is controlled the same way as every other postprocessing option
colorMap_lightmixIntensities
colorMap_lightmixColors

[racoonart]

Huuuh, works like a charm :) Should be sufficient. Only minor thing I noticed is that the arrays are empty until some value (doesn't matter which one) has been changed in the lightmixer.

[pokoy]

Finally had some time to test the latest daily (5-9-16) - awesome!! Bloom&glare looks much nicer than in my earlier tests and LightMixer is going to be extremely useful - many thanks!!

I have two wishes/questions regarding LightMixer:

- a LightSelect pass with the environment included contains the visible background, so if you change its level in the Mixer the visible background will change as well. Ideally I would like to affect the light contribution only (as it does with a sunlight for example) and leave the visible background untouched.

- will we have a way to include objects with LightMtl in the future? From what it seems these are not selectable right now.

[Ondra]

Huuuh, works like a charm :) Should be sufficient. Only minor thing I noticed is that the arrays are empty until some value (doesn't matter which one) has been changed in the lightmixer.

you can resize the arrays yourself, any mismatch between the array length and number of light select groups should be handled by Corona without crashes or other problems

[Ondra]

- a LightSelect pass with the environment included contains the visible background, so if you change its level in the Mixer the visible background will change as well. Ideally I would like to affect the light contribution only (as it does with a sunlight for example) and leave the visible background untouched.

It is doable, but might be tricky to make sure there is no additional overhead. I will look into it

- will we have a way to include objects with LightMtl in the future? From what it seems these are not selectable right now.

Picking objects with CoronaLightMtl should be possible - just make sure the light has emit light on

[TomG]

If you have objects with CoronaLightMtl, the one-click Setup LightMix Elements button (in the System panel of Render Setup) will add the object. If Emit Light is enabled, then the LightMix will control it as expected; if Emit Light is off, although you get a CShading_LightSelect render element created, you can't adjust it in the LightMix. So any objects with CoronaLightMtl should work fine, keeping that in mind.

EDIT - and you can add them manually too of course, should you want to :) That also works fine.

[racoonart]

Ok, just to avoid confusion... Corona is not actually storing the multipliers and stuff by referencing the Render Element object but it is only storing lists of values in the same order as the render elements are currently set up.
Hmm.. downside is that if I remove an element in the middle (e.g. the lights for this element have been removed too) the values will all be off by 1 entry. The upside is that I can rebuild the REs without losing the lightmixer info (which is sometimes necessary to reconnect the RE output path with the global one).
Maybe the best solution would be to store the lightmix data (multiplier, color) in the respective render element as a property. That way we can prevent both issues and even merge Render elements with the lightmax data into other max files. ... Please? :)

[pokoy]

If you have objects with CoronaLightMtl, the one-click Setup LightMix Elements button (in the System panel of Render Setup) will add the object. If Emit Light is enabled, then the LightMix will control it as expected; if Emit Light is off, although you get a CShading_LightSelect render element created, you can't adjust it in the LightMix. So any objects with CoronaLightMtl should work fine, keeping that in mind.

EDIT - and you can add them manually too of course, should you want to :) That also works fine.

Ok then, I probably had the wrong object selected - many thanks! Love the one-click way of adding objects to a list btw.

[pokoy]

- a LightSelect pass with the environment included contains the visible background, so if you change its level in the Mixer the visible background will change as well. Ideally I would like to affect the light contribution only (as it does with a sunlight for example) and leave the visible background untouched.

It is doable, but might be tricky to make sure there is no additional overhead. I will look into it

This would be great, as of now we'd need to create image planes as a workaround to make sure the background is not visible anywhere.

[TomG]

Ok then, I probably had the wrong object selected - many thanks! Love the one-click way of adding objects to a list btw.

I love it too! And how it recognizes groupings - that makes things nice and easy to set up, nice and easy to add, then nice and easy to control in the LightMix! Let us know if all works well and as expected in your scene.