more then 255 lights

[Guillermo Leal]

I have been using the daily build (2015-09-24), and keep getting the message light sampler can only handle 255 lights efficiently.
for this particular project there is no way around it i need a lot more lights, is there a way to get rid of the message, it pop ups every time i render, clicking ignore or dismiss all, makes no difference.

by the way is it planed to support more then 255 lights? it seems like a limitation to me.

enabling develop mode shows options for solver and sampling mode, can we get some information about the options there? there are no tooltips for them.

thanks,
Guillermo Leal.

[Ondra]

will be possible in next daily

[Guillermo Leal]

That's great.  Do you have a date?

It would also be grate to have the option to enable/disable the message window.

[Ondra]

just released

[atelieryork]

100% good news! Working on a job at the moment with easily 300+ lights and having to stick to 255 was very problematic.

Nice work!

[arqrenderz]

Still you are going to have a lot of noise..... No matter the hours of rendeing....

[Ondra]

Still you are going to have a lot of noise..... No matter the hours of rendeing....

That is why we are working on scalable solution. We have a reasonably working prototype already done, and it will be probably release in 1.4 stable release (together with adaptivity)

[Siahpoosh]

in this project i have thousands of light . but i made an script to grouping lights together  by distance , and then my render is faster and also cleaner :

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with this technique you will have less light count and calculation will be faster , see the attachment to get the idea ,

[atelieryork]

This is interesting, vrMan. So are they "grouped" as in instances?

Ondra - very good to hear there's efforts being made in this area. We frequently work on scenes with many hundreds of lights (even if there's perhaps only 30 or so unique ones and the rest are instances), and it's currently manageable but speed could be better.

Look forward to trying these dailies...

[romullus]

I think there is some miscommunication going on. There's only improvements in error / warning system in recent daily builds. Improvements on many light performance is planned in V1.4. Am i right?

[arqrenderz]

in this project i have thousands of light . but i made an script to grouping lights together  by distance , and then my render is faster and also cleaner :

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with this technique you will have less light count and calculation will be faster , see the attachment to get the idea ,

You mean that the light are turned ON as the camera aproaches?
Does the lights count as 1 even if there is 100  instances of the same?

[pokoy]

I have a project with thousands of lights and got some help from Ludvik, here's my layman's conclusion, devs please feel free to correct me:

- the important thing here is 'light groups' displayed in brackets next to the lights count in the stats
- for light objects and geometry with a LightMtl assigned, a single face counts as a 'light', whereas a mesh consisting of - let's say - 32 faces, counts as 32 'lights' but one 'light group'
- the limit of 255 lights applies to 'light groups'
- example: if you have 1000 spheres with a LightMtl assigned, they'll count as 1000 'light groups' and Corona will use a slower algorithm. Now if you collapse these spheres and you end up with 10 objects, each consisting of 100 spheres, they'll count as 10 'light groups' and will use the faster algorithm.
- the rule is to limit the number 'light groups' to 255

Instances are still separate geometries so they'll still count as separate 'light groups', these would still need to be collapsed to larger groups of objects.
This does not apply to CoronaMtls with self-illumination, these are not handled as lights and are sampled separately.

There may be side effects to this but I'll let this one to the devs to explain in detail. I wish I'd known this earlier and there would be a sticky thread explaining this somewhere (or maybe there is...?)

[Ondra]

this is correct with one important note, collapsing light objects may trigger using the better algorithm, but if the collapsed objects are too big or are created from light objects too far away, the results will be even worse than before. So there it is not "collapse all lights into single object and everything will be perfect"

[Siahpoosh]

This is interesting, vrMan. So are they "grouped" as in instances?

yes

You mean that the light are turned ON as the camera aproaches?
Does the lights count as 1 even if there is 100  instances of the same?

no i just grouped them by distance from each other to make calculation simpler , instead of have a thousand of lights i have 255 mesh light

[peterguthrie]

Any sign of progress on this issue? We are working on a project where this would be a serious problem (5000 lights might be enough). Really want to use corona for it!!

[Ondra]

We are anticipating the solution in daily builds sometimes in november

[atelieryork]

Good news! It's a regular issue here on big external scenes.

[peterguthrie]

very good news

has become an issue here even on smaller scenes!

[peterguthrie]

just bumping this upwards as having many lights in a scene is going to be hugely important for us if we are to start using corona more in production

[Ondra]

just bumping this upwards as having many lights in a scene is going to be hugely important for us if we are to start using corona more in production

We already have working solution, but we are doing some "spring cleaning" of our codebase first, so stay tuned

[j_forrester]

Hi Ondra,

Any chance you know when will have access to this new version. I have a scene i'm currently working on with 600+ lights and this would be most useful!!!!

Many thanks

[Ondra]

hopefully about a month